Hey to all our new friends! We want this space to be an informal place for people to talk about how population growth affects them and the things they care about. Also, we would love to have you share stories about difficulty in obtaining birth control because of self-righteous pharmacists, ridiculous things you learned in your abstinence-only sex ed classes, etc.

I first started thinking about population growth as a problem when I was on Semester at Sea in college. We went to India and some other very crowded countries and I was struck by how it seemed like they just couldn't get ahead of the population growth. They couldn't create enough jobs, build enough houses, or grow enough food to satisfy demand. It seemed out of control.

Then I moved to the Washington DC area four years ago. I have witnessed countless developments built on previously wild land, horrendous traffic problems due to too many cars on highways not wide enough to accommodate them, and housing prices that are just ridiculous.

I can envision a world where population growth skids to a stop and finally reverses and it is very appealing. People are wonderful and children are great, but the fact is that the natural world and the people that live in it would benefit from far fewer people on Earth.

Thoughts?