Politicians in both parties want to solve the “problem” of declining fertility.
Recently the Biden administration began sending checks to parents with minor children. Republican senators like Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have proposed their own plans to offer financial rewards for having kids. These leaders hope that by subsidizing childrearing, they can incentivize people to have more babies - and thus prevent a “population bust.”
These tactics display a mild contempt for the millions of Americans who are intentionally choosing to have smaller families. And they display an ignorance of - or apathy toward the disastrous environmental consequences caused by excessive population growth.
This sensitive subject that become somewhat taboo even within the environmentalist movement- which was originally founded to mitigate the ecological destruction resulting from rapid growth. Uncomfortable though it might be, we can’t afford to ignore these consequences. It will be impossible to conserve our wildlands, waterways, and wildlife if the U.S. population continues to boom.
The number of people in the United States grew by 22.7 million over the past decade. That means the country added 2.3 million people- roughly the population of Houston- every single year. America is projected to add another 75 million people over the next 40 years, mostly through immigration.
The notion that we’re facing a population bust is delusional. And as we allow and encourage growth, we are ravaging our limited resources. In metropolitan areas our capacity to feed, house and employ everyone is under severe strain. More than a half million Americans are homeless; some 34 million live in poverty.
As we struggle to support people, we are also straining nature. Ecologists use the term “overshoot” to describe the phenomenon of human demand exceeding the capacity for an ecosystem to renew itself- for example, when we consume freshwater more quickly that an aquifer can replenish, or overfish a species to extinction.
According to the Global Footprint Network, which measures this ratio between resource use and renewal capacity, the United States is deep into overshoot mode, sucking up nature’s bounty at up to 150% of the ecosystem’s capacity to renew. Meanwhile, studies show that as the human population grows in a given area, that area loses natural spaces and agricultural land for grazing and growing crops.
The effects have been especially acute in fast-growing states. Florida, for instance lost 10% of its natural lands, 23% of croplands and 39% of rangelands between 1982 and 2010 according to a report on urban sprawl by environmental planner Leon Kolankiewicz.
Many of us have witnessed human-driven environmental degradation with our own eyes, from the suburban sprawl that takes over former wildlands to the extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change.
Encouraging rapid growth- either through immigration or paying people to have more kids than they otherwise would- is a short-sighted response to a nonexistent problem.