I wrote a version of this essay in 2019, when the US had 4.5 million less people, in spite of the pandemic which killed 700,000 Americans, so I thought it was time to revisit the topic.
The talented and hard-working men who replaced our patio door had heavy Russian accents. I soon discovered that they were from the same part of Russia, Belarus where my grandparents were born. I have intentionally traveled to countries populated with people with different languages because I enjoy learning and absorbing different cultures. I have devoted my professional life as a naturalist to make our nature center accessible to everyone. The doctor title before my name was earned in a degree that was steeped in social justice.
I have not wavered from my steadfast belief in the justice for all concept in our constitution, but I am continually stunned by how so many of our policies completely ignore nature’s laws and the way we as a species depend on them. It is time to have a more nuanced discussion about immigration that includes the environment. In this time, on this planet, in our country we have a reality shaped by how many people are already here.
The Statue of Liberty, was originally known as “Liberty Enlightening the World” and was given by France in 1886 to celebrate the Franco-American alliance during the Revolutionary war. It was given when our population was just over 50 million people as a gift to celebrate liberty. When the poem by poet Emma Lazarus was added later in 1903, it was a game changer for it turned statue which graces Liberty island in New York’s harbor, into a symbol of a different notion: as a never-ending welcome mat for the world’s downtrodden. It is a narrative that has permeated our culture for 118 years. I am arguing that it has contributed to the gaining of 280 million people since these words were added to the base of the statue.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The flaw in that sentiment is that it assumes that our country will always and forever more be better off with more and more people. It ignores the land stolen from so many Native American Indian tribes, still working to get it back. It assumes we will have enough farmland, fresh water, open space, wildlife, wildlands and everything that makes for a quality of life, now and forever more.
When the currently silenced voice of environmental measurement is allowed a seat at the decision-making table, it will speak a shocking story. It turns out, according to data from Global Footprint Network that if we are to look at immigration and the US population through the eyes of sustainability then we passed up our sustainable numbers at least 150 million people ago.
I am in my sixties now. Our population in the US has more than doubled in my lifetime. Those additional 167 million consumers have transformed this country. They are responsible for our crowded cities and traffic congestion, more pollution and less open land. More people make a wide variety of negative impacts on the environment on which we all depend, and it doesn’t matter from this perspective the nationality, religion or race of those additional people. It is significant however, that we are growing in the US it mostly due to our ecologically outdated immigration policies, not due to our fertility rate. The Census Bureau projects that the US population will increase by another 79 million people by 2060, passing 400 million in 2058. Almost all of that increase will be due to immigration. Therefore, we can hand out all the condoms on street corners that we want. We can even use the Endangered Species Condoms so cleverly produced years ago by the Center for Biological Diversity, but we will not affect US population growth much if we focus on our total fertility rate, which is now officially 1.7 per woman. With the current and increasingly more permissive immigration policies, we would be best to focus on Washington DC and the policies currently in the hopper. Here comes one of the metaphors I am becoming known for, we are trying to clean up the disease of US overpopulation with soap and water when antibiotics are required. Antibiotics (aka sensible immigration policies) are more expensive and have side effects, but they do at the end of the day save the patient.
We are all consumers. We can and should try to consume less but we all need water, energy, food, jobs, open land and none are in a limitless supply. The consumption in the US is so high that those who keep the statistics on this like the Global Footprint Network, tell us that it would take five planets to supply the globe with enough resources if everyone were to consume like we do in the US. Adding more high-level fossil fuel consumers to the US due to increased immigration from lower footprint nations is not what our warming planet needs.
Yes, overpopulation is indeed a global problem, but it will be much easier to stabilize and reduce our own population with our own political systems than to try work only on the global stage. Population Media Center and UNFPA (United Nations Family Planning Association) have wonderful missions and have had some admirable successes on the global population stage, and it is critical that both get much more funding. However, since they both formed in 1998, we have added 1.8 billion people to the planet. They have an extraordinary and overwhelming task before them no matter how well they are funded. It would be so helpful if each of the 195 countries recognized by the UN assisted them by recognizing that their own futures are in peril if they do not take on the task of addressing the overpopulation issues within their own borders.
Let’s put in it terms of saving endangered species. Those who wish to save them might listen to the argument that we need a more local approach to overpopulation. They may agree that although still very challenging, it is at least theoretically easier to save Florida panther from extinction that it is to save the African Elephant. Both are suffering from overpopulation and the way it ravages ever-shrinking habitat on both continents. Clearly, no matter how many address labels and cloth bags we collect from our donations to international conservation groups, we have more political power to save the Florida panther.
In 1973, I vacationed in Florida, the same year that the Florida panther, a subspecies of mountain lion for which their hockey team is named, went on the endangered species list. The population of Florida then was just 7 million. The panther formerly ranged from Canada to the Andes but was hunted to near extinction to protect livestock and make room for humans. Thanks to intensive conservation efforts there are estimates of 120-150 Florida panthers now trying to exist alongside 22 million humans within its borders. Many are hit by cars and struggle to find suitable habitat. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, most of those 15 million Floridians added in 48 years are due to inward migration followed closely by foreign immigration. Florida with its shrinking habitats and some of the worst traffic congestion in the country has truly taken Lazarus’s poem to heart. It did name the Florida panther as the state’s official animal back in 1982, but it needs to do much more.
I wish I had the space to do justice to the 1,300 endangered species on the US list like the lesser prairie chicken or the lovely pollinator, the Karner blue butterfly, but that’s the point of this article, we are all running out of space due to overpopulation and our continued growth.
I acknowledge that this is a very difficult discussion to have. I have personally benefited by having ancestors who came here. I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. But I know for sure that human numbers and how we grow is a part of the equation that needs to be on the table. Overpopulation has been ignored, dismissed and trampled upon for far too long, often under the pretense of political correctness. We absolutely cannot allow our overpopulated country to be an excuse for treating immigrants inhumanely. Atrocities are indefensible. But it is equally hard to imagine that we can make good decisions about our country’s future regarding immigration policies while ignoring the tragic state of our country’s limited life-giving resources. Is it really fair to welcome people into a place that is already over-pumping its aquifers and draining its rivers to support unsustainable development? I know for sure it isn’t fair to the hundreds of species hanging on by a thread.
We must acknowledge that we all suffer when we exceed our country’s environmentally determined limits, and we have already exceeded them by many measures. We must try our best to walk that fine line between loving our fellow human and our planet’s support systems. It would have been great if a Emma Lazarus would have added these words to the end of her poem “until it is no longer sustainable to do so.”
The Statue of Liberty would then truly have an opportunity honor the US, its future and its goals of liberty and justice for all.