There have been many great pieces of legislation written to protect wildlife and the wildlands where they live. Among them: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, The Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, The Wilderness Act of 1964 and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act of 1989. These pro-wildlife laws all sound good on paper but not only are they are constantly being watered down by pro-development judges and lawyers, there is less and less wilderness to protect. The US lost an additional 17,800 square miles of natural habitat and agricultural land to development between 2002 and 2017, according to the latest 15-year dataset from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service.
If wild animals had hired the lawyers to write these laws, would they still keep them on retainer? I don’t think so. I think they would demand to have their protections expand to include curbing human population growth. In our current state of protections wildlife may be kept from the brink of extinction, but they are not thriving. Although I love to see bald eagles and trumpeter swans almost daily in the suburbs of the Twin Cities here in the Midwest, I know that we have won a few battles but are losing the war. It’s great to see animals like bald eagles being removed from the endangered species list, but compared to their hay day, they are still rare and compromised in many states. Many ornithologists, for example, believe that the eagle population numbered about half a million birds when Columbus arrived in America, and now their numbers have reached just over 300,000.
The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet report 2022, couldn’t be more depressing: The report reveals an average decline of 69% in wildlife species populations since 1970. Sadly, we are in the era of our 6th mass extinction, the sixth one our planet has endured. This time however we are the meteor. Human pressure to expand into the range of wild animals destroys habitat, introduces diseases, invasive species, and increases deadly roadkill encounters. Our climate is so full of greenhouse gases that we are baking our ecosystems. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that our human population numbers continue to grow by over 80 million a year hitting the frightening milestone of 8 billion in the fall of 2022.
Globally growth is the quintessential enemy of wildlife. It is fueled by the number of feet as well as how much those feet are consuming. Taming growth, stabilizing our population and then ratcheting it down would do more to help reduce climate gases than all of the COP (Conference of the Parties) climate conferences put together and they are up to 27 now.
The truth is, that humans are at the top of the food chain. That is what makes our high numbers so dangerous to wildlife. Imagine if lions were as populous as locusts. They would take over and eat everything in sight, rendering our planet lifeless. That is what we are doing. We are top predators unable to do anything but behave like locusts because our numbers are so high. All of our wildlife protection laws must incorporate stopping our growth in order truly protect wildlife. No matter how much we love pandas and pangolins, we have more power to protect bobcats and wolves from within the halls of our own legal system and we need to use that power.
The tragedy is that so most of our laws are designed to promote growth. If we divided our laws into two columns, pro-growth or anti-growth, the pro-growth side would win by a landslide. Under the umbrella of growth live so many laws we don’t question their effects anymore, we just accept them as a part of our lives like sunrises and sunsets.
Permits are legally and easily issued to build apartments and stadiums, dams and shopping malls. Utah is a state with serious drought problems, yet they issued over 33,000 building permits last year, more than any other state. Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a welcome mat for developers who get legal permission to avoid taxes sometimes for as many as 50 years, so they can build their projects with less cost to them and with no commitment to the infrastructures of surrounding communities. Sanctuary cities have popped up across the country designed to combat deportation and detention of immigrants. Berkeley California started this trend. Others have followed. They typically do not detain undocumented workers, and this has become a huge pro-growth policy because it has become a dog whistle to those wanting to come into the US and increased the population of newcomers beyond the capacity of these sanctuary cities to absorb them.
This goes hand in hand with our immigration laws which are also currently acting as pro-growth laws in their lack of enforcement and refinement to address our current overpopulation crisis. They keep the doors of the US open with pressure from corporations, social justice groups and those who believe that the US can still afford to be the release valve for the world’s needy now that we sit at the bloated number of over 333,000,000.
The laws that are missing from the endangered species picture are the laws that would decrease growth. Anti-growth or degrowth laws if you will, are not a part of the national conversation, but they need to be. All of our laws need to be looked at through this lens: Do they cause the population to rise or fall? Do they encourage growth or limit its dangerous path?
Imagine a world which begins wildlife policies with this phrase:
“We the undersigned acknowledge that our limited planet is bursting at the seams with humans. To continue to promote our growth as a top of the food chain mammal with our laws and policies, is to ensure our own demise as well as the extinction of plants an animal species on which we depend. To continue to ignore human population growth as the engine which drives the extinction train is to sign up for failure.”
Each country has its own unique resources, cultures, religions, and laws. It is virtually impossible to infuse the same de-growth laws worldwide. In order to save species and to save ourselves, each country must first assess its resources of water, energy and material goods and social services. Each nation must then determine how much it is growing, and how it is happening then implement the appropriate laws which with curb growth as humanely as possible, remembering that nature is anything but humane. Starvation, flooding, disease, wildfires are all on the menu in a world which refuses to see that humans have exceeded their carrying capacity on Planet Earth.
If total fertility rates are mainly to blame for increasing numbers, they must be encouraged to come down. Among degrowth based laws which would curb fertility: incentives for small families, more support for senior citizens who won’t need large families to take care of them, free access to birth control, more supportive and cheaper foster care and easier adoptions. There also needs to be consistent civil discussion about our imminent ecological collapse.
If immigration mainly to blame for forcing numbers up, like it is in the US, they must be tamed with more restrictive laws that are humanely enforced. Responsibly controlled borders must be a part of a formula for a nation if it wants its wildlife to survive the pressures of ecological collapse. Macro thinking is required if our natural places are to remain free from the footprints of newcomers who are not to be mistreated but need to be restrained with laws like E-verify* which are federally voluntary but are begging to required by more states. Temporary visas for educational opportunities must be just that, temporary.
These discussions can no longer afford to be sidetracked by accusations of racism. It is a flimsy avoidance strategy of a monumental degree. History has proven that descendants of slaves are relegated to the back of the hiring line every time we have a wave of immigrants come into the US. (See: Back of the Hiring Line by Roy Beck 2021). Because Black Americans in border states have recently added their voices to the protests of the uncontrolled stream of immigrants, it begs the question, how can racism be the reason for wanting responsibly controlled borders? Allowing populations to grow with either laws and customs which encourage either high fertility rates or immigration is asking for extinction to exhilarate no matter how many wildlife acts are on the books.
If wildlife were able to hire the best lawyers and sue us for allowing growth and sprawl destroy their habitat I for one would want to be on that jury and vote for the plaintiff.
*“is an Internet-based system that compares information entered by an employer from an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to records available to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to confirm employment eligibility.”