Discusses our continually increasing population, its causes and consequences, and efforts by governments and individuals to control its growth.

'Building the Population Bomb' carefully examines how the rise of the world's human population came to be understood as problematic by scientists and governments across the globe. It challenges our assumption of population growth as inherently problematic by demonstrating how it is our anxieties over population growth - and not population growth itself - that have detracted from the pursuit of economic, environmental, and reproductive justice.

Figuring the Population Bomb traces the genealogy of twentieth-century demographic “facts” that created a mathematical panic about a looming population explosion. This narrative was popularized in the 1970s in Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book The Population Bomb, which pathologized population growth in the Global South by presenting a doomsday scenario of widespread starvation resulting from that growth. Carole McCann uses an archive of foundational texts, disciplinary histories, participant reminiscences, and organizational records to reveal the gendered geopolitical grounds of the specialized mathematical culture, bureaucratic organization, and intertextual hierarchy that gave authority to the concept of population explosion. These demographic theories and measurement practices ignited the population “crisis” and moved nations to interfere in women’s reproductive lives. Figuring the Population Bomb concludes that mid-twentieth-century demographic figures remain authoritative to this day in framing the context of transnational feminist activism for reproductive justice.

Examines some of the negative impacts of the earth's population explosion; this concept is tempered with the potentially sustainable solutions that may be available to offset this impact.

This book concentrates on the world population crisis not because resolving that crisis is the only step needed toward a future of sustainable well-being. Instead, it focuses upon how indescribably cruel an enemy of children, women, and men massive overpopulation would be.

If current world population trends were to continue, human numbers could more than double to 13 billion people by the end of this century. Given humanity's consumerist trends, with resulting global warming and the overall impact on vulnerable biodiversity and habitat, this would be ecologically disastrous! No Vacancy is that rare chronicle of sobering optimism in a world more accustomed to thinking about population as a dilemma with little hope of positive change. Family planning expert Bob Gillespie and renowned global ecologist, author and film director Michael Tobias journeyed the world in search of answers. This book reveals an exquisite window on remarkable events occurring in country after country where Tobias and Gillespie discovered changes that have resulted in smaller family sizes and the empowerment of women and children, while creating critical pathways towards ecological sustainability. From Iran, Mexico, Ghana and Nigeria, to countries across Western Europe, as well as the U.S., India, and Indonesia, No Vacancy paints an emotional, at times provocative, portrait of a global transformation; a fertility transition that may well prove to be one of the most important-and timely-ingredients in humanity's survival and the continuation of life on Earth. Book jacket.