On June 14th 2021 Dan Walters decided it was important to warn us about the pains of California’s so-called baby bust. (Calmatters.org) The growth gravy train has brought superhighways, skyscrapers, 5G wireless Internet, mansions, swimming pools and all things modern to this popular state. California has been a beacon for all things sunny and extravagant for decades. Its mild weather, mountains and deserts, canyons and coastlines have been a magnet for outdoor lovers. Its farms have required laborers and its Hollywood studios attract actors and producers with dreams to become famous. To accommodate the popularity of a state with so much natural beauty and promises of a better life, we’ve had to pave it. We’ve sacrificed its beauty for the demand it can not sustain. We now must allow access to Yosemite via lottery and operate under the illusion that adding more lanes to freeways like the 405 will help with congestion. We also are forced to witness more victims of mudslides and wildfires in each successive year.
I first started going to California 23 million people ago. It was 1961 and I went there for my cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. I was 7 years old. Imagine much less traffic, the less frequent water shortages and the roomier visits to Yosemite back when California had 16.5 million residents. Due to a combination of immigration and natural growth the golden state’s population has risen to its current bloated total of 39.5 million in just 60 years, barely a blink of an evolutionary second.
While we spent most of our time at the synagogue and at relative’s homes on that visit, I’d like to imagine that the wildlife did better in those days too. With all the talk about schools having to close if the population doesn’t keep growing, I’d like to give voice to endangered animals like the San Joaquin kit fox. “More than 800 species in the state are now at risk – including half of all mammals and one-third of all birds. Of these, 134 species are listed as threatened or endangered, that is, facing a real possibility of extinction.” Leon Kolankiewicz Daily News (2008/2017). Though they will never get their name on Hollywood’s walk of fame, wildlife matters. The open space they need away from our kind has the added benefit of allowing the water cycles to work and the land to breathe.
Certainly putting the brakes on population growth and getting back to a much more sustainable number will have its de-growing pains, but we can figure out those challenges. We can restructure our economy and start seeing that growth in a finite place is as problematic as any economic Ponzi scheme. What we can’t figure out in our current perpetual love affair with growth, is how to bring back the land, its watersheds and all of the wonderful species so integral to the biodiversity that sustains us.
Striving to have less people in this once beautiful state will be more beneficial to the ability of our environment to sustain more wildlife and support a quality of life that doesn’t include the added air pollution, overall scarcity and mudslides of population growth. Framing current demographic trends as a ‘Baby Bust’ not only ignores immigration as a significant source of California’s population growth, it sounds a false alarm. I like to think of it as getting our collective undies in a bundle about how someone forget to polish the silverware on the Titanic. How ironic that focusing our attention primarily on humans is ultimately detrimental to the very species we are trying to protect. We must move upstream to see the long term impacts of our decisions to embrace growth over the ability of the land to support us. It will be tricky, because we must do this without invoking draconian measures because the ultimate goal is to prevent suffering, not cause it. If I were a betting person I’d bet that the wildlife and the future residents of California will thank us when there is still room to roam and water is still coming out of their taps.