When I was in the sev­enth grade in a south­ern Illi­nois junior-high school in the early 1990s, my Eng­lish teacher assigned a series of public-speaking assign­ments. We were to choose sev­eral top­ics and then give pre­sen­ta­tions. Per­haps I had been a lit­tle pre­co­cious, but I selected over­pop­u­la­tion and the food cri­sis as one of my sub­jects… Con­tinue reading