I remember coming home crying from school in first grade because I hated my math classes. I remember asking my mother if I really had to deal with 12 more years of this torture. But as an adult I have learned to be grateful for all of the classes I suffered through. America, we need to learn basic math. It may even be more important than our limited knowledge of ecology.
Reports came out about the rate of growth slowing in the US, and every growth enthusiast went apoplectic. This was disturbing on two levels. One was that they believed that we were actually declining in numbers and the other was the universal dismay expressed that this would be a bad thing.
The fuzzy math and brain twisting brought these otherwise intelligent journalists and commentators to the false conclusion that the population of the US itself was in decline. The key word is RATE here. So for the first time in 100 years the rate of population growth is declining, that is a cause for a cupcake size celebration. Let’s take a look at what happened to US population in 100 years. It grew by nearly 225, 000,000 people putting tremendous pressure on our limited resources. So if the rate of growth is slowing that just means the trend is going down not the actual numbers. The actual numbers in fact are going up, mostly due to immigration.
Let’s say you were stranded on dock anchored to the bottom of a lake that was flooding at a rate of one foot per hour. Then the rate of water rising slowed to a rate of one foot every two hours. You can celebrate that the water is increasing more slowly only until you drown because it is only the rate that slowed, not the actual level of the lake.
I keep getting asked by the math challenged what I think about population decline in the US. After my head spins around and my hair catches on fire, I answer that I think that WOULD be terrific since we are way over our sustainable numbers. At 331,000,000 we are more than double what the US can handle when our resources of water, open land, room for wildlife, and other quality of life issues are considered. But again the rate is slowing, and that doesn’t translate into actual numbers going down.
While some population groups push mainly for small families, the actual birthrates in the US are near replacement level, making our growth of 1.2 million people per year mostly due to our current immigration policies. The reason Americans do not curdle at this is because they do not see the harm in growth. They see immigrants as essential to our integrity as a vibrant country. They are not wrong about the contributions of immigrants , but they need to do another kind of math and measure how our country is really doing. How are our aquifers holding up? How is our quality of water and vibrancy of our rivers doing? How easy has it been to quarantine and socially distance in our crowded cities? How are our wildlife doing?
When do we get to swallow our pride and admit we are full? Like Bill Maher said on his Real Time show on HBO, “ When do we quit pretending that we have enough resources for more and more people?” It’s not going to happen until most of us take some remedial math classes and wake up to the realities of what it means to perpetual grow in a finite country.