The Moral Imperative of Being An Overpopulation Activist

In his book, “The Moral Arc:  How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom(2015),” Michael Shermer makes a well-supported argument for how the secular world has done more good for the world than the world of religion. He believes that, “The scientific revolution led to the Age of Reason and to the Enlightenment and that changed everything.” He further states that,”…these changes reversed our species historical trend downward and that we can do more to elevate humanity, extend the arc and bend it forever upward.”

Not so fast, I say to the founder of the Skeptic society, I am skeptical. The moral arc of humanity cannot continue to go upward when the trend of the human population arc is also going upward.

As a science writer, Shermer knows the earth is a limited place and that humans are at a trophic level that is meant to be inhabited by a very limited number of individuals. As our numbers continue to climb in a hockey stick -like upward curve, our resources decline, our density increases and along with it an increase in scarcity. This is hardly a situation where our collective morality will be incubated well.

Morality which includes an equal treatment under just laws, equal job opportunity, equal access to healthy food, etc, are all threatened by the far-reaching tentacles of overpopulation. Simply put, when demand exceeds supply there is an immoral scramble for getting one’s fair share.

Why are water wars a concern in the not too distant future? Because humanity has done a most superb job using up the fresh water supply faster than it can renew due to our ever-growing numbers. As our population grows so does how much water we consume for us, our livestock, manufacturing and transportation.

I am a fan of Shermer and his work in the field of skepticism and secularism. He refers to many examples of how science has contributed to an improvement in our morality. But science is not benign, it has contributed to both sides of the overpopulation predicament. It has contributed both to increasing our numbers and the increasingly scary ways in which we die. Science has increased our longevity with medical procedures and drugs and also made birth control available. Science has made the nuclear war possible and created carcinogenic chemicals and created a whole scientific field around solving infertility. At the end of the day the birth side has won, putting unrelenting pressure on the biosphere as we continue to add over 1 million in less than a week on the planet.

I am not naïve enough to think that the world would be instantly more moral if our numbers were suddenly in line with the finite supply of our minerals, energy, water and soil. Furthermore, I know that in immoral hands, a doctrine with overpopulation as its main storyline would be disastrous.

What I am saying is that overpopulation itself is a roadblock to any kind of moral progress. Extending the moral arc of humanity, no matter how secular and scientific we become, is impossible in a world of nearly 8 billion growing by 80+ million a year.

Each country has a moral obligation to its citizens and resources to assess its own limits. Science and reason must be used to determine what the ecosystem can sustainably afford to offer each person. The scientists at the global footprint network,

( www.globalfootprintnetwork.org) have already done the homework for us, and it doesn’t look good for the moral arc. I am making the argument that the moral arc will continue go down, and even crash as the population of our country and the world goes up.

If you accept my premise that scarcity, brought on by too much demand on a limited planet, is a petri dish for disorder and immorality, then opposing growth is our collective moral duty. My colleagues and I come from a place of wanting to prevent chaos and helping the biosphere. We have taken on the ever more treacherous mantle of screaming about overpopulation because we see the big picture. I have asked people why they work on this issue and they all say basically the same thing, they want to save the biosphere that supports us and the wildlife and open spaces they love.

 As “8 Billion Angel” filmmaker and overpopulation activist Terry Spahr says,

“Global warming, food and water shortages, catastrophic storms, extinction of species, plant and animal habitat loss…. The list of environmental, social and economic catastrophes affecting our planet with greater frequency and severity goes on and on. If there was a simple root cause and a fundamental solution, wouldn’t you want to know?” The answer he goes on to say, is unsustainable human population.

I would add that if you are dedicated to stopping those catastrophes, that you exhibit some pretty hefty moral chops. 

Indeed, overpopulation activists are the ones holding on to the reins of morality and justice. The world that Shermer discusses can certainly benefit from more rational thought, but that must include thought and work on overpopulation.

Unless we start see working on this critically important issue as a moral imperative, then morality itself will be rendered irrelevant, for it will be flattened by the thundering feet of billions of desperate people.

Salt in the Wound: Why Thinking Bigger about US Population Growth is Con

It seems that we have three general responses for the deep wounds which need to be healed in our country: 1) find a politically acceptable band aid which won’t fix the problem long term but makes those involved look good 2) Find a suitable cure involving the proper gauze/tourniquet in the way of public policy or whatever is truly required to begin the long-term healing and 3) con-artists who rub salt in the wounds and make them worse while claiming that this snake oil will bring a quick reliable fix.

The latest in the line of rubbing salt in the wound is gobsmacking in its premise. In the US where we are already destroying rivers, draining aquifers, killing off our remaining wildlife and shortening our lives while stuck ever denser housing and freeway construction, there is an excruciatingly horrid proposal on the table to accelerate population growth.

Apparently, author Matt Yglesias has never been stuck in gridlock on an LA freeway, or had to drink the water from a tap in Flint Michigan. He has never seen tents and cardboard boxes of our country’s over 550,000 homeless or seen the news showing how the US is suffering from the effects of climate change with larger, more powerful floods and devastating wildfires. He must be sociologically tone deaf about the millions who have lost their jobs due to automation, the shipping of jobs overseas, all exacerbated by the current pandemic. Against this backdrop of overpopulation-driven pain and suffering, he wants to welcome hundreds of millions more American consumers. According to his upcoming book, I am loathe to mention, he thinks we should think bigger and welcome more population growth until we reach 1 billion Americans -- jobs, wildlife, open space, fresh water, clean air and traffic be damned.

I am hoping he is secretly doing this to start a conversation about a truly sustainable population for the US, which the scientifically sane calculate to be about a third to half of our current 330 million. That could indeed have positive results, but right now it just feels like he is enjoying finding a niche to exploit by rubbing salt in the wound of our over-consuming, overpopulated country. 

There is great risk that he will be successful in making this salty con stick to the public discourse so averse to paying any real attention to the whole idea of sustainable US numbers. Based on an older salt- in-the-wound idea, I still hear people say that we could fit the world’s population into the state of Texas as if that has any ecological relevance. I could fit 1,000 rats in my cupboard, but they would be dead by the time the sun rose the next day.

Due to intellectual laziness, lack of ecological education, and a paucity of those predisposed to critical thinking, we have a population full of people who can be susceptible to con-artists, even when their ideas are ridiculous. Thankfully there is already a great deal of pushback on Yglesias’s preposterous pro-growth proposals, consider this one more.

 

If Trees Could Vote

I want to send a bill to Washington  

That will allow trees to vote

And birds to cast their ballots

The fine print will allow bees

their choice for insect justice;

a world with enough poison-free flowers.

Let the wild rivers splash

and the clouds rain down on the proper box to check

So they too can live uninterrupted lives

While the wild and not so free four-leggeds

Head to their voting booths

To scratch in their favorite choice

For a leader who will take into consideration

Their rights for a change.

Everyday is Overshoot Day

My informal survey of friends revealed that few have heard of Earth Overshoot Day.

 I explain it this way: It’s a calculation.. It’s basically what the earth can produce in terms of bio-capacity minus what we consume. According to the smart folks at Global Footprint Network, “Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth can renew during the entire year. Humanity currently uses 60% more than what can be renewed – or as much as if we lived on 1.6 planet. From Earth Overshoot Day until the end of the year, humanity grows the ecological deficit which has been increasing steadily since the world fell in ecological overshoot in the early 1970s..”

 This day is designed to shed a light on how we are taking more from the Earth in the course of a year than it can produce. Kudos to GFN for trying yet another creative way to innovate a much needed soapbox from which to pontificate that indeed the well is running dry. Earth Overshoot Day has a bit of good news to report, commemorated on August 22 in 2020, it is three weeks later than 2019, due to the economic slowdown caused by the corona virus pandemic.  However, we are still running way too short due to both our overpopulation and its evil twin; overconsumption.

 The problem is that Earth Overshoot Day is a model and essentially an abstraction as most models are. On the surface it seems like we are better off at the beginning of the calendar year than we are on some pre-determined date, when really every day is overshoot day and has been for a very long time. The earth’s cycles do not follow some human determined schedule. Its cycles are mostly very slow moving and over billions of years has stored much of what it has produced in the form of minerals, soil and fresh water.

 Humans were defined by the author Daniel Quinn Ishmael series as either Takers or Leavers. The leavers were the hunter gatherers who left something for the future generations and the takers do just that, they just keep taking and taking from the earth. I think that all humans are essentially takers, not because we are intrinsically evil, but because that is our niche in the food web. Long before elitists were promoting neo-capitalism during their martini-laced power lunches, humans were altering the earth with slash and burn agriculture. Centuries before industrialization darkened the skies and polluted our lakes and rivers, we were pushing some of the greatest species ever to evolve into the abyss of extinction. The Dodo bird’s extinction happened before the first plastics arrived on the scene, it succumbed to the way human livestock overtook their habitats. The passenger pigeon which once darkened the skies in its migration was last on anyone’s menu in the early part of the 20th century due to overhunting.

 Humans must rely on the plants to photosynthesize as producers, and the first and second level consumers of plants make up the protein we then consume for our nourishment. Some of us can rely on mostly plants to produce our food but in no way does this mean that we can pardon ourselves from our position as takers of the planet. We are a needy bunch, from our perch as an apex predator, and our needs have now been exponentially exacerbated by an incredible increase in the production of highly processed products which are both toxic and carbon producing in their production and problematic in their disposal.

Every week or so, I take an informal survey of the products I own and use. I ask myself which of them was made or shipped to me without the use of fossil fuels? I also ask myself what is their ultimate destiny?  From the dental floss in our bathroom, to my framed photographs on our walls, from the bananas on our counter to the hairbrush on my nightstand, the answers are always the same. Everything I buy, own and use, no matter if it was bought used or not, came from the earth and will go back to the earth. In between carbon gases were burned in their production and transportation and trapped in the atmosphere. The greenhouse gas effects, which are now altering weather patterns, and with it altering our ability to grow food, come from all of these not-so-innocent products. Landfills are multi-colored with non-biodegradable plastics, wires, batteries and other leftovers from our infamously throw-away society. Early hunter gatherers may have altered landscapes, but they left mostly bones behind.

 We modern humans have become the most egregious takers for we leave behind products that the earth has no idea how to accommodate, while carving up our biosphere in the pursuit of our insatiable appetites for more. Even if we were to wake up and stop the merry go round of ridiculous consumption, for which there are too many examples to mention, our numbers would have to calm down too, to an extraordinary degree.

 So why is everyday overshoot day? Why should the word overshoot be on our lips and in our public discourse and in our news coverage? Because we are on a highway to hell, paved with the actions of limitless demands of a planet with limited capacity. Because at populations which have grown by millions in the ever-consuming US and billions in the world, we have been too successful and nature always punishes the animals who step out of their ecological boundaries.

 We need to put on the brakes, (reduce our population in every country especially those with ‘guilty ‘on their consumption scorecards) wear a seatbelt ( stop our love affair with economic growth) and have airbags installed (learn and value the way we depend on healthy ecosystems ) in a mission to reverse the trajectory of crashing into the earth’s limit to support a specie that is busy creating its own epitaph: Here lies a specie smart enough to know it was headed off a cliff, but not wise enough to turn itself around.

                                             

Time for some ethical critical thinking by Karen I. Shragg

 The “politically correct” or PC world came knocking on my door in the late 90’s when I was getting my doctorate in critical pedagogy. Our multi-cultural co-hort full of smart and interesting people, ascribed to the notion that searching for language that would not offend was one of our critical goals. In my opinion they  spent way too much time trying to figure out which group had experienced the most marginalization, instead of focusing on how to go about eliminating discrimination. One day I specifically remember that I whispered under my breath that I was disappointed that my classmate, just called on, was going to take a long time answering a question. My motivation? It was 1 pm, I was hungry. I just wanted them to hold their question till after the break. I was called out for being a racist by a white co-hort member who was trying very hard to be the most PC in the class.

The focus on political correctness has only made us less resilient problem solvers, for every story has both a small and larger focus. Every story has a history and will only have a better future if it is grappled with in the context of ethical improvement for the short and long term.

When the politically correct police silence people, they get a temporary feeling of euphoria that they have accomplished something. But it is a destructive act. They have only taken a broad judgmental brush and canceled what they determine is a ‘bad’ opinion. Making people afraid to speak their minds is not only undemocratic and even fascist, it does nothing to improve the issue at hand. It has only gotten worse in the 18 years since they put a Dr. before my name. It is now CC or cancel culture and is reminiscent of the “love it or leave it” chants of the sixties. I am learning a hard lesson. The “left” can be equally obstinate and steadfast that they own the only truth on the block. Shutting out other voices, they know to be sincere, is hurting their own cause. 

Instead I would like to offer a different approach and perhaps to coin a new word: “E.C.T.” stands for Ethical Critical Thinker. We need to rid ourselves of the PC world and adopt an E.C.T approach. First, we have to be ethical which means we have to have the goal of improving the world in a way that causes the least harm.  The second is that we must consider all aspects of a problem in both the short and long term. We must realize that we rarely get a perfect choice, just a better one. To the best of our ability and with the latest scientific information, we need to consider the long-term consequences of our actions for us and our rapidly deteriorating biosphere.

To be PC is like painting a rotting house with a fresh coat of paint. It temporarily may look better, but it still rots from within. If you are E.C.T. you do not rush to judge. You try to listen to everyone’s story. You ask critical questions and look out for impacts to those other than yourself and your species. An E.C.T.person also realizes that the personal and global goals can be diametrically opposed to one another at the same time and that dynamic needs a deep dive if it is ever going to resolved.

An E.C.T. person does not think quick fixes for long entrenched problems are ever a good idea. An E.C.T. person also tries to link our problems to false narratives which have to be questioned at their core. An E.C.T. person sees a lot of gray in issues yet also knows when something is intrinsically evil and must be stopped in its tracks. To truly be an ethical critical thinker is to avoid jumping on to the current bandwagon which haven’t fully been vetted.

It seemed like a great idea when Canada geese were brought into a suburban nature center in the 70’s until they did so well, they started flying into airplanes. It seemed that DDT worked well to kill off pests until its residue endangered raptors. We can’t always know the consequences of our actions, but we can try to forecast impacts before they are initiated so we can avoid expensive fixes in the future.

I have been to many ribbon-cutting ceremonies for large corporate developments with smiling officials getting whiplash for patting themselves on the back for a job well done. An E.C.T. person would wonder, what about the traffic that will bring to our area? They would question the further demand on the limited local water supply and the wisdom of the bribery of delayed taxes (TIF financing) that corporations were given, delaying any tax benefit to city coffers. An E.C.T. person would wonder where the wildlife was supposed to live and what kind of energy demand the new structure would make and add to our global emissions. A countering PC person would deny their right to even ask these critical questions, wondering why they want to stop progress and all of its “benefits”.

I may start my overpopulation talks in the future with something like this. “I am an ECT person, and as an Ethical Critical Thinker I am here today to invite you to explore a different way out of many of our problems. The issue I am bringing up has been thrown under the bus so many times by the PC police that it has deep tire treads all over it making it taboo for all but the most determined activists. But I would like to ask rhetorically, how is that working for us? Hopefully you too want to be open to a broader context of why we cannot seem to get ahead on environmental issues.  If you can join me using this E.C.T. approach, perhaps we can get there together.  That is what I want to say to the loud critics of the profound film Planet of the Humans. Filmmaker Jeff Gibbs has a perspective that is worth discussing in an open and non-judgmental way. His film is an invitation to rethink our assumptions, which is what all movements and cutting-edge films are trying to do. An E.C.T. person listens and asks questions, they do not accept any idea at first blush, nor do they cancel it in an act of pure cowardice.

An E.C.T. person knows how to prioritize their time and efforts. They know that debating the kind of sunscreen used by passengers on the boat deck is not as important as the fact that the boat has a hole in it.  They know that it is not time to fuss over a clogged drain spout when smoke is pouring out the windows. They weigh all possible outcomes and are not trigger happy with their responses. Do protests work? There is a long history that they do. The anti-war protests of the sixties certainly helped to end the Vietnam war. But are even the most well justified protests likely to be putting our overall health and the livelihoods of so many in jeopardy in the midst of a pandemic? An E.C.T. is not afraid to answer, YES and wait to see if the data confirmed that notion.

Name the touchiest of subjects and you will see it has been ruined by the PC police. Not only do they claim to be offended but dig even deeper and they may have something to lose economically if something new comes to light. Name-calling ensues just by trying to have an upstream discussion. When looking at the US through the lens of sustainability, on all kinds of measurements it is clear we are in overshoot. Although still operating under the mantra represented by the poem on the plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, we are running out of water, open space, forest and wild habitats for the animals that need them. Life is becoming less fun and more dangerous in our overcrowded cities whose answer to growth addiction is either sprawl or high rises. Magnificent animals from the Florida panther to the mountain lion are endangered with extinction due to human overpopulation and our continued growth. But try to have an upstream E.C.T. discussion about population growth, overpopulation and its primary driver, legal immigration, and watch the accusations start to fly.  An E.C.T person who wanted to have a discussion about carrying capacity on our landscapes frequently ends up discussing the value of immigrants to this country’s history. E.C.T.’s do not conflate unrelated issues, only PC people do.                                                                                            

There is one more thing that E.C.T.’s believe: you focus on the message, debate its merits and do not waste everyone’s time by focusing your critique on hating the messenger, unless that messenger has provable ill intent. Propagandists can certainly be scorned for both their message and intent, but someone making a heartfelt film or writing a book rarely deserve the often-heard cries of the morally offended. It’s time to start a new and more helpful era where we can build new bridges of understanding rather than spend all of our energies bashing each other just for having a different perspective.

 

Don't Start the Revolution Without Me- A Review of Planet of the Humans

Michael Moore is great at starting revolutions and I have been a fan of each and every one of his films. I remember meeting him and witnessing his passion for doing the right thing at a showing of his film, Bowling for Columbine in St.Paul years ago. Greedy multinational corporations are not put on trial enough for the pain they leave in their wake. The crime of illegal wars, institutional racism and classism and are never deeply examined enough and admirably Moore is consistently up for the task. 

I patiently waited while he ever so skillfully he went after General Motors, the Health Care System, the Gun Lobby and more. Sometimes I wasn’t so patient. While I was completely with him in his attack on everything from the NRA to Wall street greed, I was waiting for a film that deeply questioned why we were still heading for the cliff of collapse even though we had 50 years of Earth days under our belt.

Well here it is, Planet of the Humans, a film detonating business as usual, because to keep on doing the same thing while getting zero results is the definition of insanity. Moore lent his moxie to a film by Jeff Gibbs who dared to question the fundamental ways in which we are dealing with our predicament on the planet. Any objective view of our state of the world would reveal that we are in more trouble than ever. Carbon parts per million is going up, human numbers keep skyrocketing, endangered species keep getting added to the list and in the race to cover the landscape of the planet, forests are losing out to deserts. More than that, monied interests keep controlling the modern human narrative with their advocates deeply in their pockets. The green illusions have to be a part of that story and with Ozzie Zehner’s help we can now see why green has not lived up to its promises.

 Those of us who have been in the trenches fighting for the deep attention the earth really need to be grateful for this revolutionary film. We cannot shoot the messengers even though there is an embarrassing litany of doing so throughout history. Those benefiting from the current way of doing things will always protest, but they cannot get in our way of listening.

 Galileo died under house arrest for suggesting what his telescope revealed. Gibbs has crafted a telescope of sorts to peer into the way energy is delivered to us under false pretenses and some are upset, offended and even call for a violation of his first amendment rights. They refuse to look through his lens, because they are intellectually married to their savior, renewable energy. Ignaz Semmelweis was a doctor who discovered in the 1800’s that if surgeons washed their hands, patients wouldn’t die of infection. He had double blind studies and documentation that he was right. No one believed him at the time and he himself died in his 40’s of an infection himself. The vitriol directed at POTH unfortunately reveals that the tendency to ignore science and evidence is still with us today and hurting us more than ever.

I have long believed that the worst thing we could do is to come up with some magical form of energy to power our destructive ways. If the world of industrial development ever discovers an unlimited and easily harnessed, carbon-free energy source we are all doomed. We do not need a world of bulldozers powered by magical energy, we need less bulldozing. We need less of everything we have been doing.  We are deep into what I like to call the GHG.. the Great Human Gobbling and Gibbs and Zehner have given their life’s blood into waking us up. The fact that POTH uncovers the lies behind our hopes for green energy’s ability to save us from ourselves is just the beginning of the story that needs to be told

 It’s like many people have been riding on a high-speed electric train riding along and enjoying the view, eating their vegetarian organic meals in the dining car when they are told to stop the train. They liked the ride and thought they were on the right train, after all its electric and they are eating the most planet conscious diet.  POTH is the first awakening in a long time to say that the ride may seem to be sustainable but you are still headed for a cliff. We need to be thankful for the warning.

 I have been a lifelong environmentalist and overpopulation activist. For a long time, I knew our house was on fire. I could see the billowing smoke in our numbers alone. But I was told I couldn’t call the fire department, I would be an alarmist even though I knew reckless pro-growth policies would never allow efforts to practice conservation and green up the earth to work.

POTH didn’t just call the fire department, it called a global 911 and I for one am eternally grateful. While some are still wondering why it was necessary and still others have been shocked back into denial, I have other concerns. What concerns me is not that they have revealed that the emperor of green energy has no clothes but how our new and very much needed environmental movement might still miss the mark. If the millions who have seen POTH are shocked and dismayed by the delusions of green energy just wait til they hear how overpopulation and its evil twin overconsumption, have been thrown under the politically correct bus. Even more disturbing will be the revelation that the environmental establishment has been in the driver’s seat not willing to address the implications of the 5.5 billion people we have added to our limited planet in the last century.

 There have been plenty of us lesser known writers, filmmakers, and activists waiting in the wings for a new batch of environmental recruits. We are willing and able to take on the challenge of steering our train away from the cliff, but will our messages get heard or be drowned out by the next batch of snakeoil salesmen? We are here ready to grab this opportunity with even more truths to reveal.

 Will these newly awakened environmentally concerned get to hear that we have to start de-growing our world one country at a time using the most effective and humane means possible? Will they understand the implications of overshooting our resources locally and globally by both our numbers and habits? Can they embrace the fact that the first method available to us is to redo our immigration, tax and labor laws to stop our trajectory toward our ever-climbing numbers? I hope so. I am concerned that once again our much needed revolution will get off track. So many revolutions start out with great ideas and get derailed by those more interested in profit and power than in truly making a difference.

The full story of the Great Human Gobbling of the only planet in our solar system able to sustain life has begun to be told by POTH. It is just the beginning. Put on your seatbelt -- we are in for a ride and we must we must stay awake. No more falling asleep at the wheel to the soothing voices of those with promises in one pocket and dollars in the other.

Elms R US

Elms R Us by Karen I. Shragg

 

My city used to be covered with mature elm trees planted closely together. They formed arches over streets in a beautiful configuration that added value to neighborhoods. But then came the bark beetle. Because the trees were planted close together these fungus-carrying beetles had a hay day and soon the trees were dead and had to be removed. The solution was to decrease their density, at least 60 to 70 feet apart, and to plant diverse species with them because usually diseases like this are species specific.

So why are we like Elms? We are being densely planted in cities which welcome growth like it isn’t a recipe for disaster.  We are learning with Covid 19 as our teacher, that our proximity is one risk factor for spreading the disease.  When given the command to keep six feet away from others I wonder how one does that in a world where we have been cramming people into places for decades? Just the word mass transit used to be synonymous with being green, now we think of them as Petri dishes for disease.

Our whole world is turning upside down. We are living in the most ironic times but it is also an opportunity to rethink how we warehouse people believing that density is a problem solver of growth. How strange that spacious offices are sending people home to crowded apartment buildings in order to get away from people.

Experts tell us that pandemics are going to be with us even if we get this one under control. Humans are ripe for them because we have been tempting viruses with our addiction to growth and our total disregard for the way our density disrupts the natural world. We are so afraid of seeing what ultimately threatens our health with our required proximity and it is simply that we live in an overpopulated world.

Yes overpopulation, specifically the 5.5 billion we have added in less than a century and the density it requires, must become the focus of our discussions as a cure for what ails us.  A short perusal of the literature will demonstrate its role in the spread of viruses. Canceling the discussion under some politically correct delusion is just another way to throw a monkey wrench into potential solutions to this economic and public health disaster.  Besides this is global pandemic and pointing fingers between developed and underdeveloped countries is no longer relevant. We all need to reign in our populations by humane means or yes the virus and the ones yet to come will do it for us in ways that are too ugly to mention. 

An ancient remedy for sore throats can be found in slippery elm bark, but perhaps this tree’s greatest contribution to humankind is its lesson on the need to recognize the chaos we create when we disrespect the way nature requires that we be sparsely planted  on our limited planet. 

BYE THE NUMBERS

This February marked what would have been have been my grandfather’s 125th birthday. We called my father’s dad, Zadie. He was born in Russia near Kletsk in 1895. An unwilling Jewish soldier in Tsar Nicolas’s army, he and most of his siblings sought a better life in the US. Not all made it here, which is why to this day I have cousins in Argentina. Yes, I am a proud granddaughter of an immigrant. But he and his relatives came here in the 1920’s, back when the US had a population of around 110,000,000 and the world’s population was just under 2 billion. US immigration was limited in those days for a lot of reasons that most would not be proud of today. Anti-Semitism and a general xenophobia informed much of our policy and kept legal immigration to a more ecologically sane number, approximately 150,000. 

This century, the persecuted around the globe have increased. Their desperation runs deeper and their numbers climb higher. This is due to many factors, including global overpopulation, climate change pressures, the hangovers of colonialism and the ravages of the US military industrial complex which have kept developing countries in poverty. No one blames refugees for trying to get to a country of apparent riches. I am certainly glad my relatives were able to get in. I have unconditional empathy for those seeking entrance to a country, which promises a better life, even though our racism and xenophobia roots have not disappeared.

The trouble is that due exponential growth, medical advances and a huge increase in legal immigration limits over the years, the US has nearly tripled to an unsustainable 327,000,000.  So has immigration policy stayed low to compensate for the higher population? No it has not.  At about 1.1 million, legal immigration has grown about 6-fold. To be blunt that is half-assed backwards. Our dominant story has followed the poem on the statue of liberty without any regard to the physical, ecological limits that are built into every country’s landscape, including our own. Over a million new drivers, job seekers, and consumers of limited water supplies are now added each year because we feel it is our moral duty to absorb those in need. Our public discourse has shunned all conversation about bringing sanity back into our immigration policies. We need to stress that we also have a moral duty to preserve our fragile ecosystems. Officials in both political parties need to show some courage, integrity and encourage this much needed conversation.

All who care about this country and its environment should join in a chorus of reducing the number of legal immigration back to the days when my grandfather arrived in a ship to Boston harbor. Policies need to reflect the needs for preservation of habitat for wildlife and to protect our local natural resources. We behave as if we expect to avoid congestion, large carbon footprints, water shortages, increases in solid waste and air pollution while adding over 1 million new consumers into our country.  If we continue with current immigration policies we can expect an additional 75 million Americans by 2060.  According to Global Footprint Network, we passed our sustainable number at 150 million. Overshoot is here and eating away at our promises. If clean and available water, open space, less traffic congestion and lower carbon footprints are truly valued, we must look to all sources of population growth and address them. Fertility rates and immigration are both causes of US overpopulation. As such they must both become a part of a civil discussion about how we address our problems at their source.

My Zadie knew how lucky he was to make it to America and worked hard all his life to make better opportunities for his family. He made me respect the challenges all immigrants face and the way they must learn to fit into a prejudiced society. I just wish I had the wherewithal to tell him, years ago, how much I appreciate the sacrifices he made so that my siblings, cousins and I could grow up in the US. I also wish people realized that my Zadie and his peers lived during a time when we had a population we could have sustained. It is in our best interest to convince Americans and our leaders that we have long said goodbye to a number the environment in the US can handle.