8 Billion Angels

- [Jane] If I just have this magic power, I would like to alleviate poverty because when you're poor, nevermind the individual suffering, you're destroying the environment because you have to, you have to cut down the last trees to try and grow a bit of food to feed yourself and your family, or to make some charcoal.

Or you have to buy the cheapest food, even if that did cause horrendous suffering to animals.

I would like to change the unsustainable lifestyle of everybody else.

We're just greedy.

And I always think of Mahatma Gandhi saying, "This planet can provide for human need, but not for human greed."

And that is so right.

And maybe the hardest of all, but what I really, really, really would love to change without causing any pain or suffering, reduce the number of people on the planet, because there's too many of us.

It's a planet of finite resources and we are using them up.

And that's going to mean so much suffering in the future.

(soft piano music) (waves crashing) (birds chirping) - [Ben] The island we're on is Shikinejima, it's one of the Tokyo islands, just a couple hours south of Tokyo.

It's a wonderful island.

We got a very tight-knit community of locals.

And so with a lot of them doing fishing, they have a real connection to the sea.

For us, this provides the great location with which to carry our research, investigating what the oceans will look like in the coming century.

- [Kazuo] Jason Hall Spencer, who is professor at Plymouth University UK, first found that spot for such CO2 bubbling from the sea bed is quite useful for studying ocean acidification - [Jason] 'Cause a lot of people think the oceans are fine.

They don't realize that in our lifetimes, it's changed radically.

Big fish have gone, the water's getting warmer, it's getting more corrosive.

Acidification and warming are just two parts of the problem of increasing human population.

- [Ben] We've come to this island in Japan and it's one of a chain of seven volcanoes.

And each of these volcanoes is emitting carbon dioxide from the seabed.

And we've been diving in these special places to see what the future might be like in terms of more and more CO2 entering the sea.

And it's really worrying actually, 'cause we see consistent differences as the CO2 levels ramp up.

(water splashes) (water bubbling) - [Jason] Now, lots and lots of people all over the world are doing experiments in laboratories where you can look, for example, in a bucket or in a test tube, or in an aquarium, what the effects of CO2 are in the short-term.

But it's really difficult to see what the long-term effects of ocean acidification are.

The carbon dioxide we're measuring in the sea next to these volcanoes obviously comes from the volcano.

It's bubbling up through the seabed.

This gives us a way of looking into the future of what man-made CO2 emissions are gonna do.

Man is responsible for 95% of the increased CO2 that we see on the planet.

Volcanoes contribute a tiny amount to that, but these volcanoes are very useful windows into the future, if you like, of what the ecosystem effects are in the sea.

What is ocean acidification?

It basically comes about because carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising and rising fast, okay?

So, since the Industrial Revolution, we've ramped up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Now, a quarter of that carbon dioxide is dissolving in the sea and it's equivalent of each and everybody on the planet throwing the weight of a bowling ball into the ocean every day of carbon dioxide.

It's acidifying the oceans 'cause it reacts with seawater to form a weak acid called carbonic acid.

And that actually makes the water more and more corrosive.

And that's a massive change in the chemistry of the water worldwide.

But if you look at the rocks all around me, under the water there's coralline algae.

This is algae that people used to think was corals 'cause it's rock hard.

It feels like a coral.

It's actually a seaweed and this stuff covers more of the seabed than any other type of marine organism all around the world.

And it's vitally important to the ecosystem because it emits chemicals that cue the settlement of organisms like corals.

This turns out to be like a canary in the coal mine because when you get closer and closer to the CO2 seeps, all of this material simply dissolves away and disappears.

There's not enough chalk in the water.

These are chalky seaweeds.

Not enough chalk in the water to form this material.

Here in Japan, 70% of the coral reefs last year were completely bleached by the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the sea.

And once they've been weakened by the warming, that leaves them even more vulnerable to corrosion from acidic water.

If we were looking at a dashboard of the planet's life support system, we'd see since the 1950s, a huge amount of damming of rivers.

So, there's a lot less water are going into the system.

There's a huge increase in the amount of carbon dioxide, huge increase in the amount of methane.

Basically, all of the resources that we need to support life on Earth are being utilized heavily by mankind.

And that's because the population has increased so much since the 1950s.

- [Sylvain] Many researchers from everywhere in the world is gathering together here to study ocean acidification.

- You can almost see that, really.

Feeling it, it's sort of brittle.

Much more brittle than you expect with normal incorporate.

Yeah, and it's the same with these shells, right?

So, these, all of these just collected in normal conditions, really tough, strong shells.

And then on the outside, massive.

Yeah, and these are more like dwarf forms.

- [Sylvain] The cut is really incredible.

- Yeah, I can't believe, I mean, if a crab was to attack that, it could be able to break in, no problem.

- Well, you can see the organs.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I feel as if I could push my thumb to that, no problem.

You know, so.

- (speaks foreign language) - [Ben] Overfishing is a problem where demand is out stripping supply.

The issue we're having is what they term the tragedy of the commons whereby everyone's relatively disconnected from one another.

And so they think that if someone's gonna take that last fish, why shouldn't it be them?

- We are destroying fisheries one after another, after another.

You can go to your supermarket and you can look at what kind of fish are for sale there.

Most of the fish on the fishmonger's slab is tilapia, farm-raised salmon, farm-raised this or that.

So, what have we done to the world's oceans?

We have massively removed what we call the top predators, the equivalent to the lions and tigers, the sharks and the tunas, and all those big, predatory fish.

- [Jason] Everything's got a certain limit.

And even the vast Pacific Ocean, they thought it could fish it as much as we'd like.

That's clearly not true.

For the last 50 years, we are seeing the effects of people on the oceans.

It's been ramping up and ramping up, and now it's getting ridiculous.

Habitats all over the world are starting to be damaged.

We're losing mangroves, we're losing sea grasses.

We're losing corals.

And that's all because of us.

We need to turn things around soon.

(soft piano music) - [Bill] Agriculture is the way that humanity makes its presence known on most of the surface of the world.

Most of the surface of the world is under one kind or another of agricultural production.

Sometimes people don't think about the relevance of agriculture to their own personal wellbeing and the wellbeing of their children because this process of producing food is often so divorced from the process of purchasing it and consuming it.

- [David] The surface of the Earth, the part that we walk around on, that we live on, it affects our societies.

Just to go out and talk to farmers.

They care about their land.

They care about the future.

(soft guitar music) (rooster crows) - So, what do we need to know?

Since 1960s, I've been the operator of this place.

At the present time, we farm about 2000 acres.

It's a dry land farm where we rotate between wheat, corn, and fallow.

We irrigated since 1948.

When I was a little kid, I was 12 years old, we put down that irrigation well.

And I watched, I was up there the whole time when he was drilling it.

I mean, that was exciting.

It was something that never had happened before here.

And it was this eight-inch pipe and the water shot out of it.

It was completely full.

Ran it down and irrigation ditch and off it went.

That was something else, for me, anyway.

Quite a few years ago, when geological survey started seeing the water tables drop, they were checking wells.

Brownie Wilson is one of those that checks this area.

Well, we sure been lucky this year, it's been raining.

- [Brownie] Yeah, your corn looks great for being dry land, looks awesome.

- It looks like irrigated, doesn't it?

- [Brownie] It does.

Well this well has been measured since 1940s almost.

And since that time, the water table in this well probably dropped 80, 90 feet.

- 96, I think.

Something like that.

- [Brownie] Water is very important to Kansas.

So, here in the high plains, it's typically a semi-arid environment.

And so, the challenge here is water.

And the ability to irrigate and apply water to a crop greatly increases the yields.

In some cases you might get three times a yield as opposed to a dry-lander.

That's what we call people that don't irrigate.

Primary source of supply for that western side of Kansas is from a groundwater source.

And we call those aquifers.

This is water that's been stored in the ground, in some cases, for millions of years.

The big one that everybody likes to talk about is the Ogallala Aquifer, which is one of the largest, most accessible, fresh water systems in the world.

The more you measure these wells, the better you get at this kind of thing.

It just kinda takes a little touch and you have to have love in your heart.

You can't do it fast.

(chuckles) Okay, so now I'm starting to get blue chalk so you can see it's still blue, and then right there and see how it's a little darker.

And so, then I'm just reading the measurements here.

So, that's seven feet 0.32.

- Okay.

- So I need to take 205.

Get that palm pilot up.

205 minus 7.32 minus one foot to account for that elevation to the top.

- So that's, yeah, 196.68.

- So, you're at 196.68.

And I think we were 190... - 6.15 or something.

- [Brownie] One five.

So it went down maybe half a foot, something like that.

So, that's not too bad.

It's usually the average decline in this well's been about lower a foot every single year.

- But over the years and those wells started diminishing and we started seeing at the top of that pipe where it came out of the pipe, instead of being a full pipe, there was a little bit of a gap in the top where the water started dropping off quicker.

- It's dropped about, it's gone from about 120 feet and it's down to about 25 feet left of water in that well.

It drops about a foot every single year and he doesn't use the well for irrigation anymore.

As wellers we measure, we track the changes that occur every year.

And, typically, especially with the Ogallala Aquifer here in Kansas, it's a state of decline.

There are some real issues.

There's a lot more water that gets extracted every year than what goes in the ground naturally.

Most of our groundwater declines and our water supply issues that we see in Kansas are self-inflicted.

In the sixties and seventies, a lot of wells went in.

And they saw groundwater declines occurring as just, "We'll deal with it later."

And often cases that later is now.

In cases where the aquifer becomes unproductive, there are homesteads out there that don't have a viable well anymore.

The well physically went dry.

The water table dropped out from underneath them.

You know, here in Kansas people will go down fighting or adjusting and they'll carry on, and they'll try to do agricultural production and they'll try to have crops in the field.

And then they'll try to feed the world.

Now whether we can actually do that or not, you know, that remains to be seen.

- [Bill] It's my responsibility to save the water.

Just like it's my neighbor's responsibility to save that Ogallala or that water for future generations.

- [Lon] What you're looking at right now is a very nice crop of irrigated corn.

It's all for food and for ethanol.

And it's being watered from the Ogallala Aquifer.

as we speak.

Ogallala, of course, is our aquifer.

And there was a time when water was just something we turned on the tap and we didn't even think about where it came from.

Drilled the wells around here, the attitude was there's enough water to last forever.

'Cause it seemed like it when it was 200 feet deep and not that many people were pumping and, you know, "It'll last forever."

They got plenty.

This is a very large farm that I'm from.

And my work really is to be CEO over about a dozen other guys that are specialists in their area.

Half the United States were farmers not all that long ago.

Farmer used to mean somebody who tilled the soil.

And to me now a farmer is somebody is an economist.

Someone who makes a lot of decisions, someone who's specialized, and someone who is world-based rather than small-based.

At 30,000, right now I'm farming close to 10% of the county.

Farming's gone from private to corporations.

Farming's gone from local, to regional, to national, to worldwide.

We're in a worldwide market, worldwide supplies, worldwide demands, worldwide financing.

If we didn't use fertilizer and the advanced genetics and everything that's raised deals, all of a sudden food would be scarce and prices would have to go sky high.

And I suppose you could make a case that eventually the world population would have to drop to that point.

- [David] There's been a whole series of agricultural revolutions through which we've been able to increase our food output, which has allowed our population to rise.

And you could argue about which is the cart, which is the horse, which is in the driver's seat.

But they've really gone hand in hand in terms of the development of agricultural innovations that have allowed population to increase, culminating most recently in the agritechnical revolutions of the late 20th century, that increase crop yields globally.

Today though, I think our major challenge is figuring out how to keep feeding major populations.

- [Lon] Oh, I don't think I've seen this one, Kristen.

- [Meeting Host] During our irrigation scheduling from this one, number 16 is a small well, you can see that.. - Oh, it's just... - It's getting close to the fully completed line.

So we hope it rains this weekend because the well is not big enough to keep up.

- Is the water just like oil?

Something we pump out of the ground?

The oil's limited, is the water limited?

There's only a certain amount of oil in the ground and it's a finite amount.

And if it's consumed, it's gone.

You know, we're realizing there's a limit.

We're using it faster than it's being replaced.

And so we'll just keep doing it until we can't.

So, I don't know, decide whether am I good or evil?

The minds that you're gonna talk to are gonna say... - [Interviewer] What are they gonna say?

- Well that I'm basically evil (laughs) by wasting a limited resource that should be left for future generations.

- [Bill] Agriculture's changed significantly from pioneers to family farms, to now industrial agriculture.

It continues to concentrate and become very capital intensive.

All of that has been done under the banner of more food and fiber for the world.

We're feeding the world.

Of course, we provide feed grains for livestock, primarily, and half of our corn goes into ethanol production.

So, the idea that we are feeding the world is disingenuous at best.

Here in central Iowa, water quantity is very little of a concern for us, but water quality is a huge concern.

Water quality in our source waters, in our surface waters here is driven by land use upstream.

Land use upstream in this area of the Midwest is overwhelmingly impacted by row crops and industrial agriculture, corn and soybeans, as well as animal feeding operations.

Farming is big time, big business in this state.

These are not family farms.

These are industrial farming operations.

(somber piano music) We're taking water essentially directly from the rivers.

The water quality is driven by things that come across the land into the rivers directly.

And because of industrialized agriculture, corn in particular, by far the largest crop in this state, nitrogen is added in a number of different forms, either as hydrous ammonia or as manure in land application of hog manure, in particular.

Those get into the watershed and create significant concerns for us downstream.

You look at a river in this state, it looks more like cappuccino than it does like water, where you can see to the bottom.

And the largest concern for us are nutrients.

Things like nitrogen or phosphorus, that in water treatment are far more difficult to remove than either suspended solids or soils or bacteria.

The reality is that the trend line continues to show more and more problems with our surface water quality and to go out and take a test of the surface water quality will indicate all kinds of problems associated with not just the nutrients themselves in large quantities, but we're also seeing the impacts of those nutrients, algae, bluegreen algae, cyanotoxins, cyanobacteria, which are an outcome of too many fertilizers in warm water, have a significant impact on our business.

I grew up in this area and a very good yield per acre would be a hundred or so bushels per acre.

Now, 200 or so bushels per acre is the norm and our friends in agronomy tell us that in our lifetimes it'll be closer to 500.

So, to be able to make those corn plants that productive requires a great deal of artificial fertilization.

- [Bill] Well, with all the attention given to the highest number of bushels that you can get per acre, a lot of farmers fertilize to the very maximum.

That's just a mentality that a farmer has, is that you gotta grow the most that you can, you gotta do better than your neighbors.

- [Bill] Science continues to move plant science forward in a way that there's gonna need to be more and more chemical inputs put into the soils.

The soils themselves are diminishing.

So, to continue to provide higher productivity, it's not coming natively from the soils, which are getting worse, not better.

It has to be chemically added.

And that creates significant concerns for those of us downstream, who suffer from the environmental impacts.

(moped honks) - [Saroj] If you ask anybody, "What is the problem of India?

They'll say population.

Population, in terms of numbers, is a huge issue.

I need hardly say that to you.

You can go on the streets of Delhi or any other metropolis in this country, and you'll find huge numbers of people jostling at you.

So, the numbers are very large and they have implications of all kinds.

- [Vimlendu] Around 19 million people living in Delhi, around 65 million people living in the new cities that have actually come in and around Delhi.

So, actually Delhi is not just 19 million people, it's 65 million people because people come every day and go out and live at the periphery.

So, my day to day work is actually fighting that battle to really tell people that environment is important.

That environment is not just economy, but it's also health that we are talking about.

Delhi is one of the most polluted cities in the world.

Our air quality index is beyond measurable limits of meters counted beyond that.

There are 80,000 people who die every year in Delhi because of air quality issues.

- [Shashi] The air in Delhi is unbreathable.

It's absolutely awful.

And we just aren't grappling seriously enough with the crisis of air pollution, The "New York Times" correspondent here, Gardner Harris, pulled himself out of Delhi prematurely and wrote an article in the "New York Times" saying that as a father, he felt he could not morally accept the responsibility of inflicting Delhi on his children.

Now it's a frightening thing to read if you're a Delhiite and you don't have the opportunity of getting back to New York, right?

One of the contributors to air quality here is multiple sources of smoke.

So you've got everything from the chap on the roadside who's making tea on a charcoal brazier, to the homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk who will freeze to death if he doesn't light a fire, to the car, or the bus, or the truck that's spewing smoke into the air, but it has to be grappled with because we are in the process of killing ourselves literally with this.

Indians are suffering daily.

We have deeply, deeply polluted rivers as well.

Our waters, the great sacred river of Hinduism, the Ganges, is a sewer now.

- [Vimlendu] You know, we are just five kilometers inside Delhi right now.

So, Yamuna, post the drain, has just traveled five kilometers.

And imagine it's only been one drain.

There's 17 to 19 similar drains that empty into Yamuna and the river is completely, completely jet black.

You actually see bubbles coming out of the river, which is methane.

This river can any day be on fire.

If you go to another location there's a mountain of froth.

There's so much froth pollution in the river that it's completely, it looks as if it has just recently snowed or something.

The government data says that this river quality, as per Central Pollution Control board, is of E quality.

And E quality means that it's not even fit for animal bathing.

It's only fit for industrial cooling.

You see hundreds of poor people actually bathing in the water 'cause that's the only source of water that they had when they drink and bathe and do everything in this.

Pathetically of all, a prosperous city, poorest of the the poor people still depending on this black Yamuna.

This is the story of Yamuna, this is the story of India, and this is the story of India's ecology.

- How do you revive a dying river or a dead river?

How do you manage to reduce these sources of air pollution in a city like Delhi?

What's holding us back?

I suppose, partly it's the scale and the intractability of the problems.

There's a calculation that it's affecting somewhere between one and 2% of GDP.

That's actually being knocked out by the healthcare costs of pollution and environmental damage in India.

- [Vimlendu] Every study that's been conducted in India around pollution and national resources says that 80,000 people die in Delhi because of air pollution issues.

And so if 80,000, are we waiting for 8 million people?

Instead of one river, are we waiting for all the rivers of India turning black?

Is that when we'll wake up?

- [Shashi] To actually fix your environment, and as a result, your healthcare populous, they'd be, first of all, not falling sick and dying, and also they'd also be more productive because they'd be healthier.

- Progress was supposed to be a positive word, but progress in development has actually become a negative word because whenever or wherever there is progress, there in the backyard there is some muck or some ecological disaster brewing.

- [Shashi] Some degree of environmental damage has accompanied all industrialization everywhere.

Indeed, the bulk of our problems of environment around the world were caused by the galloping industrialization of the advanced Western democracies.

And I think it's disingenuous of us to pretend that that isn't the case.

They are, today, the flag bearers of environmental virtue, but for a century and a bit, they were the biggest polluters of the planet and on the planet.

India with 17% of the world's population, has about 4% of the world's emissions and people are alarmed enough already because we have to breathe the foul air, and drink the unclean water, and deal with the challenges that causes us.

- But still, if our resources are getting stressed is because of the population that we have.

- [Saroj] India is witnessing the entry of the largest numbers of young people in history.

One in five global adolescent is in India.

About a third are of the ages of 10 to 25, which is 365 million.

Investments have to be made in their education, in their healthcare, employment opportunities, and so on.

- Right now, majority of India, it consumes to survive.

It does not consume for a particular lavish lifestyle.

People are just eating two meals a day.

People are just having access to 10 liters, maybe not even that much water.

And when the average Indian wants to start living a middle class aspiration, which is about consumption, as minimal it would be, but if it gets multiplied by 1.25 billion people, then, of course, it really creates a kind of a stress.

- [Stuart] Three or four billion people live in desperate poverty.

- [ Travis] And there are two things that are true about those people.

One, that they are going to become higher resource consumers and two, that they ought to, right?

We owe it to them as a matter of justice to leave them space to develop in a way that they're not in absolute or severe relative poverty.

That means that global average per capita consumption is going to go up for a long time.

- [Stuart] We are trashing the planet with as many people as we have.

If the half the world's population that are destitute were to live anywhere near as well as we do, then we'd be trashing the planet even more.

- [Travis] Overpopulation sounds like a problem concerning the numbers of people, right?

But it's really not.

Overpopulation is a problem of numbers of people consuming at a certain rate.

My child has a very large carbon footprint, right?

If she's an average American, then she'll use 16 to 20 metric tons a year.

And people in the poor parts of the world emit less than 0.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

- [Stuart] And so the problem with human numbers, can't simply be a matter of pointing to sub-Saharan Africa and saying, "Look, control your families."

- So, I become concerned when we talk about population growth happening elsewhere.

You know, all the population growth in Africa or in South Asia, when we consumers are having a much, much bigger impact.

One child born to an American with means, is, you know, equivalent to, potentially, 40 Bangladeshi children.

- [Richard] I try to, you know, to be environmentally conscious in my purchases.

So, all these are little things we can do, but it comes back to the population.

How do we get the message out that we need to think about maybe having smaller families and that's not a politically viable strategy at this point in time, but it's an ecologically necessary one?

- [Bill] I think it's actually easier to reduce population growth rates than it is to reduce consumption.

Most people want to consume more, want to improve their quality of life.

And particularly the poor who want to increase their consumption to lead a decent quality of life.

- I think it's harder for people to give up their stuff than to reduce their family size.

We're really, really bad at stopping using our stuff, right?

We don't give up our stuff no matter what people say.

In periods of economic recession, families tend to get smaller, right?

So, we're really good at modulating our family size for all sorts of reasons.

- [Bill] Because the world has not acted as swiftly as it should have to address the issues when the world's population was three billion, we're now at 7.5 billion, we have a much more serious problem.

Each person is having a bigger impact than the previous person because humans are smart.

So, we've gone after the easiest to reach resources first.

Now we're having to drill through miles of ocean and sub-ocean floor to get at oil or through Arctic tundra.

So, as we add to the population, the impact is magnified because we've done the easy stuff first and now we're having to do the hard stuff to maintain our lifestyle.

- [Stuart] We are driving species to extinction a thousand times faster than they would be going extinct naturally.

Why are we doing that?

We're doing that in large part because we are destroying the places that they live.

About two thirds of all the species on land live in tropical rainforests.

And we're destroying those places.

And so, loss of habitat is the major driver, but we are doing other things too, particularly in the ocean.

We are destroying fisheries one after another, after another.

- Knowing that we are facing the biggest extinction right now, since an asteroid hit our planet, is so personally painful to me.

- [Travis] My students say, "We wanna save the planet."

The planet's fine.

The planet doesn't need saving.

We need saving.

The Earth tells us that it's in trouble in a bunch of different ways.

It tells us we're in trouble by its effects on us.

So you get things like changing disease vectors that are really surprising and harmful.

You get food insecurity, you get mass starvation.

Basically, you see that the sorts of things that humanity isn't able to recover from are happening more and more.

- [Bill] We do not know as a technology changes, how many people can be sustained with current number of resources.

But we are getting very close to a combination of climate change, desertification and loss of fresh water, over pumping of underground aquifers leading to desertification of farmland, that could cause a loss of one to two billion people by 2030.

The water table in India, the number one grain producing country on the planet, is sinking by about 10 feet a year.

The water table in China is sinking by about three feet a year.

The American southwest is losing farmland because of over pumping of underground aquifers as well.

Farmers are drilling deeper and deeper until they can no longer afford to drill deep enough to reach the water.

And then their land is turning to desert and they're giving up.

And we're seeing this all over India.

Thousands of farmers are abandoning their land, unable to pay their debts, and moving to the cities.

In India, there are about 200 million people who are being fed with crops grown with unsustainable over pumping of underground aquifers.

When that water is gone, those people face starvation.

200 million people starving at once is something we've never experienced in human history.

This poses a threat to global harmony, if you will.

We face the potential much worse migration of desperate people than we've witnessed in recent years when this starts to happen.

And unless we start to take this seriously, it will happen.

- [Travis] For me, the hardest thing is the massive injustice.

If it were the case that those of us who were really destroying the planet were gonna be hit the hardest and we were gonna be hit first, I think I wouldn't wrestle with it as much, but it's not gonna be that way.

Those of us who are living, for instance, in the U.S. in the 21st century are pushing forward a process that is an existential threat for the people who are the poorest and the worst off in the very near future.

So, massive injustice is the big worry.

- [Bill] The world's political leadership has been terrified to address the population issue for several reasons.

One, is many economists have convinced politicians that more people are necessary to keep economic growth going.

More consumers, more workers, more taxes.

And the whole economic system of the planet is basically based on growth.

- So, just think about that for a minute.

We have a finite set of resources in a closed system.

And the only way our economy survives is if we grow forever.

Something's wrong with our math and logic here, right?

- [Bill] The next generation is going to face challenges and rates of change that have never been experienced in human history.

The evidence that we are out-using the caring capacity of the planet's natural systems is stronger than the evidence supporting the theory of gravity.

It's okay to address controversial and difficult subjects and to take action even in the face of criticism, because unless we have the nerve to do so, we're going to face serious consequences.

- [Travis] If we started shrinking the population, in the long run, things would be much better.

We have to get smaller.

7.5 billion isn't sustainable, eight billion isn't sustainable, 11 billion, definitely isn't sustainable.

- What do we need to get to?

Well, the first thing is we have to stabilize human population numbers.

- [Bill] Indeed, it is a bleak outlook that we're facing, but it's not hopeless.

The reason to alert people to the fact that we are facing a crisis is because it's not too late.

We still can do something.

- There's been a serious concern globally and nationally that the numbers are very large and something has to be done and we don't have the time to waste, and we have to do something fast.

- There's a very interesting and quite simple answer to human population.

That is, population rates go down when we educate women.

- [Zoe] Women being educated is one of the best predictors for people having no more than two children.

- Not surprisingly, a woman with any kind of education doesn't want to be someone who dies, you know, at 25 years old giving birth to her seven or eighth child.

- [Zoe] And how can we move in this direction of limiting our population growth and then reducing it in a way that is not dictatorial.

- People have in mind, China, so-called one child policy.

It might be the most infamous, but it's only one, lots and lots of countries have had population policies and continue to have population policies.

- [Saroj] Coercive ways of family planning are against human rights.

Fundamental human rights are violated when you do that.

And usually it's the rights of the women that are violated.

- It's now pretty much agreed by most thinking people that coercion is not the answer to the population problem.

Kerala's experience would demonstrate that the two biggest things in reducing our population have been human development and women's empowerment.

When women are in charge of their own destiny, when they're educated, when they're in employment, and when they are essentially able to decide things like how many kids they have, and space them, and so on and so forth, and when you've got the kind of human development that ensures that those kids survive, then you won't have more children.

I mean, Kerala's history shows that.

Kerala is a very special place.

There is a huge culture of openness, of coexistence, of literacy, education, and the empowerment to women.

In 1819, Kerala became the first place in the world to decree free and compulsory education at primary school for boys and girls.

So that we're celebrating the 200th anniversary of that moment.

Kerala has pretty much all the human development indicators of the United States.

The infant mortality rate in Kerala is comparable to the U.S. and is a good deal lower than the rest of India.

The maternal mortality rate, the birth rate, which in Kerala is only 14.6, and out of a thousand people, whereas the rest of India is 22.

So the result is that, in Kerala, we are heading, it is expected, to a possible negative growth in the next census.

By 2021, it might be negative or just below zero anyway.

- No matter where you look in this country, nobody wants large families anymore.

Even among the poor, they want small families.

They want to delay their births, but they don't have the means to do so.

So there's an unmet need for contraception.

Think of a young girl who's married, does not want to have a baby, wants contraception, but she doesn't have the physical of the social means.

She's poor, she's uneducated, she lives in a remote, rural area.

So, how do we reach those services?

- If we made sure that all people on the planet were educated and had access to family planning services, if they had access to healthcare, that by itself would reduce fertility.

That would make a dent.

- [Saroj] But the other fact, which is very important, is that this is a highly patriarchal society.

Sons are valued.

Girls are devalued.

Being a patriarchal society, sexual and reproductive health decisions are made by men.

Women often don't have a voice in these matters.

Isn't it important then to somehow encourage men to take a shared responsibility in terms of, as their partners, husbands, fathers?

This is something that is the opposite side of the coin of women's disempowerment, which is very, very important because unless that happens, we won't solve the problem.

- There are many governments that have done marvelous jobs at reducing their population through intentional campaigns to promote small families, all in a human rights context, all voluntarily.

- A lot of governments avoid talking about population, but certainly not all of them.

Iran is a really, really famous example that through completely non-coercive measures, they drop their fertility from almost six to below replacement inside just a couple of decades.

In the eighties, they very intentionally designed a suite of policies to lower the fertility non-coercively.

And what they did is they opened lots of healthcare.

So, they had healthcare access to people all over the country, wherever they were.

They said to get a marriage certificate, you have to take a family planning course.

And over the course of about two decades, they reduced their population from almost six children per individual to below replacements.

It was incredibly successful program.

- In Ethiopia, we've done eight prime time radio dramas because in Ethiopia to reach the rural population where most people live, you need radio.

So we're doing long-running radio dramas, almost half the population listened regularly to that show.

Once, that show had a character decide to use family planning.

She was really admired by the audience.

The fertility rate across Ethiopia dropped by a full child while that program was on the air.

So we know we can change societies and make people healthier, happier, and better off economically.

- If you change enough voices, if you get enough people having the conversation, and they have it loudly enough and often enough, then you can change the norms.

And it's no longer the case that everybody is allowed to say to this single woman who's in her thirties, "Don't you want kids?"

"Why don't you have any kids?"

Which is incredibly invasive and nobody should be asking, right?

But we feel justified to do it.

I think I owe justification for having a child in the face of all the problems that I see.

And so if we could change the culture so that the burden of justification was flipped, you don't have to justify your choice to remain child free, but maybe you do need to feel a burden of justification if you decide to have multiple children and you know about the effects.

What we do the earth has everything to do with the fact that other feeling, living, loving, awesome creatures are gonna live on it in the future.

And we can make that bad, or we can make that good.

And it just blows my mind that we're having to have this conversation.

- [Stuart] In this day and age there is no excuse for us to bury our heads in the sand.

We have to get out there and engage.

And I think there was a moral imperative behind that.

- You don't make life for future people worse than you could.

- [Richard] The next generation may be the last that really has a chance to turn things around before the Earth is just plain ravaged by too many people consuming too many resources.

- [Stuart] What is the next generation going to think of us if we trash the planet for them?

- [Jason] Human intelligence is the one thing that gives to be the most hope of all because we are very clever as a species.

We're very good at getting ourselves out of pickles.

Pickles are good term for the oceans, right?

Because it's being pickled by mankind, but we are able to work out ways, for example, of slowly reducing the population.

We don't constantly strive for increasing and increasing populations.

That's the opposite of what we wanna do, really.

'Cause we've only got one planet and we don't know of any other planets that we can live on.

So, we need to look after the one we've got.

- We humans are so ingenious.

I have every confidence that if we turn our attention to transforming the educational system and providing young people with these skills and with the passion to wanna make a difference, we're gonna see it.

- When I pray, it's to have courage to do what I can to protect the beautiful planet that we have and to seek justice for its peoples.

- [Richard] I really will value the natural world and I find peace in it.

Depending on your perspective, it can be a church or it can be a place to practice meditation, or it can be just a place of solitude.

I guess I'm the eternal optimist.

I think that we could return up to healthy numbers.

And I think that there will come a point in time when we find the political will.

- There is hope that still inspires me.

Hope that I have actually seen people waking up and doing something about it.

We all need to be political human beings.

'Cause these are political issues that we are talking about.

- [Jason] We still have coral reefs.

We've still got beautiful mangrove forests.

We've still got kelp forests around the world.

Now's the time to act to save them.

Because if we continue like we are, they're gonna be lost.

- We still can promote family planning and small family norms.

We still can promote girls' education.

There are many things we can do.

We know they work.

It's not hard.

It's a matter of political will and people making the commitment.

- The hope is that young people will realize there's no such thing as self-interested business as usual anymore.

You have to change things, 'cause, boy, we're all in it together.

We're all on this rock.

- [Zoe] Action is the antidote to despair.

Even in my darkest moments, I'm never gonna stop.

I'm never gonna give up because I still have to look in the mirror every day.

I'm still gonna die one day.

And how do I want to have lived my life?

Do I want to have tried to make a difference?

Yes.

- [Stuart] The last thing out of Pandora's box was hope.

It's the first thing I have every morning when I get up.

I get up thinking, "What am I gonna do today?

How is it gonna make a difference?"

I have hope.

(bright uplifting music) (soft piano music)