Section 5: TRACK 3

Population and Women


← Return to Seizing an AlternativeSection V

Track 3: Population and Women

In 2011 the world topped 7 billion people—and kept right on growing. In the 1990s, worldwide efforts to provide family planning services slowed population growth, but that progress has stalled. The question is: what will be left of civil society and of the non-human life on Earth by the time human population finally stops growing. One vitally important response: give every woman and girl access to family planning.


Track Heads

Marilyn Hempel

Co-founder of Blue Planet United

Marilyn Hempel is the co-founder of Blue Planet United. Since 1994 she has edited the Pop!ulation Press, and written articles for other publications. She continues to do that and to oversee Blue Planet United projects.

Marilyn was a member of the NGO delegation to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. Since participating in the conference, she has given hundreds of speeches to organizations throughout the United States. In 1995 she was a delegate to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. In 1999, she was chosen to be part of a U.S. NGO delegation sponsored by UNFPA, sent to China to study and observe their emerging voluntary family planning and poverty eradication programs.

In 2008 she received the prestigious Paul Harris Fellow award from Rotary International, in appreciation of significant work toward the better understanding and friendly relations among peoples of the world.

In 2014, Hempel edited the book, FACING THE POPULATION CHALLENGE: WISDOM FROM THE ELDERS. The book, published by Blue Planet United, is a series of essays by “elders” who have spent a lifetime working in the population and sustainability field. They answer the question: If you could assemble the leaders of the world, what would you say to them?”” The essays provide a blueprint for how to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

Marilyn presently serves on the Board of Directors of Population Communication, and on the Advisory Board of Population Media Center. She has sat on the Boards of Directors of ZPG and the Population Institute.

Marilyn grew up in Southern California—and in East Africa, where her father was Chief of the Social Research Section of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. She holds a Masters of Education from McGill University (Montreal, Canada), an M.A. from the Claremont Graduate University, and a B.A. from Pitzer College.

blueplanetunited.org


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