Support the Cause Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER)

Retails for USD50, but as part of Speak Out, you can request free books to use for raising awareness. OVER has distributed about 6,000 complimentary copies so far. Visit

The message of Speak Out is driven by global sustainability: Their objective is to match aggregate human consumption to the sustainable yield of the planet’s renewable bio-capacity. To achieve this, they stress that “total resource extraction, production, and consumption need overall reductions, and a restructuring within the scaled down totals to contribute to social justice imperatives”.

The 2015/2016 Speak Out campaign partnered with The Foundation for Deep Ecology to publish a photo book called Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER). The editorial team gathered the most compelling images from around the globe that show both the human and ecological sides of the overpopulation story.

Tom Butler, editor of OVER, shares his guiding message for the book: “To me, the common theme is one of what dominion looks like. Whether that desire to control is targeted at the Earth, as viewed in a clear-cut forest or tar sands development or sharks killed in a net of an industrial fishing boat, or targeted at people, as in the images of young girls given into marriages with men three times their age. These images represent loss of beauty and potential, for Nature and people.”

Butler admits that the book visually alludes to numerous touchy subjects, from gender relations to abortion rights and immigration policies. “There are pressures both from the right and left of the political spectrum not to talk about it,” he says. “And so, mostly, people don’t, merely talking about the consequences of population growth and consumption.”

Butler says that while there is no shortage of data, demographic information and policy documents on human population and consumption, these are not targeted at reaching the masses in any meaningful way. “We wanted to jump over those rational arguments and go right to the emotional part of the brain in readers of the book,” he explains. “Can you look at these images of the Earth as transformed by human numbers and behaviour and not feel an emotional connection? The point is to get people to care, and then start talking and acting to support change.”

In keeping with the campaign’s positive outlook, focusing on a dystopian future is not the aim of OVER, although documenting the current realities facing the planet is prudent to raising awareness. To this end, Butler has included an afterword by environmental author Eileen Crist that crafts a positive vision of what the world might be – beautiful, diverse, and filled with life.

“Doing the right thing for people in high fertility countries – empowering women, educating girls, and making family planning tools universally available – is morally justified and ecologically beneficial,” Butler says. “That is a pretty good story to tell.” ag

“Can you look at these images of the Earth as transformed by human numbers and behaviour and not feel an emotional connection?