Countdown by Weisman

Ref: Alan Weisman (2013). Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for Humanity? Little Brown and Co Publishing.

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Summary­

  • Our planet is threatened by a multitude of interactive processes- the depletion of natural resources; climatic changes; population growth; a rapidly growing disparity in the quality of life; the destabilization of the ecological economy; and the disruption of social order. Behind each of these are the same unspoken cause: cumulative human presence.

  • The boundary for Atmospheric CO2 concentrations should not exceed 350 ppm. As of 2009, CO2 is at 387 ppm. The amount of N siphoned from the atmosphere for human use, chiefly through Haber-Bosch. The boundary they arrived at was 35 million tons per year, versus the current 121 million.

  • Nine Planetary Boundaries, beyond which the world would enter a phase shift that could prove cataclysmic for humanity:

    • Biodiversity Loss

    • Disruption of Global Nitrogen and P cycles

    • Stratospheric Ozone Depletion

    • Ocean Acidification

    • Freshwater Use

    • Land Use Change

    • Chemical Pollution (Novel Entities)

    • Atmospheric Aerosol Loading

    • Climate Change

  • In the entire history of biology, every species that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash- a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species.

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Population

  • We currently add 80 million people annually. Every 4.5 days, there are another 1 million people on the planet.

  • UN's medium estimate for population by 2050 is 9.2billion.

  • Just a half child per woman decrease in the world's fertility rate could bring us back to 6 billion by the end of the century- or half a child in the other direction could take us to 16 billion.-Dr. Malcolm Potts, Population Specialist.

  • Optimum population is not mean the maximum number that can be crammed onto the planet like industrial chickens, but how many could live well without compromising the chance for future generations to do the same. At minimum, everyone should be guaranteed sustenance, shelter, education, health care, freedom from prejudice, and opportunities to earn a living. Optimum population should be big enough to maintain human cultural diversity, and in places dense enough to allow a critical mass of intellectual, artistic, and technological creativity- enough people to have large, exciting cities and still maintain substantial tracts of wilderness.

  • Demographic Transition: when high mortality and high birth rates both turn to low.

  • A bleak salt marsh is what remains of Lago Texcoco, the largest of 5 lakes that filled this high basin in central Mexico when Hernan Cortes's Spanish troops first saw it. The Aztec capital, called Tenochtitlan was on an island, connected to the shore by causeways. After the conquest, the Spaniards drained the lakes; eventually the basin refilled and overflowed- with people. Today, 24 million live in one of the Earth's greatest expanses of continuous concrete and asphalt, covering Mexico's Distrito Federal and parts of five surrounding states. The sheer weight of the city atop its over pumped aquifer has sunk it so low that sewage canals no longer flow outwards.

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—Family Planning—

  • Before scarcity and civil order devolved into food riots and water wars, "a far better choice, in our view, is to expand the milder methods of influencing family size preference, while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control are accessible to every human on earth within the shortest time possible.-Ehrlich.

Fertility

  • In Niger, every woman averages between 7-8 children- the highest human fertility rate on Earth. The only thing that checks Niger's world-highest fertility is its 50-year life expectancy.

  • For the Uganda shilling equivalent of $1.50, a woman can buy a voucher to cover prenatal care, her stay in the hostel, delivery, and postnatal care. The vouches are subsidized by Marie Stopes International, Britain's analog of America's International Planned Parenthood Federation.

 

Abortion

  • A Five-minute operation on an unintentionally pregnant 17-year-old woman can change the trajectory of the next half century of her life. Few other medical procedures have that power.-Malcolm Potts.

  • In China, women take abortion Leave, the inverse of maternity leave, which includes a subsidy for the procedure, convalescence, and for replacement of a stainless-steel IUD.  

 

Sex

  • Sperm can live inside a woman for up to six days preceding ovulation.

 

Birth Control

  • Antibiotics can lower the effectiveness of BC pills.

  • Contraceptives

    • Condoms

    • IUDs: longer term Depo-Provera shots

    • Progestin Contraceptives: mostly injections of Nongestural or oral packets of lofemenal and ferrous fumarate tablets.

  • Birth Spacing

  • Sterilization

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Immigration

  • And of course the tendency was to say: let's be multikulti and live next to each other and enjoy being together, (but) this concept has failed, failed utterly.-Merkel on immigration into Germany.

  • Although some Japanese accuse their country of racism, most agree that shared cultural values are why Japanese society functions so smoothly, why its cities are so orderly, and why crime in Japan is so low.

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Economics

  • In the last 50 years, world population more than doubled, but world economic growth increased sevenfold. This is a profound dilemma. Because the predominant paradigm of social and economic development remains largely oblivious to the risk of human induced environmental disasters at continental to planetary scales.

  • Traditional economics preaches perpetual growth as a self-evident truth, even though nothing, save God or the universe, can possibly be perpetual- and there's some doubt about the universe. But assuming an ever-expanding economy were possibly, there are only two ways to achieve it: keep inventing more new products (or new versions of old ones) and keep finding new consumers.

  • The top 10% of the economy is who receives interest payments, and the bottom 90% pays them, interest payments today essentially redistribute wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 10%.

  • The measure of nearly every economy that humans have designed has been defined by whether or not it grows. The business news judges how healthy the economy is by whether housing starts rose or fell this month: never mind that each new house pushes sprawl even farther, chews up landscape, and requires more resources to provide plumbing, sewers, electricity, and roads. That house represents profit for developers and real estate brokers, and jobs for carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, painters, carpet layers, landscapers, paving crews, and furnishers. Maintenance during his lifespan will create even more jobs. And the economy will grow on.

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Religion

  • Islam

    • For adulterers and for women claiming rape who can't produce witnesses: their "crimes" risk punishment by death.

    • “The love we feel for Islam has been undermined by our contempt for the mullahs who mix mosque and state, and are destroying both in the process.”

    • We were taught in the mosque, in school, and at home to have lots of children, for lots of reasons. In America or Europe, if there's a problem, you can call the police. In a place with no laws to safeguard you, you rely on family." (Palestine).

  • Catholicism

    • Papal Infallibility: Stated unequivocally that on matters of morals and faith, the Pope's teachings are divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, and thus irreversible.

  • Hinduism

    • One reason for the preternaturally skewed sex ratios in Haryana, India is a widespread belief among Hindus that passage to heaven depends on having a son to light his parent's funeral pyres.

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Food

  • Agriculture & Land Use Change

    • Rice, Wheat, and Corn- once three rare weeds, are the most abundant plants on Earth.

    • Crop Ecologists expect grain harvests to drop 10% for each 1C rise in average temperatures.

    • 70% of the grain grown in the US, they claim, and 98% of the soy meal, goes to feed livestock (Worldwide, about half of grain is used for animal feed), not people (as do 80% of the antibiotics sold). Nearly one-third of the planet's ice-free land mass is used for either grazing or for growing animal feed. It takes about 6 lbs of grain (and roughly 2400 gal of water) to produce 1lb of beef.

    • Food production for humans currently occupies some 40% of the earth's non-frozen terrestrial surface, plus all our roads, cities, and towns, we've claimed nearly half the planet for just one species- us.

    • Punjab, the size of Vermont and NH combined, makes up just 1.5% of India’s total land area, it is the nation's pantry, growing 60% of its wheat and 50% of its rice. Hydrologists are saying: that the water table below it is dropping at 10' per year.

  • Nitrogen

    • In all nature, only one family of enzymes can fix airborne N- that is, absorbed and chemically convert it into a non-gaseous form, such as the plant food Ammonium. And just a few plants host bacteria bearing these enzymes, which, in return, get fed by nodules on their roots. They are mainly legumes, such as lentils, beans, clover, soy, peas, alfalfa, gum acacia, and peanuts.

    • Haber-Bosch: Haber discovered that by passing N and H over an iron catalyst at 1000C, he could produce small amounts of Ammonia (the feedstock for Ammonium Sulfate, nitrogen fertilizer). Later, adding high pressure, he accomplished this at half the temperature

    • Nitrous Oxide: an insidious by-product of over-fertilization is 300x as potent as CO2.

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Water

  • The Colorado River

    • There are 8 cities of over a million people that depend on Colorado River Water (Vegas, Denver, Salt Lake, LA, SD, Phoenix, Tijuana, Mexicali), as well as a dozen other smaller cities (Tucson, Albuquerque).

    • Stair-Step Exchange: Nevada would take Denver's Colorado River allotment, because Denver, in turn, would take Nebraska and Kansas' share of the Platte River, because those states could recharge their depleted Ogallala Aquifer by siphoning water from the Mississippi, and so on Eastward.

  • The Jordan River: All but 2% of the Jordan is already allotted by the time it leaves the lake.

  • Saharan Africa

    • Because Libya's northern wells are depleted or fouled by seawater, drinking water for 90% now comes via Muammar Gaddafi's magnum opus, the "Great Manmade River"- the world's biggest network of pipes, connected to more than a thousand wells drilled half a kilometer into a sandstone aquifer in the south. The water they tap accumulated when the Sahara abounded with plant and animal life, a wet period that ended about six-thousand years ago when the Earth's axis wobbled slightly.

    • Sahel: Semi-Arid Transitional belt that separates the desert from central Africa's tropical savanna. The Sahel is six hundred miles thick at its widest point.

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Energy

  • The total number of people, each using 3KW of energy apiece, that could live in a world using no more than 6TW is 2 billion. In a world of 1.5 billion, everyone could have 4 KW.

  • Hydrogen Energy: There's more H in the universe than all other elements combined. Whether burned by internal combustion or injected into a fuel cell, its exhaust is simply water vapor. Theoretically, that exhaust could be captured, condensed, and tapped again for H, ad infinitum. A perfect, closed system- except for one annoying detail: in this universe, useable amounts of pure H gas occur naturally only in places like the Sun. On Earth, all H is tightly bound with other elements, such as O, C, N, and S. Breaking the bonds to free it- pulling the H out of H2O- requires more energy than H produces. The most efficient way to extract H is still using superheated steam to strip it from natural gas, a process that also releases that pesky pollutant Co2.

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—Environmental Sciences—

  • The main culprits of Global Warming are deforestation, methane belched by cattle and rice paddies, and fertilizer manufacture.

  • How might Nature destroy us? Probably in a number of cascading ways, as one loss ignites another…

    • Biodiversity Loss

      • Before the industrial revolution, the fossil record suggests .1-1 species per million went extinct annually. The acceptable proposed limit is 10. The actual current loss is at least 100 missing species per million, a figure widely feared to rise 10-fold this century.

      • Collapse of the Fish Supply.

    • Overextraction of millions of years of buried carbon.

    • Ocean Temperature Increase

      • The world is on track to warm more than 2C at which point coral reefs, home to the main protein source in the PI, aren't expected to survive.

      • Decreased O levels and increased metabolic rates in warming waters are already decreasing body sizes of North Atlantic cod and haddock faster than models had predicted.

      • Thermal Expansion: Warm waters expand, melting ice adds more volume, and the specter of rising seas become a certainty as it grows likely that Earth's average surface temperature is headed beyond the 2C increase over preindustrial levels proposed as the threshold we dare not pass.

    • Ocean Acidification

      • Higher levels of dissolved CO2 corrode developing shells of young mollusks and crustaceans.

    • Global Warming

      • The higher the temperature at night, the more energy a plant burns to convert sugars- energy it otherwise would apply to growth.

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—Sustainability Solutions—

Economic

  • Steady-state economy: the population would stay more or less constant at a livable, optimal level, and so would the consumer base. Same with the labor pool, which would make just enough stuff for the consumers to consume. Manufacturing wastes, and products that had passed their useful life, would be continually recycled. Like a terrarium, everything would be in balance.

  • As it stands now, if banks start loaning money more slowly than they collect debts, the quantity of money in the economy goes down, and it's impossible to pay back debts. So we get defaults on houses, defaults on mortgages, defaults on loans. We get collapsing businesses. Our economy plunges into misery and unemployment. Under our current monetary systems, the only alternative to that is endless growth. So one absolute thing we have to change is the whole nature of the monetary system. So how might we do that? It's fairly simple. It's a change that's been proposed by economists for centuries. We deny banks the right to create money. Instead money creation would go back to where it used to be. "We restore that right to the government.  It can spend money into existence on public goods, like rebuilding our infrastructure, our education systems, our sewage systems, and restoring our watersheds and forests. Or it can loan money into existence to state governments and local governments or to central industries, like renewable energy- systems- but at zero interest. At zero percent interest, when it's paid back, the money's destroyed. So there's no continual increase in the money supply.

 

Organizations

  • Millennium Development Goals (UN): focus on gender equality, women's empowerment, reduced maternal and child mortality, and universal health care and education.

  • Planetary Regime: Combine’s the UN's environmental and population programs and expands the UN treaty called the Law of the Sea to manage all natural resources. It would be a steward of the global commons, empowered to control pollution of the atmosphere, oceans, and transboundary waters. Such an agency, they added, also "might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world."

  • Offices of Population (like Costa Rica)

  • International Rice Research Institute (IRRI): their biggest quest is how to increase the photosynthetic efficiency of solar panels by 50%.

  • Gates Foundation: 98% of the United Nation’s Population Funds (UNFPA) funding comes from four American foundations and 81% of that was from just one: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 

Projects

  • The Natural Capital Project: An International collaboration to keep ecosystems and people whose lives depend on them- meaning everybody- in healthy equilibrium with each other. It focuses on three areas: land and sea use, climate stability, and human demographics and economics.

  • Biological Diversity Vaults: The National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation at Fort Collins, CO and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a cavern deep in the Norwegian permafrost:" the so-called doomsday repository for the earth's botanical diversity.

  • The Mechai Pattana School (aka the Bamboo School): opened in Thailand in 2009 for 90 local children in grades 7 to 9 (a high school opened in 2012); the school is constructed of Carbon-absorbing fast growing Bamboo and each classroom has two teachers with a 1:5 teacher-student ratio. Math, Thai, English, Science, History, Art, Social Studies, and Environmental Studies are taught and students help to interview and hire prospective teachers, screen and select incoming applicants (to avoid nepotism, siblings are automatically accepted; since even rural women now average two at most, there are plenty of places left over), and serve with parents and teachers on the school board. Rather than textbook-based lessons, the curriculum is woven into study projects that students propose, based on whatever piques their curiosity with an emphasis on original thinking, not rote learning.

    • The School's two goals are to turn students into social entrepreneurs and philanthropists, meaning helping their villages become places they don’t have to leave in order to learn a living, instead of going to Bangkok factories or Israeli date plantations, or becoming sex workers.

    • Students teach younger children to use computers, elderly villagers to read, and their own parents to design household budgets. Students start and run their own businesses, raising specialty fruits, recycling plastic, selling duck eggs, making jewelry, sprouting beans, and preparing baked goods, all financed by a student-run bank. Half the profits underwrite scholarships for needy primary school students they identify in their villages; the rest is reinvested in their fledgling enterprises. During tenth grade, students spend a year helping to run Birds & Bees, PDAs resort in a famous Thai Beach destination, Pattaya, where they learn the hospitality business.

    • In lieu of tuition, students and parents’ plant 400 trees and contribute 400 hours of community service, tutoring and keeping their village and temples clean. "Our school is not just for students," Mechai tells parents. "We guarantee that every family living near the poverty line will be out of it in nine months."

    • Parents are automatically eligible for micro-loans and for occupational training. In sixteen surrounding villages, students’ families are running cricket farms, purifying and selling water, cultivating mushrooms, making paper-flower wedding and funeral wreaths, and raising pigs.

    • Students grow asparagus, chilies, basil, eggplant, assorted edible greens, and lime trees, which, through clever pruning and watering schedules, they coax to fruit just when limes are out of season and scarce.

    • Mechai watches girls and boys in uniforms they designed themselves- dark skirts and trousers, white shirts and blouses with plaid collars- water a living sculpture of discarded soda cans filled with soil and nailed to colored posts, from which sprout herbs and chives. Lettuce grows in suspended tiers of discarded PVC pipe, slit lengthwise and drip-irrigated by discarded intravenous feeding tubes connected to plastic bags that once held saline solution. Even discarded sneakers and irrigation boots have been converted to planters. Mango, Coconut Palm, Banana, Custard Apple, and rose apple trees are spread among bamboo classrooms, where students at computer screens learn to graph growing cycles.

    • There's a library with bamboo furniture the students build themselves, and a toy lending library for village children, stocked with playthings that students have collected.

    • Surrounding the campus are rice paddies, which grow an organic cash crop that pays for teacher salaries and the school's operating budget.

    • A motto embroidered on the students sleeves reads, "The more you give, the more you get." Mechai sits among them in the spacious, open-sided Cafeteria, kept spotless with homegrown, chemical-free cleansers made from neem tree oils and lemon grass, where students earn their meals by planting more trees. "No free lunches," he reminds them. As long as they waste no food, students may eat all they want.

    • It will take half a generation to see if these rural children- who, but for this school, might otherwise have grown up illiterate, undernourished, and impoverished- turn into the entrepreneurs and philanthropists Mechai hopes. More than half are girls, and one thing he is confident of is that they are destined, if not for the careers of their own making, at least not to be sex workers- and not mothers to more children they, their village, and their country can afford.

 

Female Empowerment

  • Why women aren't having as many kids: Education, Cost, Food.

  • Giving women control over their wombs and their education made it increasingly hard to deny them the workplace.

  • Low fertility rates directly result from a high percentage of female university graduates.

  • One simple thing might make a difference, however. Indian women who make it to secondary school average 1.9 children apiece. For those who graduate, it's 1.6. The fertility rate among women with no education is 6.0.

  • Compliance with family planning tracks directly with female literacy.

  • Letting women choose proved far more effective than making them feel stupid or guilty for having so many children. Everyone wanted the pills- which led to the next problem: Until then, only medical clinics dispensed them, but just 20% of the population lived in easy reach of one. Even if they did, many found medical centers intimidating.

  • I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, and utterly impossible if there were more. We all agree that the solution is to empower women to control their own fertility.-Sir David Attenborough.  

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Misc Quotes

I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, and utterly impossible if there were more. We all agree that the solution is to empower women to control their own fertility.-Sir David Attenborough.  

We are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction….There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.-Borlaug.

If the issues in the population debate are connected to the very survival of our species and culture, then the notion that different views are just people's opinion is frankly ridiculous.

"It's totally counterintuitive if you want to manage people. If you go to Darfur and see people starving, you bring them food, and their reproductive rate goes back up. Haiti has an earthquake, you bring in food and relief, and their reproduction rebounds." He shakes his head at the irony: by replenishing the population, the suffering inevitably recurs.

The only way a minority could stay in power would be by apartheid, not democracy.

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Chronology

  • 2009: An exhaustively comprehensive study is published by World Bank environmental specialists Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang who measured feed, flatulence, forest-to-field loss, packaging, cooking temperature, waste production, fluorocarbons used in meat refrigeration, C-intensive medical treatment of livestock and of meat eaters who suffer from heart disease, cancers, diabetes, high blood pressure, and strokes, and even the cumulative CO2 exhaled by the worlds 19 billion chickens, 1.6 billion cattle and water buffalo, 1 billion pigs, and 2 billion sheep and goats. Their conclusion was that livestock and their by-products account for at least 51% of annual worldwide greenhouse emissions (P385).-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 2002: China amends the one child policy to permit ~56 ethnic minorities- anyone other than the 92% Han Majority- to have three children, lest they shrink into cultural extinction.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1984: The Mexico City Policy (aka Global Gag Rule) is passed via executive order by the Reagan Administration, requiring foreign NGOs to pledge not to "perform or promote" abortion as a method of family planning.

  • 1980: The One Child Policy is implemented by China with some 22 legal exceptions that have allowed 35% of families at least two; many Chinese refer to the 1.5 child policy.

    • Calculating the carrying capacity of China involved countless variables, but they had focused on arable land, locally available raw resources, the cost of importing others, and the economic potential (and cost) of each added person. Population must be checked before it became an economic impediment rather than an asset. They had prepared gradual plans involving incentives for voluntary limits, birth spacing, and postponed childbirth. Mathematical recommendations of one child per couple for the next few decades until a generation died off and the graph peaked at just over a billion Chinese- and then, as population momentum reversed and shrank back towards the optimum, people could gradually return to replacement level production.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 22 Sep- 5 Dec, 1980: Iraq under Hussein invades Iran under Khomeini; Hussein’s goal was the oil rich Khuzestan Region. Khomeini creates a theocracy in response with dictatorial powers.

  • Jan, 1979: Iranian Shav Pahlavi flees to Egypt and Ruhollah Khomeini, an exiled high Ranking Shi’a cleric is made Ayatalloh. Pahlavi dies a year later from Lymphoma.

    • Mid 1970’s: Iranian Shah Pahlavi abolishes every political party except his own, inciting spontaneous strikes. Khomeini, who had been exiled for denouncing the Shah’s lavish rule from the Peacock Throne and his coziness with the West, became a symbol of defiance in absentia. The strikes intensified and organized, until millions filled the streets.

  • 1979: The Cambodian Khmer Rouge falls to Vietnamese Troops.

  • 1973: The US Congress passes the Helms Amendment which prohibits the use of US foreign aid to pay for abortion as a method of family planning.

  • 1971: Bangladesh becomes a nation following civil war with an estimated 3 million deaths when East Pakistan cedes from West Pakistan.

  • 1971: India legalizes abortion and criminalizes sex-selective abortion. Enforcement, however, is so lax that by 2030, India could have 20% more men than women- a deadly prescription for, among other problems, jealousy-fueled violence and escalating rape.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1970: the US invades Cambodia, a country it was already bombing in hapless pursuit of North Vietnamese forces. The invasion had the unintended consequence of unleashing Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, a communist force previously under the disciplined rule of North Vietnam. It's genocidal leader, Pol Pot, soon launched his own equally disastrous version of China's Cultural Revolution. Under its reign, entire harvests were destroyed, 1/5 of Cambodians perished, and famine struck. Nearly a million Cambodian refugees, many starving, were either in Thailand or packed into refugee camps along its border.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1958-1962: China’s Great Leap Forward which overshot its capacity to produce food was the worst famine in world history; ~40million die under Mao when private farms were collectivized and millions of peasants conscripted as industrial laborers. Grain was requisitioned for growing cities, even as yields plummeted under inept directives from distant Beijing. Nobody dared disobey. Nobody dared to report true figures from disastrous harvests in terror of being purged, which often meant execution. The shortfall was so grave that up to 40 million Chinese people perished- no one is exactly sure. Millions more were malnourished.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1954: Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman is removed by the US CIA before his land reforms could expropriate United Fruit Company banana plantations.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1953: Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh is ousted by Britain’s MI6 and the US CIA with cooperation by Shah Pahlavi, for nationalizing Iran's oil industry, of which 80% of the profits went to the drilling company known today as BP.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1948: Japan passed the Eugenic Protection Law, legalizing contraception, abortion, and sterilization for health reasons. A year later, with the crisis (population) unabated, the law was extended to permit abortions and family planning for economic reasons.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1948: Jose Figueres Ferre executed what may be the most original coup d'etat in world history. In the aftermath of a stolen presidential election, Figueres, a coffee grower who stood all of 5'3" cobbled together an army of 700 irregulars that overthrew Costa Rica's government. Then, as the leader of the new ruling junta, his first act as commander in chief of the military was to abolish it. Figueres reasoned that it was easier- and cheaper- to keep the citizenry pacified with schools, health care, and social security than with a standing army ready to suppress internal unrest. On his coffee farm in Southern Costa Rica, he learned that paying laborers fairly, and providing them medical care and free milk for their children from his dairy, assured him of a loyal workforce. Within a year of his coup he had converted former army barracks to schools, held elections, and stepped down from the interim presidency. A few years later, he was elected democratically, and reelected twice thereafter (p67).-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1947: British rule in India ends, a triumph for Mahatma Gandhi's gentle civil disobedience. But Muslims who feared living under a Hindu majority demanded independence, and Pakistan was born in two Muslim majority regions cleaved from Eastern and Western India. With its two halves separated by a thousand miles, governance in Pakistan was weakened from the start, and the division couldn't last.

  • 1941: Mohammed Mosaddegh becomes Iranian PM after Reza Shah is forced to abdicate by the invading British because of his cordial ties with Germany, the rule was relaxed and hijab became a matter of personal choice.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1936: Iranian Reza Shah Pahlavi, seeking to modernize the country, decreed that all Iranian women be unveiled.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1934: The US begins its first governmental birth control program in Puerto Rico.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1913: BASF, german dye manufacture, opens its first synthetic ammonia plant (ammonia is the feedstock for Ammonium Sulfate= nitrogen fertilizer).

    • Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch discover that by passing N and H over an iron catalyst at 1000C, he could produce small amounts of Ammonia. Later, adding high pressure, he accomplished this at half the temperature. After he published his findings, his process was acquired by BASF.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1898: Spanish American War; US President TR persuades his government to keep Puerto Rico. TR’s plan for the PR was a US Naval base and coaling station for ships using the canal he dreamed of digging through the Central American isthmus.-Countdown by Weisman.

  • 1840: Justus Von Liebig discovers that N, along with P and K, is one of the essential nutrients for plants. 

  • 1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population is published by Thomas Robert Malthus, a British economist and Anglican vicar, who warns that population growth would always outstrip food availability.-Countdown by Weisman.

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