Jill Quirk and Sustainable Population Australia
I have been interested in the human population factor in environment since I was a teenager in the 1960s. This came about through an interest in the environment and seeing a threat to wild life at that time as well as a push for and awareness of the need for National Parks in the face of “progress“, population growth and development in Australia. Around that time Paul Ehrlich’s rather alarming but seminal book, The Population Bomb came out and I read it with a large measure of disquiet. Although population was not the main preoccupation of my early adulthood, I later became concerned when it seemed to me that it was not being adequately addressed by environmental groups because it had become a taboo topic: yet population was already having such a huge impact on our environment.
It was and is a continual trade off between development and the environment and it seemed then as now that development was non -negotiable. I heard about Sustainable Population Australia some time in the 1990s and joined in that decade. I was Vice President of the Victorian Branch in 2004 – 5 and I am currently the Victorian President of Sustainable Population Australia, having been elected in 2006 and 2007.
The last four years have been packed with experience and learning. In that time, the current Vice President of SPA Victoria, Sheila Newman and I began using electronic video to record and investigate issues which are related to or dependent upon population growth. This has exposed much discontent which needs to be reported and publicized in the areas of development, democracy, population and environment.
My academic qualifications include a sub-major in philosophy and a degree in Arts/Psychology and French, Audiology and Librarianship along with about 3 years of study in Art, but my current interests are in population, energy and environment as these factors will shape the future of our world.