The Earth Is Full
"We will realize that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less," Paul Gilding, Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, says. "How many people," Gilding asks, "lie on their death bed and say, I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value, and how many say, I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks? To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff."
http://rdd.me/3qjaquz1
Religion to become extinct
A study using census data shows that religion is heading for extinction in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. The study, presented at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. The research team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The team took census data stretching back as far as a century on religious affiliation. The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the "non-religious" category. They found that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them. And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12811197?print=true
Twilight of the West
Demographer Peter McDonald calculates that with current fertility levels, Italy will lose 86% of its population by the end of the century, falling to 8 million compared with today's 56 million. Spain will lose 85%, Germany 83%, and Greece 74%. Population historian David Reher told in 2006 that, "As population and tax revenues decline in Europe, urban areas could well be filled with empty buildings surrounded by areas which look more like some science-fiction movies." The future is already here: Hoyerswerda, a town near Dresden close to the Polish border, has lost half its population in the last 20 years. It is an ageing ghost town. "Hoy Woy" seems a town without a purpose, in a corner of Europe without a future.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/01/population-crash-fred-pearce
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