I can see it in their eyes. I know the second I lose my audience when speaking about how to truly protect our country’s wildlife, the issue to which I have devoted my career. Speaking to groups of all sizes and stripes, I can tell when they agree with my premise that it is unacceptable to stand back while so many wild animals are threatened with extinction. When I stay in my lane and discuss the way pollution hurts every animal from honeybees to coho salmon, they cheer. When I say that we need to stop cutting old growth forests to protect critically endangered species, they applaud. When I say we need to better fund wildlife law enforcement they take out their checkbooks. When I say we need to protect rivers and riparian habitats by getting rid of dams and the notion that they were ever beneficial, I still have most of them with me. But when I say that truly protecting wildlife requires taking a hard look at the issue of overpopulation and the way population growth is undermining the best of these efforts, furrowed brows appear on their newly timid faces.
I can string them a long a bit longer by discussing how promoting small families is a worthwhile pursuit. But when I dive deeper into the main reason we are growing in the US and other developed countries, they start to squirm and even leave the room. When I tell them the unfiltered truth about the huge numbers of people currently streaming into our country, many who do so without invitation or permission, their minds shut down as they jump to possible solutions while questioning my ethics. Some even employ the most cowardly position and cancel me before even hearing me out. In our current climate of cancel-culture, it doesn’t matter how many wars you’ve protested or how many injustices you’ve stood up for, if you are going to even say the word’ immigration’ in your talk you will be canceled. That is what happened to me, and my scheduled talk called “Legally Extinct”, at the International Wolf Symposium in 2022. It was not only an act in defiance of the First Amendment it was harmful to the future of wolves.
Limits to our country’s resources are already stretched beyond recognition, yet the topic of allowing more people into our borders has become forbidden territory for most NGO’s, academic, and journalistic circles. It seems pretty rudimentary that adding more people will only exacerbate our problems. Increasing our demands for limited resources, cannot be solved with conservation measures. But no matter how many facts we can throw at this issue, the discussions are shut down when the possible solutions appear to be worse than the problem. I assure you they are not.
Here’s a compelling fact. “America lost 17,800 square miles of open space — an area the size of New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware combined — to urban sprawl between 2002 and 2017,” according to an environmental impact study co-authored by Leon Kolankiewicz. (Boston Herald, April 2022). Sprawl, he found out, is a direct result of population growth and our population is mostly growing by mass immigration, not our fertility rates. Kolankiewicz further states that,” about 1 million legal immigrants and 2 million illegal ones last year alone — is driving our population growth, which in turn is destroying our open spaces.”
It's high time to refocus of our country’s narrative if we want to do more than appear like we care about people and want to save wildlife. It’s high time to prioritize those whose lives are diminished when more come in seeking our limited resources. It’s high time to consider the wildlife who must give up their homes in the name of trying to house millions of newcomers.
It’s more than high time to consider what ignoring mass immigration is doing to a country which has grown exponentially since the poem by Emma Lazarus defined our responsibilities to the needy of the world. In 1883, this poet penned the words which were added to the base of our iconic Statue of Liberty. As Jerry Kammer said in his book, "Losing Control" (2020), her poem made so much more sense back when we had just over 50 million people counted in our census. Now that we are bursting at the seams with over 336,000,000, these words need to be viewed as outdated and undermining the very essence of democracy and our ability to protect wildlife.
Her words, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” made so much more sense when much of America was undeveloped and climate change wasn’t as much of a threat.
Roy Beck makes a remarkable case that the historical waves of immigration have hurt African American descendants of slaves as they were and are overlooked for jobs. ( Back of the Hiring Line A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, and Depression of Black Wealth 2021) The rock solid evidence provided in his book begs the question, what about justice for those who have been here and oppressed for hundreds of years?
We are creating our own problems by having a schizophrenic relationship with the environment. How is the Florida panther supposed to hang on when that state’s population has been allowed to double in 30 years? We can’t keep driving around in our electric vehicles with our “coexist “bumper stickers on them, with our organic produce-filled cloth bags and think that we are doing much to rectify the devastating impact of living in a country which is deep into overshoot. I offer up as evidence that there are now 1092 species on the US Fish and Wildlife’s endangered species list, and according to Audubon more than half of our bird species are in decline. We have to do more.
At some point we have to see the negative impact that continuing to turn the other cheek on massive immigration undermines everything we hold dear. We have to open our eyes to stopping the numerical madness and see that it is an act of compassion to do so. We may be suffering from living at a time of one of the most ecologically illiterate generations ever to populate our country. Many have also been coached to feel guilty for our relative privilege. This is a horrible reason for looking the other way while millions flood our borders with demands for a broken system to serve them. There are solutions which will allow us to not only hold on to our humanitarian ideals but to be proud that we stood up for Americans and wildlife at the same time.
E-Verify, was established in 1996. This web-based system authorized by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, allows employers electronically confirm the employment eligibility of their employees. We can also pass laws to change the numbers of legal immigrants allowed in our country and better enforce limits to visa permits. These are solutions which will prevent extreme traffic increases, deter worker exploitation, reduce carbon emissions, and improve our ability to help those already without housing and jobs. Last time I checked, all of these are all important American values touted by those who claim to care about justice.
Emma Lazarus, was a poet and a Sephardic Jewish woman of Portuguese descent who may not have minded that this Ashkenazi Jewish woman of Russian descent wishes to amend her poem, for the betterment of the United States.
“In order to preserve the intent of this great nation to care for the masses no longer wishing to be huddled, or tired or poor, who wish to live in this great land with room to roam free, with unpolluted landscapes and a future of plenty, we need to be reminded that its resources are not unlimited and its doors must not be open forever in recognition of what too many will do to our liberty.”
With laws already on the books and leaders who are brave enough to help us recalibrate our mission to one of protection of our draining resources and those already here, we will be able to truly say we are putting our best efforts toward justice for all.