Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER) is an impressive piece of art crystallizing the ecological and social tragedies of humanity’s ballooning numbers and consumption. Filled with powerful and evocative images, OVER addresses the many challenges caused by human population size (7.3 billion) and growth (1.5 million people every week).
OVER was created as the centerpiece of the 2015 Global Population Speak Out campaign, which offers people and organizations worldwide the opportunity to influence the future of life on this planet by giving voice to their aspirations for a more sustainable future. Speak Out promises to bring international attention to the many crises caused by human behavior and our already enormous population size — and the ongoing growth of global population numbers. At the same time, Speak Out also points the way towards a more sustainable human relationship with the planet: through early global population stabilization.
Through a vigorous pursuit and realization of a progressive human rights agenda, global population could stabilize as soon as the year 2050 at 8.3 billion. The keys to achieving this important milestone will be weakening and eliminating social injustices around the world, such as the low social-status of women in many countries, gender-based violence, rape, genital mutilation, untreated fistula, forced prostitution, slavery, and child marriage — after all, these injustices significantly contribute to high fertility and population growth because they rob women of social-status and autonomy in deciding how many children they would like to bear and when. Victory on these compelling issues, along with expanding global access to family planning information and services, will point global population towards stabilization within 35 years. If progress is not made on these issues, however, global population could be as high as 16 billion by the year 2100.
We have created online versions of the book’s essays and created easily sharable postcards from some of the striking photographs within the book to help you spread the word and encourage others to speak out.
OVER was published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology. It was printed and is available commercially for $50 by Goff Books, an imprint of ORO Editions.
"Over-Over-Over features a refreshingly spare text. There’s an introduction by the guiding founder of the Population Media Center, William Ryerson; a foreword by Musimbi Kanyoro, a veteran defender of family planning as a fundamental human right; and closing comments from Eileen Crist, an advocate for the myriad other species that our own overwhelming presence threatens to push off the planet. You should read their intelligent remarks, because it’s well worth the time – even though you’ll be tempted to go right to the pictures. And understandably so: The real star of this book is the photography."
There are thousands of essays, articles and books dealing with population but “Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot” provides a convincing new way of understanding the impacts of population size on human welfare and nature. Through well-chosen quotes, and stunning photographs, this largely visual presentation documents the realities and role of burgeoning human numbers on a broad variety of important areas including the destruction of wildlife and natural systems, air and water pollution, food insecurity and climate change.
A stunningly beautiful book, Over Over Over calls to mind the films of Godfrey Reggio, who some critics called to account for making the ugly—exploding napalm consuming whole villages—look visually compelling. Despite the beautiful images of often ugly things—degraded or devastated land and seascapes, wholesale slaughter of non-human creatures, human crowding and poverty—there is no getting lost and forgetting what is before us: the injury we have wrought as a species to others, the Earth and ourselves.
There are many ways to participate! Together, we can raise awareness and bring about change.