sex, lies and global survival
Population growth is being blamed for the earth's murder. Is this just? Anuradha Vittachi sets out on an investigative journey in search of the truth.

Consuming passions
It's strange. Northern experts have plenty to say about population in the South - but not a lot to say about consumption in the North. Why could that be?

Garbage galore
And they come up with some odd proposals for how to stop messing up the planet. Anuradha produces a piece of logic that shocks.

The lie of the land
Fat cats, bullies and scapegoats.

Presenting Population
How to keep the North on top

Whodunnit?
Kid gloves off Anuradha charges the two main culprits with ecocide.

LIFE ON EARTH - THE FACTS

The healer myth
Analysis time. Why does the North want to control the genitals of the South?

The pathological game
Hang on. Who's got the problem round here - and who can't control their urges? Anuradha homes in on the Northern psyche.

SIMPLY a fairy tale about fertility

What really matters
Hope, values and a possible way through the lies to global survival.

Sometimes a piece of writing is just a job. You're not being asked to be a creative artist, only a professional stringer-together of sentences. And it's no good saying: 'I'm not in the mood.' You just have to stare out the white piece of paper, refuse to be intimidated, tell yourself sternly, 'It's only a thousand words' and get on with it. But sometimes what you write requires far more of you than that and the more demanding it is, the more captivating the process of writing can become. This magazine made me positively obsessive. Often I would vanish behind my word-processor after supper 'just to tidy up one paragraph' - and not reappear until six o'clock the following morning, tired but happy.

Obviously the intrinsic importance of the subject makes a great difference: you're never going to feel as involved if you are writing about something superficial. In the case of population and the environment, you are grappling with matters of life and death and justice in relation to all of humankind - and the planet to boot. You can't get a subject much more serious than that. Not to mention urgent.

And all-encompassing. The more I listened and read, the more massive an issue it turned out to be, hooking into everything from economics to animal rights. What's more, it was emotionally loaded with every possible prejudice. Racism, sexism, classism, ageism, hatred of capitalism, ditto of socialism or of different religious faiths - and each of these ideological loads was nailed fiercely into place by powerful feelings masquerading as reasons. Which realization presented me with a challenge: could I let go of my own ready-made answers and risk seeing what might emerge during the process?

So writing this issue had to become a genuine journey of discovery for me. And many of the themes I had intended to examine throughout the course of the magazine became compressed into just one part of it while other themes were left out altogether as new ideas unexpectedly elbowed them out of place.

One risk I took, after much cowardly dithering, was to include an ancient fairytale - and eventually to include it with very little explanation as to its meaning. Indeed, new layers of its meaning have kept on emerging. Although the version offered here is lightened and abridged, I hope enough key moments are retained for it to reverberate in the semiconscious. Many readers, I have no doubt, will hate this story and find it simply gruesome or baffling. Others, especially those who enjoy exercising their metaphorical imagination, may find the story echoes their experience as compellingly as it did mine.

Letters
Letter from Lahore
Updates
Reviews: plus Rai Rebels classic
Curiosities
Endpiece: by Nina Silver
Country profile: Vanuatu

FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPH:
Mother and child in Burkina Faso by MARK EDWARDS
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER