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In just a few decades the worlds population will hit nine billion,
leading to the essential question: Can this many humans survive and
try to improve their lives without depleting the planet?

Andrew C. Revkin, a science reporter for The New York Times, has
been thinking about the elusive goal of sustainability for more than
25 years. In a new blog, Dot Earth, he gathers news, interviews with
experts and Times correspondents, word of successful programs and
accounts of his quest for sustainability from suburbia to Siberia.
Readers are invited to join the conversation.

Below are recent entries from nytimes.com/dotearth.

ART AND SCIENCE

Stephen Nash is an artist with an arcane specialty that has made him
all too busy these days drawing precise renditions of primates and
other animals on the brink of extinction.

The pencil and ink drawings, which Mr. Nash does for Conservation
International, have become valuable tools in helping locate rare
species and persuading local peoples to help conserve them.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Nash described how he builds sketches
using fuzzy photographs, biologists descriptions, old Victorian
artwork and skins stored flat in old museum collections.

It requires a very considerable concentration, said Mr. Nash, who is
53 and works at Stony Brook University on Long Island. It really
does require, as it were, almost falling in love with the animal, to
try and bring it to life in a two-dimensional way.

When two new species of titi monkey, a cat-size African group, were
discovered by biologists in 2002, one, Callicebus stephennashi, was
named for him.

CASH FOR LESS GAS!

Homeowners in San Francisco can now enter a contest where the
winnings (up to $5,000) go to groups of people (from a neighborhood,
school, condo complex) who cut their electric and natural gas bills
the most in a month, compared with the similar monthly period a year
earlier. Details are at sfclimatechallenge.org.

A3k comments: Perhaps its time for someone to create a volunteer
organization that will go to the homes of people struggling to pay
utilities and do some of the basics to reduce their energy use.

BUSH ADVISER SPEAKS

As Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups continue to
complain about Bush administration edits of Senate testimony on
health risks from global warming, the White House took the unusual
step of having President Bushs science adviser, John Marburger III,
issue a detailed explanation.

In a printed statement, Dr. Marburger said his staff had determined
that various sections of the statement did not align with the latest
findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

SP comments: In the long run, hard scientific facts carry far more
weight than dubious and groundless conjectures.

Greenpa comments: Science is gutted and ignored, and twisted when
possible, to suit the Bush Constituency.

POPULATION CLUSTER BOMB?

Many population experts foresee the next few decades evolving in a
way that is very different from the global-scale, catastrophic
population bomb concept that caught hold in the 1960s. What they
depict is more like a dangerous scattering of cluster bombs, as the
world splits into two types of countries: those with aging,
shrinking populations, like Japan and much of Europe, and those
regions, like most of Africa and parts of south Asia, still mired in
poverty, disease, illiteracy or government dysfunction with
resulting high birth and death rates.

RSM comments: Manage cities, and manage the cities extremely well,
as people migrate into them. The human migration trend will release
more lands to wilderness.