Jim Motavalli

No one told Salamatou Adamou about the "birth dearth." A midwife and widow, she had already given birth to 12 children by the age of 37. "I am exhausted," she said as she struggled through labor with child number 13. Her large family is not all that unusual in drought-stricken Niger, a country where widespread poverty combines with strict patriarchy, early marriages, a lack of health care access and educational opportunities for women, sanctioned polygamy and adherence to fundamentalist Islamic tenets on procreation to produce the highest birth rate in the world, eight children for every woman.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation with significant population growth, and a new report sees those burgeoning numbers as a factor in our unparalleled impact on the environment.

In mid-2005, women around the world had an average of 2.7 children, according to the Population Reference Bureau. That seven-tenths of a percentage point above replacement level may not seem like a lot, but it is contributing to a dramatic population expansion, from 6.4 to 9.2 billion, between now and 2050.

If soils do indeed achieve the higher profile they so desperately need, John L. Havlin will be one of the people to thank. The professor at North Carolina State University is past president of the Soil Science Society of America, and a dedicated campaigner whose work is helping to establish the House of Representatives Soils Caucus and a $4 million Smithsonian educational exhibit on the subject, opening in 2008.

Andy Hargadon is director of the University of California at Davis" Energy Efficiency Center, which works, he says, to "commercialize existing technologies." As he points out, the trick isn’t to invent new clean technology, but to get people to use it.

The fight over America’s three remaining horse slaughterhouses has developed into back-and-forth, high-stakes brinksmanship, featuring name calling, Congressional action, outraged city halls and last-minute judicial rulings. Although public opinion and the organized might of the animal welfare and animal rights communities oppose them, the plants—two in Texas, one in Illinois—were still open for business at presstime.