Orange Cone Headaches

Orange Cone Headaches:

Why Construction Will Never End in Our Overpopulated and Growing Country.

By Karen I. Shragg

Key Phrases:  Overpopulation, perpetual growth, never-ending construction, detours, congestion, traffic.

 Everyone cringes when they see the signs that litter our roads and cities with the phrase,“ Construction Zone.” It means delays, and possible damage to one’s vehicle. If you are like most Americans, you live in a city and can go no further than a few miles before you are confronted with orange cones, warning of yet another road “improvement “project. While infrastructure repair is always a necessity, these endless construction headaches, which never seem to reach a completed stage, is symptomatic of something deeper; a fruitless scrambling to accommodate our growing numbers. More people means more cement. More cement means more traffic, more pollution, and higher demands on our resources. We build out and we build up with total disregard for the impact on our quality of life, the ability of wildlife to survive or on our ground water and surface water to keep up.

 Cities throughout the US are being strangled with construction because city managers are encouraged by their councils to keep welcoming developers into their once livable neighborhoods. They still believe in the antiquated narrative that growth equals progress, when the opposite is true. We live and will continue to live in construction zones as long as we think in this outdated way. More and more people fuel the now common vistas of large cranes and bulldozers that are an integral part of every growing metropolitan city in America.

 The Worn Out lies of Perpetual Road Construction

 Each time a road is to be widened; taxpayers are promised an ever-eluding freedom that they will find on the roads when the project is completed. City councilmen and women may believe their transportation engineers when they show up with all of their fancy graphs and charts. With fuzzy math they demonstrate how bottlenecks of traffic will be resolved. I am not sure how they do it with a straight face because their ability to fulfill their promises is impossible. Population growth overwhelms the ability of the best transportation projects to resolve traffic issues. This leaves us all with traffic headaches, huge price tags and no congestion relief in sight.

 It costs approximately 4 million dollars per mile to go from 4 to 6 lanes of highways https://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road/. Taxpayers pay the bill, the air quality goes down, traffic congestion worsens and due to population growth, the problem it is designed to solve, is never resolved.

 Departments of Transportation across the country have permanent pages on their websites indicating where commuters and travelers will be inconvenienced by detours due to road construction.(http://www.dot.state.mn.us/roadwork/index.html#gsc.tab=0)

Every city, large or small begins and ends every day with a traffic report on their local news stations, and they all have a traffic information section on their websites. We just accept that traffic is a part of our lives and do our best to avoid peak times. Accidents are more likely in construction zones and can also be found daily on local news’ websites.

 It really is a problem a school child could understand. Road construction takes time. If a city’s population is growing during that time, then by the time the project is completed, there will be more cars on the road and the congestion will not be relieved. Road construction woes are particularly frustrating in the southwest where population is growing the fastest. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2020/demo/fastest-growing-cities-2010-2019.html

 But in the Midwest, it’s the same story. My own hometown, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, has a highway called Crosstown or Minnesota Hwy 62. It was clogged with traffic and slated for improvements. It took four years of orange cone headaches to finish the project. By the time the highway project was completed the traffic was worse. Promises of traffic relief were never experienced.

 Well no wonder. That project was completed in 2010. According to a governor appointed group called the Metropolitan council, the metro population of the Twin Cities grew by 9.3% between 2010 and 2018. Percentages can be misleading, however, so in real numbers the Twin Cities, grew by 264,468 people, from 2,849,567 to 3,114,035.

( https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-lifestyle/population-estimates-reveal-fastest-growing-parts-of-twin-cities#:~:text=New%20population%20estimates%20reveal%20that,compared%20to%202%2C849%2C567%20in%202010),

 So, what happens in a city with limited mass transit choices? By the thousands, these new residents get in their cars and erase the promises of highway improvements. This story of population growth in my hometown is not unique. It reflects the growth in the rest of country and the world. It is this growth which is exacerbating all issues regarding the ability to keep up with the construction of infrastructure.

Cost overruns and delays due to weather events are incredibly common in road construction projects and yet they are readily accepted as business as usual. This whole merry go round of building roads to accommodate growth is failing us yet the whole scam remains virtually unchallenged by citizens and politicians who accept these failures as a part of what they still call progress.

 Density is the Wrong Medicine for Growth

 Progress is supposed to make things better. High rise developers make promises to cities that their project will be a key to a better future for all. Cities in turn offer TIF (tax increment financing) which subsidizes developers by diverting a part of their taxes to be paid at some future date, as much as 25 years away! There is no full cost accounting of such developments. The projects are really meant to line the pockets of developers and the city fathers and mothers who get to smile for photo-ops at ribbon cutting ceremonies, perpetuating the myth of how they are helping to increase their city’s vitality. What they don’t account for is the increase in density which creates more traffic, more crime, and a general malaise of anonymity as people find it more difficult to connect to community. Covid 19 is revealing another downside to density, the increased possibility in the spreading of contagions. High rises block our ability to see a sun rise or enjoy a sunset. They light up the night sky with light pollution, destroying the chance to see the stars. Hundreds of units per high rise apartment building put a concentrated demand on water for showers, cooking and laundry all in one unsustainable place.

 All of these developments require both fossil fuel and raw materials. The earth is a limited place, and developers treat these materials as if they had some magic wand that will keep them bubbling up from the ground forever.

 It seems that sand would be something we could never run out of, but due to our insatiable demand for glass and concrete, fueled by our ever-growing population, it too is not able to meet construction demand. Marine sand is too full of salt and desert sand has crystals which have been rounded by wind, making it poor for making concrete, therefore all sand used in the making of glass and concrete construction must be mined.

“Sand and gravel represent the highest volume of raw material used on earth after water. Their use greatly exceeds their natural renewal rates” (UNEP, 2014).

 These developers and their posse of growth worshippers, pretend that in the process of shipping materials and the construction of those materials, that they are not guilty of being contributors to the release of climate-altering gases.

 To break the cycle of growth we must first accept the limits of the earth’s resources and the way that development pollutes the life-giving biosphere on which we all depend. This is particularly true in the developed world which is hooked on growth much like a drug user is hooked on their chosen way of feeling good in the moment. The benefits of growth, like illicit drugs, are temporary and always end up creating more damage at the end of the day.

 Fueling all of the ubiquitous construction in cities across America is overpopulation. Ask the average person what the current population and growth rates of their own city, state or country and few will greet you with confident answers. They may know the current world population, but rarely how rapidly we are still growing in spite of pandemics, wildfires and hurricanes.

 The basic numbers we should all have at our fingertips when dismantling the fallacies of promoting growth are these: The world has added over 5.5 billion people in the last century and continues to add over 80 million per year. The US population just hit 330 million in 2020 and is still growing by over one million per year, but passed sustainable numbers at least 150 million people ago, according to Global Footprint Network .

( www.globalfootprintnetwork.org) 

 The reason most Americans do not know these numbers is not because they are difficult to find on the Internet, it is because they are not discussed, or should I say they refused to be discussed by our numerous media outlets of all political stripes and our mainstream environmental groups.

 Monumental death rates will certainly take care of our overpopulation problem, but in ways no one wants to experience. We would need to see unconscionable increases in deaths. It is both lazy and evil to allow nature to take its course. This course is not inevitable, not if we can start seeing the big picture and believing in our power to stop this freight train.

 When one can accept that we are already seriously overpopulated relative to our resources, then growth is to be challenged no matter where it is coming from. The fact that most of our current growth in the US is due to outdated immigration policies fails to be considered due to the story that we are a nation of immigrants, so how can we limit them?

 As economist, professor emeritus Herman Daly stated recently, “Global population growth is of course entirely due to natural increase, and migration would hardly be the problem that it is today if the quadrupling of human numbers within one recent lifetime had not brought the world from two to nearly eight billion people.  However, in the U.S., Western Europe, and Canada, recent population growth is mainly due to net immigration and higher average fertility of immigrants. So, it is hard to evade the increasingly difficult and divisive issue of immigration in discussing the already nearly taboo subject of population policy, especially in “a country of immigrants”. (Daly, 2019 )(https://steadystate.org/a-country-of-immigrants/)

 A Paradigm Shift is Required

 Accommodating growth of industrialized humans and their infrastructure in our neo-capitalist, overpopulated country and world is like putting out a welcome mat for cancer, thinking you can mitigate the worst of it with chemotherapy and radiation. Breaking free from its grip is much easier said than done, but it all begins with changing our worldview. We must breakout of the trap and quit being in lockstep with the mantra of growth. We’ve been led to believe it is our savior, clearly it is just the opposite.

 Thankfully there are activists and NGO’s dedicated to another path. The Overpopulation Project at Overpopulationproject.com lists 37 national and international groups that are dedicated to working on this critical issue. The thing all of these groups have in common is an understanding that we cannot continue to grow our population on a limited planet without disastrous results.

 The leader of each organization must have gone through a period of soul searching to determine where growth was coming from and how best to address it. Was it important to address total fertility rate? Was it critical to address changing our growth based economic system or should they focus on the most common way we grow, our immigration policies? Between them all, they propose everything from the promotion of one-child families, to stricter immigration policies and steady state economics without a need to grow GNP.

 I propose that the full truth is to be found in all of the above. We must honor all of the voices of ‘degrowth’ for this Medusa’s head has many tentacles. Growth as a goal needs to be shunned, We need to start seeing endless orange-coned construction zones as representative of not only short term headaches, but long-term migraines that will only end when we change our story.

The Best an Author Could Hope For

When one writes from one’s hopefully enlightened heart, one never knows how it will be received. I practice a Zen form of writing practice, I write and let it go, rarely wondering if it made a connection with anyone. But life is full of surprises and wonder.

Last year someone not only told me he connected with my book, but that he wanted to purchase hundreds of them and send them out to those people and organizations who should know better than to ignore this key issue. What more could an author want? What more could an activist ask for?

Taking an unpopular but justifiable position is never easy but always required. Having cheerleaders to urge you on and move your work forward is its own reward. My heart is full of gratitude and hopefully the world will be more full of awareness. While none of my books may be even cracked open by those who receive them after a monumental effort, the important story is that I am fairly certain no one has ever had hundreds of their books purchased for the intended purpose of waking up those currently in charge of sending out pleas to save the earth from our actions.

The real story here is twofold:one is the inspiration my book thankfully created, the other is the focus on a massive education effort of those with the power to become a voice for addressing overpopulation. I am not so sure lack of awareness is the problem, but now we can be sure that knowledge of this issue is not the hurdle so many organizations must overcome. Many other socio-political obstacles are in the way, and it will take a combination of fearlessness and realization to follow the lead that my friend Max Kummerow started in motion with the aid of World Population Balance and my beloved publisher, Freethought House Press.

“Move Upstream, A Call to Solve Overpopulation” is on its way to open the door to truly solving the world’s problems, thanks to someone who thought it mattered enough to do the unthinkable, send out hundreds of books to those who should know better.

Karen I. Shragg

Author

Our Cage is Too Crowded

The Aesthetic of Living in an Overpopulated Country

I invoke the reader to help me with a little experiment.

Please watch this video for 3 minutes and take note of how you feel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUN664s7N-c

Then watch this video and do the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg1mpD1BICI&t=16s

Which place makes you feel serene and peaceful? No matter how much of a city dweller you may be, I am hoping the nature videos are more to your liking. The nature depicted in these videos are from places few ever get to experience anymore. In study after study, we find out that we need beauty around us and yet we do everything in our power to make sure it is out of our reach.

Human evolution mostly happened when we were in small hunter gatherer groups. For most of human history, we knew the people in our village and we had open space to roam in without having to take a car, taxi or subway to get there. Death came to us by accidents, tribal enemies and unknown poisons. There was little chance of communal spread of disease and social distancing was the norm in a world of so many less people.

For only the last 100 years of our 200,000-year existence, have we become accustomed to living in skyscraper apartments, tenements and slums. This has been our solution to accommodate the addition of nearly six billion of us in that same time frame. Six billion more of an apex predator with an insatiable appetite for goods and services forces the creation of the aesthetic of an impersonal, often crime ridden cityscape. To bring it closer to home, there were only 108.5 million of us in the US 100 years ago. Now there are now over 331 million of us, many under the delusion that the US is endless. The US now has ten cities with populations over 1 million each. Added together, the populations of our largest cities; New York, Los Angeles and Chicago equal 15 million, more than live in the entire state of Illinois. As we keep answering population growth with more development we need to consider not only the overshoot of our resources but the damage it is doing to our psyche.

Crowding humans on top of one water source is an ecological mistake to be sure, but it is an aesthetic one as well. Two-thirds of us live in the urban environment, with little choice but to continue to live where the jobs are located.

When populations explode the optics change. Given the temporary ability to import food, water and energy and all needed material goods, overcrowding still leads to a noisier and less aesthetic existence. Density creates feelings of anonymity and alienation as well. This affects our society in many negative ways. It may be time to revisit the famous rat experiment which is the reference to the phrase, “There are too many rats in the rat cage.”

Between 1958 and 1962, ethologist John B. Calhoun conducted a series of experiments demonstrating the collapse in behavior when Norway rats multiplied, controlling for food and water. He termed this a “behavioral sink”. It describes the dysfunction as depicted in everything from cannibalism to the rat equivalent of PTSD ( post- traumatic stress disorder) when the living space of these intelligent rodents became too crowded.

We are communal beings, more like honeybees than solitary bees. We need to trust each other and that doesn’t happen when we live with thousands of strangers all needing to look out for themselves. Psychologists tell us that we need to feel socially relevant in our communities. The opposite in happening in our cities today. We are not hard wired to be stuffed into traffic jams in noisy, polluted concentrations of anonymous ever-growing populations because we just can’t say no to growth.

Just like the rats of this famous experiment, we are exhibiting our dysfunction every night on the evening news. Suburbs are no longer the panacea to overcrowded cities they once were. As our country grows over a million a year, mostly due to immigration, suburbs attract the kind of developers itching to cram apartment complexes into any open space they can find. One of the most egregious examples of this happened in a nearby suburb. A grocery store that used to have a 150-year-old oak in its parking lot was slated for development. Though many fought this trajectory, the tree lost the battle. Now one can spent $1,000 a month to live in an apartment overlooking either a parking lot or a freeway. Rest assured they will be full of renters, happy to have found a place to live very soon.

I am not the first one to describe our artificial, overcrowded environments as a cause of many of our troubles. Many including Stanford professor, Paul Ehrlich, referenced the rat experiments in his work. Researchers from Oklahoma State University, John Winters and Yu Li developed a measurement tool which revealed that happiness is reversely associated with living in large metropolitan areas. I am glad people find research dollars to measure these things, but I for one don’t need anymore research. There is plenty of research on the books already. What I need is for people to realize that we cannot design our way out of the misery caused by answering overpopulation with density. We are encouraging the kind of answers that will help us to become even more dysfunctional while also driving ourselves toward the cliff of resource collapse. To create a world more like the nature video and less like the city video, we must answer the demand for density with less demand.

There are many who will not like being compared to rats but keep in mind that the Human Genome Project revealed that we share ¼ of our genes with them. More importantly these much-maligned critters further demonstrate their adaptive intelligence by being around on planet earth for 66 million years. We should be so lucky.

All Diamonds Are Blood Diamonds

All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds

 All consumption becomes overconsumption when the world is nearing eight billion of us. Any alternatives other than reducing human numbers as quickly and humanely as possible just shifts the burden to another type of resource depletion.

 The television program, CBS Sunday Morning (aired on February 14th, 2021),did a story on the mining of diamonds. It showed how in an effort to stop the wars over diamonds in Africa, the diamond industry dug up an area under the Arctic sea. This is a perfect example of trying to solve one problem by creating another. Now to solve the environmental and economic costs to digging tunnels under the arctic sea, synthetic diamonds are being produced.

 The story presented this as a great way forward, ignoring the energy needed because of the extreme heat and pressure synthetic diamonds require. 750 kilowatt hours has to come from somewhere, and that is what it takes to produce a diamond in a lab, the equivalent of about 3 weeks of powering the average home in the USA.

In another example, one billion toothbrushes are thrown away each year in the US alone, amounting to 50 million pounds of trash each year. To solve that, those who focus only on consumption will run to their laboratories to create a biodegradable toothbrush. But even that choice is not benign. It takes resources and energy to create alternatives, it is never a zero sum game. Just one more in a litany of examples. 50 billion coffee cups are thrown away in the US each year. Companies have made valiant efforts to make compostable ones, but they have to get them to certified compost sites and so far they are more expensive. I know because for 17 years I ordered and tried to properly dispose of 20,000 cups for a half marathon and 5k race to support the nature center where I was director and in charge of the waste we generated. It was hard to justify throwing away cups from seven water stops while trying to get money to fund our nature center. Even then I was well aware that these cups still had to be shipped to us and then the used ones, used once, had to be hauled with 2- ton fossil fuel powered trucks to a proper site further away.

 The king of bad ideas is the biomass industry. In an effort to create a burnable fuel that doesn’t require digging in the ground or going to war in the Middle East, someone came up with the brilliant idea to grow trees and other natural plants to burn in order to create energy. They call this biofuel and it not only pollutes but removes the best carbon absorbing organisms we have. Trees give us oxygen and absorb carbon so let’s burn them down as long as there is money to be made.

 All of these so-called solutions to our over demand of the earth’s very limited resources are driven by the almighty dollar. If a buck can be made, it will done under the umbrella of so called “green” energy. What we need is less of it all. Less is easiest accomplished by having small families and strict immigration legislation. Tighten up demand on a limited resource and you will have real success not some smoke and mirrors answer that only puts money in the pockets of investors, who could care less how their investments effect the earth in the long term.

Modern living is not sustainable and it’s not just about our ubiquitous smart phones and flat screens. We take for granted that we will always have oranges in winter and coffee to drink even though we are past the peak oil that brings it to us. But I see no one volunteering to start washing their clothes in the river and giving up on their washing machines any time soon. The only answer to our spoiled ways is to have less of us doing those things we will not give up using.

 We must adopt the phrase, “nothing I do in an overpopulated world is sustainable,” Unless and until we start to solve how many people are consuming, we will be caught in the cycle of  alternative consumer choice which will always be stained with blood.

HEAL AMERICA FIRST An Open Letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris

I can’t imagine wanting the job you were elected to do Mr. President, and Mrs. Vice President, but I am glad and relieved you are at helm of this weary ship called the United States of America. She has lost so much integrity and civility which you are beginning to restore with your very presence. No more foul language, no more disrespecting women and minorities, no more firing everyone who doesn’t kiss your boots. No more embarrassment at international meetings, no more midnight tweets. No more news stories about issues embarrassing to parents who have to explain to their kids what the president just said.

The majority of us and all of the people I know who donated to your campaign need a nap from the torture of the last four years of deceit and impropriety. But it is no time to relax. America needs to heal, and you have the keys to the medicine chest. I intentionally did not say Americans need to heal, though indeed we do, because America is more than the sum of the 331 million humans who call this country home. America is made up of rivers and mountains, great plains and estuaries, coniferous and deciduous forests, lakes, sand dunes, ponds and fens and they and all of their wild inhabitants are hurting too.

 You are undoubtedly getting so much advice your heads will spin, but if you adopt the slogan “Heal America First” as the keel to your boat you will head us in the correct direction.  There are some numbers I wish to share with you both and I want you to keep them in mind when you are signing policies into law. They will give context as to why it is so hard to govern these days beyond the belligerence from across the aisle and from inside greed-laden board rooms.

When you were first elected senator from Delaware, Mr. President, the year was 1972 when there were 209.9 million Americans. The proud but small Delaware had approximately 573,000 citizens. When you sit down in the Oval Office those numbers will be very different and they matter to the job you have to do. There will be 331 million Americans under your care, an increase of over 121 million Americans all wanting and needing a good life. Delaware’s senators Coons and Carper now must serve nearly 974,000 who now live in the second smallest state in the union, giving them each over 100,000 more people to represent in Washington. A senator’s job is never easy, now imagine it with this much heavier load.

 Mrs. Vice President, when you were elected Attorney General to the most populated state in the union, California, had three million less people than it does now. Even more significant is that from the time President elect Biden was first elected to the time of when you first held a political office, America gained 100 million more mouths to feed, clothe, house, educate. You will now be responsible to provide health care and good paying jobs for those additional millions too.

You both have a huge job of healing to do. America is sick and broken, out of work and out of our minds with worry about the future for our families in light of the pandemic and the other mega problems of climate change and nuclear war. America will no longer be in denial about the pandemic with your science-respecting ways, but it can also no longer be in denial about the math of our numbers related to the ecology of the land, water and air in our country which is struggling in overshoot of its resources.

Our spacious skies and amber waves of grain are not endless, our water supply cannot be purchased from bottles in a store. Yes even and especially in the good ol Us of A, we live in a limited place and must live within those parameters. Our wide-open spaces, are not so wide open anymore and the remaining lands cannot be littered with ‘For Sale’ signs for there is not enough water to support development. Besides the coyotes and elk got there first. Our cities cannot accommodate more density, our roads do not need more traffic, our schools and especially our hospitals do not need more demand.

 This is what you tell America when you limit our future growth, you tell them you are healing America first. This is not about hating anyone, it’s about loving us and the ones we must now turn away. With all of your experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, you know, Mr. President, that there is a whole lot of repairing of relationships to be done with other countries. The hurt we feel in America is not unique to us, but we are unique in the way we respond. We continue to give resources to others while over 500,000 are homeless here. We look the other way when businesses hire undocumented workers and then take advantage of them when so many Americans are out of work. We think we are helping the world by taking in even more people from other countries when in fact we are just making everything worse in America. It will effect you in profound ways, you who have been given the monumental task of governing us.

No president has had it easy. Roosevelt had the depression and World War II. Lincoln had to go to war with the South and send soldiers into our bloodiest battle before anesthetic was invented. But with 300 million more Americans to serve since Lincoln’s time and 205 million more since FDR first took office, you too have a formidable task ahead of you. You must try to please millions more of us and serve with policies that some will never accept. But leaders must make those difficult choices for the greater good.

Neither of those heroic presidents had to deal with 331 million Americans and all of what that encompasses. You will be trying to make life better for more Americans than any previous US president and vice president. This unprecedented situation will only be made worse by adding even more Americans due to outdated immigration policies.

Policies which benefit American citizens, American jobs, American wildlife and open spaces can be implemented with an iron fist or with gentle firmness and I am sure you will both choose the later. After the pandemic, revolving door immigration policies can allow for visits and educational opportunities while not increasing our total numbers.

 Before planes take off, they always remind us to put on our oxygen masks first in case of turbulence. That is all I am asking. Take care of Americans first. You are getting on a plane with enough turbulence to make the masks fall before the pilots have a chance to blink, put them on us before you welcome more onto the plane.

 You can do all of this without hateful rhetoric, I know you can. Just remember you’ve been given the keys to an overflowing ship with so many needy people already on it, the answer cannot be to add more passengers.

Epilogue:

I am a huge fan of the PBS Television Series, “Finding Your Roots”. Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a wonderful host of this fascinating show designed to show us that we are more alike than different and that we all owe much to the struggles of our ancestors. While tracing back the lineages of celebrities, Gates frequently reveals stories of the hardships and negative attitudes towards immigrants that their ancestors endured. I am profoundly disturbed by the show’s spotlight on the historical record of hatred and bigotry toward immigrants, be they Irish , Jews or Italian. It is easy to see why anyone who brings up the topic of immigration today is immediately ushered into this group of bigots who created a more painful existence with slogans like, “NO IRISH NEED APPLY.” Many guests are rightfully disturbed to learn that their ancestors owned slaves.

To proclaim that the US is full, or in overshoot, is a truth we must all face. It is an act of protection, and is not rooted in any sort of prejudice whatsoever. To be remotely associated with those who look upon their fellow human as deserving less of life’s promise due to their culture, race or religion is morally offensive to me. This letter and all of my writing about the need to stop the freight train of population growth due to the main way we are growing, immigration, comes from a place of deep concern for our country, not prejudice against any group of people. It is for the protection of water resources, open space and the wildlife that live there. It is for stopping the growing traffic and pollution too. It is an effort to try not to run out of resources be they vaccines, hospital beds or food staples. We are practicing an old open-arms story in an overcrowded landscape to the advantage of no one, least of all those who we are inviting in with promises we won’t be able to keep.

LIMITS LIVE HERE TOO

Poets note: In our polarized world of either being for justice or against justice, we must realize that when it comes to immigration and our policies there is a third way. The third way is to understand in every country, especially one hard wired for high consumption, is limited. It is limited in open space, limited in room for more cars, limited in water resources, limited in jobs and representation in our halls of congress. The pandemic has shown us that trying to get everyone a vaccine or hospital bed is exacerbated by our now 331,000,000. The earth and each country within it operates in a closed system. Policies creating more growth fly in the face of that reality. I hope this poem opens some eyes to an issue which is NOT at its core about anything other exceeding ecological limits.

Limits Live Here Too

 by Karen I. Shragg

Do them a favor

Turn them away

with an abundance of grace and dignity

for the pain they will endure

Don't let them in

Out of love for their future

Out of fear for our own

If our wildlife had a vote 

they would concur.

We are overflowing

Overpowered 

Overdone

Well-baked

Our patriotic goose is cooked 

in the oven with the temperature set on climate chaos

a bit more afloat than others, perhaps

But sinking none the less

and more will never allow 

any to fully achieve 

the kind of life we all seek.

We can no longer be the release valve

for the suffering peoples of the world

or for those who just seek a bit better life

It's all and only about limits 

Set by nature, disobeyed by man.

Know we must never use numbers as an excuse for racist intentions

while reaching for the chalk

to draw our responsible line in the sand. 

Why We Need to Change Our Core Stories

This past December 2020, I had my second book published by Freethought House Press. Change Our Stories, Change Our World, is all about what is at the heart of our countless problems in the world today. My book demands that we quit erecting walls and start erecting mirrors, the kind that allow for much needed soul searching. As a society, as a world, we need to go deep and see that what we believe about our world is not serving us. There are many examples from which to chose. When we believe that green lawns of manicured Kentucky blue grass will make our property values soar and keep our neighbors and lawmakers happy we end up with more cancers , decimated species of pollinators and polluted ponds, rivers and streams. Laws are often our go-to fix, with limited results. People will fight for their unexamined beliefs, and new laws might make it on the books but acts of defiance will continue. There would be no need for laws to keep us from poisoning ourselves with pesticides if health and ecology were embedded in our dominant story. The enemies of doing the right thing by humans and nature of course are those who stand to gain from the purchase of these poisons. Multi-national corporations have but one god, and it is the bottom line at the end of their fiscal year. Show no profit and the CEO’s will be sailing on their golden parachute to the next opportunity to destroy.

In my book I make the argument that we must make the switch: from worship to wonder, from greed to need, from limitless to limited, from synthetic to natural and from mindless to mindful. So why is it so hard to fill our world with wonder, live within our limits, eliminate greed and become more natural and mindful? For one thing these values do not serve a society hooked on growth and converting the biosphere and all its inhabitants into a place that serves only us. Ironically, to serve only humans and our endless appetite and need for goods and services is to eventually serve none of us at all. Between overpopulation inspired scarcity and climate change nature will bat last no matter how many attempts we make putting all of our eggs in the technology basket.

We should be teaching practical things in our schools. On my list would be basic car mechanics, how to prepare your taxes, home maintenance and civics. But none of those suggestions will matter without a deep understanding of how ecology works and our role in it. Ecology needs to be taught in the context of natural history, geography, resources and socio-political infrastructure. If that were understood I doubt if multiple high-rises would be appearing in the suburbs where I live, because someone would have measured the amount of water needed to serve them after looking at the water supply. Someone would have looked at the traffic and the cement needed to support more humans. Someone would have surveyed the wildlife in the area and put a stop to more development. If the laws of physics were understood, because they were taught as a subject starting in elementary school, we would have to reexamine all of the ways we transgress them with our indefensible stories. We would realize that over half of our land in the US is unfit for growing crops and also realize the intrinsic value in keeping those open lands untouched by human activity. We would have to conclude that it is self destructive to continue policies which look at opening more doors to immigration into a country already overwhelming its resources at a bloated 331,000,000 top of the food chain consumers. It is also very humane to obey these laws, for to disobey them is to succumb the pain and suffering of exceeding these limits.

We push the envelopes without measuring that every invention creates destruction of something in its wake. Our story of limitlessness is perhaps the most harmful story we adhere to, for the only things without limits are creativity and love. Everything else is limited. Everything modern humans do effects the rest of nature in a negative way. Bottled water saves us from poisoned wells but what about the plastic? Cell phones may make our lives more connected but they also create more pollution and a need for more mines of lithium and rare minerals.

Changing our stories must be done at a deep level. We can’t say we love wildlife by visiting zoos and watching the National Geographic channel. We must recognize that our numbers and activities are creating the sixth mass extinction which will include us someday. Only then can we work to reverse our myopia by releasing our old and tired stories and replacing them with sustainable ones.

Conservation Was Easier Back Then

This is a love letter to a woman is responsible for preserving a beautiful oasis near the home where I grew up. Eloise Butler lived at the turn of the last century. She worked hard, trying to preserve and protect an area which has ended up being an iconic wildflower oasis in my hometown. I have always identified with this school teacher and her conservation journey. I too taught school and wanted out of the noise of the classroom so that I could work in and protect my beloved world of nature.

In the 1980’s I found myself burnt out from teaching which led me to seek healing and direction for my life as a volunteer in the Martha Crone Shelter in the Eloise Butler Wildflower garden near my home. I loved photographing wildflowers and talking to visitors. It was an experience which led to my career as a naturalist and nature center director.

 To pay homage to the goals of this woman, who in spite of the unfair treatment of woman in careers at the turn of the last century, was able to achieve so much, we owe her memory and life’s work a new discussion.

 This new discussion is about the forces that work against conservation. Often framed as a fight between greedy developers and conservationists, there is one more player involved. This player is best introduced by looking at the world in 1907 when Eloise was fighting for the garden which was named after her. The United States had just reached the 87 million mark in population and the global population was 1.75 billion. In Minneapolis where the garden is located, just next to the suburb of Golden Valley where I grew up,  the population was just over 200,000. The state of Minnesota had not yet reached 2 million. If those numbers had stayed the same, life would be immensely different and conservationists would be on easy street.

If we can for a moment,  divorce ourselves from any unkind and often undeserved implications, the very fact that Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden now exists in a world of 429,000+ Minneapolis residents, 5.68 million Minnesotans, 331 million Americans and nearly 8 billion people globally is a game changer.

Eloise Butler did not have it easy. There was much to be learned about conservation in her day, after all the once abundant Passenger pigeon became extinct during her day, with no hunting regulations in place. But conservation is so much harder when pressures from population growth force compromises which never favor the natural world on which we all depend.

The first lessons we learn and teach as naturalists are all about the food chain and how the plants as producers are the foundations of life. As one travels up the food chain those dependent on these food and oxygen makers must be less in numbers. Much of what we are experiencing in our failures to protect the natural world can surely be attributable to greed and lack of land ethics, but we cannot keep ignoring the sheer force of our numbers perched precariously as we are on top of this rigid structure. We act as if adding over 244 million Americans since this visionary conservationist lived, had little impact on wildflowers and wildlife. Even worse we act like overpopulation is an overseas problem, when our growth in the US is also out of control and fueling the way development destroys our flora and fauna. Those who might consider it as an issue, often choose to focus on encouraging people to use cloth bags, avoid pesticides and ride bicycles. Although all good suggestions, we must remember we are apex predators and just our water demand, our use of sanitation and energy and our need for food and shelter acts as a giant bulldozer locally and globally. Even a 1000 Eloise Butlers could not stop this stampede.  

I doubt whether the destructive force of overpopulation was ever on Eloise Butler’s mind, but she was smart and courageous, and I would bet if she were alive today, she would be taking up the reins on this issue like so many of my colleagues have done. She would not stand for green-washing nor would she stand down on tough issues. Nothing would honor her legacy more than to find ways to bring overpopulation back to the conservation table before it’s too late.

From Aristotle to the Dalai Lama : Happiness as a precious, threatened resource.

I was taught in some long forgotten high school class that the Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that happiness was the driver behind all of mankind’s activities. If indeed that is true, then perhaps it behooves us to unpack what it would take to make 331 million Americans happy. Indeed, what would it take to make nearly 8 billion humans happy and do we have enough resources to do that? Perhaps in addition to looking at copper, oil, water, lithium, titanium and others as limited resources, we should start looking at happiness as a limited resource as well. Eudaimonia, Greek for happiness ,was Aristotle’s answer to the question: What is the ultimate purpose of human existence? Aristotle believed that in order to achieve happiness one needed to have both the physical goods to live and time for intellectual contemplation. One’s needs had to be met and they also had to be virtuous. According to Aristotle, happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime, all the goods — health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc. — that lead to the perfection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life.

 Modern day Buddhist leader and philosopher the 14th Dalai Lama would concur. He also has said that the purpose of life is to seek happiness the common era. The highly respected Dali Lama, referred to as his Holiness, is a present-day leader and yet they landed in a similar philosophical place.

 Aristotle realized that our enrichment was attached to virtue as well as tangible goods. Once someone had enough, he could contemplate the more perplexing issues of the day. Where Aristotle uses the word virtuous, the Dalai Lama uses compassion. Essentially, they are in agreement that our actions towards others is attached to our happiness. “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” At the time Aristotle promoted his ideas the world, I doubt he comprehended the hurdles to happiness presented by numbers of humans that we are experiencing in a world bulging at nearly 8 billion. At the time this Greek philosopher walked the earth, the whole planet had 162 million people on it.

For reference, that is the same amount of people that were in the US when I was born in 1954. Not only has the world experienced incredible modernization between the time of Aristotle to Dalai Lama, it has experienced the kind of growth only computers can comprehend. While humans are biologically the same as they were 2363 years ago, we now live in a world where we have to share the resources on which we depend with nearly  8 billion more people.

 Assuming Aristotle, and the Dali Lama are on to something here, it just may behoove us to treat happiness as a precious resource that is at risk in an overpopulated world. I propose that access to happiness is just as much at risk as our non-renewable resources. Our deficits can be measured, and Ecological footprint network does a great job letting the world know what is happening with our natural resources. They describe this deficit as a bio-capacity deficit. “if a population’s Ecological Footprint exceeds the region’s bio-capacity that runs a bio-capacity deficit. Its demand for goods and services that its land and seas can provide….exceeds what the region can regenerate

 We are also experiencing a happiness deficit. The two go hand in hand, even though happiness is difficult to measure. It’s hard to be happy when you run out of water and you are scratching for food. Long ago an experiment was done with rats. Given adequate food and water, the rats exhibited all kinds of mental illness when they began to live in overcrowded conditions. We share ¼ of our genes with rats, so we may be subject to the same consequences of loss of happiness in our overpopulated state.

Growth based capitalism is based on the narrative that to be happy we have to have lots of material things. One can never be happy without the newest car, the biggest boat and a larger home. We literally buy into the system that demands our throw away habits. From built in obsolescence to fiscal year pressures, this unsustainable economic system is making the planet wither under our feet.

 Now anyone who has watched the series, “Behind the Music” knows, extreme wealth and fame are recipes for disaster not happiness. Biographies of poor musicians who became wealthy with their hits, more often than not, discovered how unhappy fame and wealth got them. Many ended up leaving us too soon at the end of a needle. Why bring this up? Because many will say that you do not need money to be happy ala the riches some accumulate. But Aristotle wasn’t talking about needing 5 Rolls Royces that Maurice Gibbs of the Bee Gees once owned, he was talking about enough wealth so one didn’t need to worry about one’s basic needs and have the luxury of time for contemplation. Besides, he lived 2218 years before the internal combustion engine was invented .Happiness is not available to everyone now and will be in even less supply in the future. Why? Because the very basics all humans are challenged by our overwhelming demand and out of control global greedy systems.

 Could we distribute our resources more equitably? Colonialism and its sister sinister force, globalization, are still in operation around the world. Many try to fight a world in which the rich and powerful take from the poor and vulnerable. In theory we could do a better job, but that too is threatened by overpopulation as we wake up in a world with over 200,000 more people in it every day, and those all of those people need resources.

 According to Habitat for Humanity, 1.6 billion people live without adequate shelter, 1 in people currently live in a slum, and they also predict that 1 in every 4 people will live in a slum by 2030. Living with adequate housing and food is not a guarantee of happiness but it sure is a prerequisite for the opportunity to become happier.

Growth of slums is directly tied to growth of our numbers as resources will keep falling short in a closed system. Nobel efforts exist to make the world a happier place. A quick Internet search finds that there are 45 main NGO’s devoted to ridding the world of poverty. While this is an impressive effort to end global poverty, the billions who still suffer remain higher than anyone would desire due over-demand of limited resources caused by overpopulation. It is of course is also the way the irrational accumulation of money rules the world instead of the laws of physics and ecological principles. Corporations have globalized their neo-capitalistic earth gobbling ways and the continual growth of 80 million new passengers to the closed system every year contributes to keeping poverty a growing problem.

The access is to happiness is crippled when we continue in our rigidity and keep acting as if the earth and its biosphere were limitless. To continue to fuel growth in a closed system is beyond foolish, it is suicidal. Happiness does not flourish when the earth and its life-giving biosphere is ignored. According to the World Wildlife Fund, “Only 3% of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use. As a result, some 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion find water scarce for at least one month of the year. Inadequate sanitation is also a problem for 2.4 billion people—they are exposed to diseases, such as cholera and typhoid fever, and other water-borne illnesses. Two million people, mostly children, die each year from diarrheal diseases alone.” It is impossible to be happy in a water scarce world.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (born 1935) has been around the world witnessing both our progress and our population growth. He teaches that to be happy is to have compassion, but unlike Aristotle he has also witnessed the earth warming in his homeland of Tibet and the earth gaining 6 billion people in his lifetime. The way those additional people take away from the possibility of happiness is not lost on him. He said, “One of the great challenges today is the population explosion. Unless we are able to tackle this issue effectively, we will be confronted with the problem of the natural resources being inadequate for all the human beings on this Earth.”

Though he did not go as far as saying that happiness dwindles as overpopulation overwhelms the earth, he did say, “The growth in population is very much bound up with poverty, and in turn poverty plunders the Earth. When human groups are dying of hunger, they eat everything: grass, insects, everything. They cut down the trees, they leave the land dry and bare. All other concerns vanish. That’s why in the next 30 years the problems we call ‘environmental’ will be the hardest that humanity has to face.”

We need to start to see happiness and the opportunity to contemplate a more virtuous life, as a precious and dwindling resource. It is just like water, oil, copper, tin, lithium and the rest. Realizing this, we just might understand at a deeper level the change that is needed. We need to change our story. Tell someone we are about to run out of silica and they may not understand the implications. But tell them they are going to run out of happiness now and for generations to come and a whole new audience may awaken to the thief that is overpopulation.

 To quote novelist James Baldwin,” Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Egypt's Ironic Past and Uncertain Future

There is much irony in the newest information that the population of Egypt is skyrocketing. Mostly a Sunni Islam nation, birth control is a touchy subject as babies are seen as a gift from god, and sex is strictly forbidden outside the institution of marriage. Boys are favored in the culture adding to the birth rate. Egypt is mostly a desert with its growing population dependent on the richness of the ever-diminishing Nile river valley. Egypt is a relatively poor country. Unlike much of the Arab world, Egypt’s landscape is not dotted with oil fields.The deck is stacked against a prosperous future for Egyptians as they continue to grow with a fertility rate of 3.1 per woman (2018) on average in an already water-stressed environment.

The irony comes in because Cairo was the scene for an unprecedented effort to discuss and debate the impact of population and its projected rapid growth on the countries of the world. In 1994 the UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Egypt’s ancient capital. It brought together 11,000 representatives from governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international agencies, and citizen activists. But those various activists had different agendas. At the end, the conclusions had shifted focus away from the original mission of the conference. “The long international document from Cairo made no mention of the connections between population growth and the environmental ills of countries with growing populations” 1

It’s very unfortunate that the broader discussion of policies and education which could be implemented to flatten the hockey stick human growth curve, was sidelined at the conference. Feminist activists were successful in hijacking the mission of this massive effort and made the conference all about women’s empowerment. This was a downstream shift from the bigger upstream issue of how population’s rapid escalation negatively impacts the economy and the environment, to issues surrounding maternal health. Women’s issues are great to champion, but Cairo failed to address the broader issue of the pressure placed on countries when there are excessive demands on infrastructure and resources.

Looking back now in 2020, those activists who wrestled away the upstream mission of the Cairo conference cannot say with any honesty that this was a successful move. If their strategy was a good move, we would have seen better results. Using the conference host country as an example, in 1994, Egypt had 61.1 million people, and it has now reached 101 million with the last million being added in just the last 8 months. Now a country twice the size of California, has to manage 40 million more people and provide them with housing, clothing, education and jobs. How’s that decision to dodge the broader overpopulation challenge working? Not well at all. There is nothing empowering about overshoot. According to the United Nations,(Sept 2018), Egypt is facing an annual water deficit of around seven billion cubic meters and the country could run out of water by 2025. We have failed those who are now suffering under the weight of the menace of overpopulation. Ironically, we have failed the women those activists set out to protect.

Comprehensive governmental and non-governmental groups paired with religious leaders needed to come together 26 years ago to create a better future for all Egyptians. They were trying to do just that. If that had succeeded, we wouldn’t be witnessing such despair created by those who took up all the air in the room for what they thought was most important. I wonder how many of those activists have looked back to honestly reassess what they did. Imagine what could have been done instead of gambling away the future of the people of who live in the “cradle of civilization.” Political correctness cannot continue leading us around by the nose. It started long ago and continues to pile up its victims. We need to be less afraid of the implications of possible solutions, and worry more about the consequences of doing nothing, something we are really good at. Policies which encourage sustainable populations are easy to write but harder, much harder to pass. That is because like the activists at Cairo nearly three decades ago, we keep our focus downstream and away from the bigger issue.

This is not a problem exclusive to Egypt. Our failure to address overpopulation in a comprehensive way is an international crisis. Doing the right thing means listening to the earth, not the latest flavor of the month issue which squeezes out other voices in its arrogant misdirection. Ecological realism needs to be the new force guiding our way out of this ever-increasing mess in countries around the world, including and especially our own.

1 Beck, Kolankiewicz, The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History Journal of Political History 2000.