Cover your tweedle… save the burrying beetle

American burrying bettle. (Design donated by Lori Lieber. Artwork donated by the Endangered Species Print Project. © 2010.)

The Center for Biological Diversity cooked up a humorous way to tackle a serious issue: overpopulation. {1} By branding and marketing condoms as a “save the endangered species” campaign, the Center is making an explicit link between H. sapiens reproduction (whether unwanted, careless, unplanned or  plain-old excessive), human overpopulation, the earth’s carrying capacity and finite resources and the scads of biological organisms that suffer habitat fragmentation, resource depletion, over-hunting and over-exploitation because of burgeoning human growth, population density and the effluent of civilized humanity. <whew!>

So go ahead, indulge in these biophiliac prophylactics. If you visit the website (link above) you can peruse the handful of species they’ve chosen to highlight with swanky turns of phrase like “Cover your tweedle… save the burrying beetle” and “wear a jimmy hat… save the big cats.”

Can’t get enough? Enter their contest to win a life-time supply of free condoms. And remember, having just one or two kids means you are not contributing to the overpopulation and species extinction crisis.

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{1} Full disclosure, I interned with the CBD in 2005.

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Overpopulation and species extinctions

An interesting little phenomenon is underway throughout the month of February called the “Global Population Speak Out.” It was first started in 2009 by environmental writer John Feeney. This year, he’s enlisted the help of a group that calls themselves the Population Institute. Their stated goal with the GPSO campaign is to break the taboo of talking publicly about Earth’s human population problem and related ecological and environmental ills.

Instead of writing one of my usual posts about research, I’m just going to direct you to the GPSO site, and also to the Center for Biological Diversity’s Overpopulation Campaign which has some good information about the connections between human population and the current extinction crisis, including this nice little USGS graph showing how species extinction rates are linked to the growth of a single specie’s meta-population:

Credit: USGS

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