I Tried to Photosynthesize, But All I Got was a Sunburn

What if I could stay in one place and weather the seasons dependent on the rain and sunshine to keep me alive?  What would it be like to be a producer of my own resources rather than a consumer of them? What if my existence were beneficial to the planet because I gave oxygen, absorbed carbon and gave food and shelter to other organisms? It’s a fantasy worthy of exploration for it would then be easy to stop using all plastic and all forms of transportation. I could stop demanding that food be grown in former prairies and shipped to me from foreign lands because I developed a love for the plants that produce chocolate and mangos.

As a green plant and producer of my own energy, I would reproduce as a sustainable mandate to cover the earth with more of me which would keep the planet at an even average temperature. My seeds, fruit or nuts would double as food for the next level of species (like squirrels) as well as a way to continue my species. My proliferation would be a benefit to the whole biosphere. My only enemies would be storms and diseases and the giant rodents who need my bark for food and my wood for their homes.

Let’s look at a simplified version of the food chain, also called the food web. Plants need to be the most numerous as they are the producers. Grasshoppers eat plants are next in line as a first level consumer and in a balanced ecosystem they should be too numerous to count. Skunks love grasshoppers like we love French fries. Skunks need to always be in lower numbers so that they can find enough food and are considered second level consumers. Owls eat skunks, among other animals, and are perched on top of the food chain and are logically and ecologically need to be the least numerous so that they can find enough food for themselves and their young. We are the owls in this scenario of the food chain but are as numerous as grasshoppers and therein is the crux of the problem.

Humans depend on plants and animals. But as our numbers have exponentially grown in a planetary second, we keep putting pressure on nature’s long tested and balanced systems. We need to grow more and more food to feed our reproductive success which only causes more population growth in a merry go-round of a terminal Catch 22 few want to confront. Like an alcoholic admitting they have a problem, we must admit where we are in nature’s schematic. At the core of this problem is acknowledging our place on the food chain. We must consume, water, food grown on viable soil, and resources for shelter. Our modern world is unimaginable without toothbrushes.

But alas I am not a producer of the food chain, I and my fellow 330,000,000 Americans as a part of the world’s nearly 8 billion, are top consumers of the food (and energy) pyramid, much of it wrapped in plastic. As a part of this century, I am an egregious consumer no matter how much I try to buy used goods and eschew pesticides. Like a river, my species will always choose the easiest way to live, flowing downstream and around the rocks in my way. Rivers do not flow uphill. I take from the earth to meet and better my needs. The proliferation of my species, even though I did not reproduce myself, just means more consumption in a world that can only take so much of me and my overly successful kind. As a taker of resources, each invention to better my world lessens the ability of the world to keep meeting my needs. All my success and that of my fellow nearly 8 billion and growing hominids take more and more resources all of which took billions of years to form and all dependent on plentiful source of climate changing energy.

Population is not declining as census figures are being manipulated to say. But even if that were true it would be something to celebrate. We are still growing by over 80 million a year (only the rate is decreasing) and any growth in an already overpopulated world has no happy ending. In my 2015 book, "Move Upstream, A Call to Solve Overpopulation," I describe the avoidance of this issue as downstream thinking. When 6 billion people have been added in one nonagenarian's lifetime, (I had to look that up too, it means someone who is between 90-99, like my dad who is 95) lifetime, it’s time to take stock in our overall footprint. We cannot just lower our individual footprint we must count the total amount of feet.

Of course, we do not need limos, cruise ships, yachts, endless throw away toys and an appetite for new clothes because styles change, but we do need the earth for basic supplies. At nearly 8 billion and growing those basics cannot keep up on an overpopulated planet. Many, who are able to, have opted for vegetarian/vegan diets including yours truly. It eases a lot of pressure on the water and land to eat a plant-based diet, but when there are billions of us even that act is woefully inadequate. We don't want our teeth to fall out and yet we now throw out 1 billion toothbrushes every year, a small item which becomes a mountain of waste when multiplied by our hundreds of millions just trying to follow our dentist's recommendation.

 Because numbers are best managed and manipulated country by country, immigration must be included in the way we look at our growth. Growth in the US, with its huge carbon contribution as a developed country, is mostly by immigration, the most easily stoppable means of growth. In very basic terms even the non-science oriented can understand; when someone comes to the US from a lower carbon footprint country, the whole globe suffers for the uptick in carbon their change of residence will mean. In their article (2008) entitled," Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions," Steven A. Camarota and Leon Kolankiewicz, assure us that immigration to the US is something which is directly attached to the overall increase in global carbon emissions. The media as well as climate change activists mostly ignore this research to the detriment of us all.

 Three points stand out to me as facts we cannot continue to avoid, just because it is likely to put us into the social justice doghouse.

• The estimated 637 tons of CO2 U.S. immigrants produce annually is 482 million tons more than they would have produced had they remained in their home countries.

• If the 482 million ton increase in global CO2 emissions caused by immigration to the United States were a separate country, it would rank 10th in the world in emissions.

• The impact of immigration to the United States on global emissions is equal to approximately 5 percent of the increase in annual world-wide CO2 emissions since 1980.

Humans have succeeded in living in all continents and exploiting mineral and plant resources to create our skyscrapers, freeways, airports, and endless and growing development.

 We could hang our hat on that as progress, except for the inconvenient truth that this party cannot continue forever on a limited planet. Not only do we use up these irreplaceable resources, we keep adding waste to the waste stream and contribute the greenhouse gases which are melting icecaps and destabilizing our climate.

Our mineral resources developed in our planet over billions of years.  The ability of our top-of-the-food chain selves to exploit rocks and minerals to create everything from rocket ships to surgical equipment and cell phones is astonishing. It is also destructive to the life forces and other organisms deeply connected to our survival especially with the numbers of people now alive in 2021.

The only way to do this is to do it country by country and celebrate and work towards reduced population sizes including and especially in high carbon producing countries. We must examine total fertility and immigration together if that is a part of a country's growth story.If you want to solve poverty in the developing world you work to solve overpopulation. Too many people drinking from wells, never set up to support exponential demand, is caused by overpopulation and is only exasperated by digging deeper wells. If you really care about the future of humanity in these resource scarce countries, you could do nothing better than to advocate for lower total fertility rates and controlled immigration from even poorer countries. Those countries which listen to the cautions laid out by the overpopulation issue will be the prosperous countries of the future, for they will be the ones who will not be needing to scrounge for basic resources to keep up with endless growth of a top of the food chain specie who should have known better.

Essentially, we need to form an NGO and call it the FCA which stands for Food Chain Anonymous. At the beginning of each meeting, we need to stand up and say, “I live at top of the food chain in a world that cannot meet my needs even as I try to move down to consume less than I do now.” “I pledge to become a moral activist to support less growth of my specie, realizing that it is at the heart of our current state of imbalance and will perpetuate more misery and chaos if not fully addressed.”

The Fuzzy Math Behind the Myth of U.S. Population Decline

I remember coming home crying from school in first grade because I hated my math classes. I remember asking my mother if I really had to deal with 12 more years of this torture. But as an adult I have learned to be grateful for all of the classes I suffered through. America, we need to learn basic math. It may even be more important than our limited knowledge of ecology.

 Reports came out about the rate of growth slowing in the US, and every growth enthusiast went apoplectic. This was disturbing on two levels. One was that they believed that we were actually declining in numbers and the other was the universal dismay expressed that this would be a bad thing.

 The fuzzy math and brain twisting brought these otherwise intelligent journalists and commentators to the false conclusion that the population of the US itself was in decline. The key word is RATE here. So for the first time in 100 years the rate of population growth is declining, that is a cause for a cupcake size celebration. Let’s take a look at what happened to US population in 100 years. It grew by nearly 225, 000,000 people putting tremendous pressure on our limited resources. So if the rate of growth is slowing that just means the trend is going down not the actual numbers. The actual numbers in fact are going up, mostly due to immigration.

 Let’s say you were stranded on dock anchored to the bottom of a lake that was flooding at a rate of one foot per hour. Then the rate of water rising slowed to a rate of one foot every two hours. You can celebrate that the water is increasing more slowly only until you drown because it is only the rate that slowed, not the actual level of the lake.

 I keep getting asked by the math challenged what I think about population decline in the US. After my head spins around and my hair catches on fire, I answer that I think that WOULD be terrific since we are way over our sustainable numbers. At 331,000,000 we are more than double what the US can handle when our resources of water, open land, room for wildlife, and other quality of life issues are considered. But again the rate is slowing, and that doesn’t translate into actual numbers going down.  

While some population groups push mainly for small families, the actual birthrates in the US are near replacement level, making our growth of 1.2 million people per year mostly due to our current immigration policies. The reason Americans do not curdle at this is because they do not see the harm in growth. They see immigrants as essential to our integrity as a vibrant country. They are not wrong about the contributions of immigrants , but they need to do another kind of math and measure how our country is really doing. How are our aquifers holding up? How is our quality of water and vibrancy of our rivers doing? How easy has it been to quarantine and socially distance in our crowded cities? How are our wildlife doing?

When do we get to swallow our pride and admit we are full? Like Bill Maher said on his Real Time show on HBO, “ When do we quit pretending that we have enough resources for more and more people?”  It’s not going to happen until most of us take some remedial math classes and wake up to the realities of what it means to perpetual grow in a finite country.

Until Further Notice: Everyday will be Earth Day

It takes all hands-on deck to fight the evils in the world, and we are still left feeling so helpless. Just when we are hoping that justice will finally listen to our protests new shootings stain the taste of our morning coffee with tears.

Now Earth Day is around the corner adding another gloomy layer to the pile of issues we must address. The sad part is that the often-proposed answers to the Earth’s problems are so woefully inadequate. When it comes to Earth Day, we are still stuck downstream in the mantra of planting trees and picking up trash. It allows municipalities and schools to check the stewardship box  when they should be educating and demonstrating the need for systemic change. One day or one week devoted to using cloth bags and eating plant based local meals doesn’t address the kind of stewardship we really need. We must call for a match between our demand and supply, it’s that simple and that difficult at the same time.

 The reason I work upstream on systemic ecological issues is simple: If tomorrow we were swimming in all the justice we needed, our newly equal planet will still be facing collapse. Keep 2050 in mind while passing out trash bags and handing out seedlings. That is when climate  scientists estimate much of our planet will be too hot to inhabit. We are killing the biosphere where we all live and giving one day to its care. As someone born and raised in Minneapolis, I am particularly invested in hoping all goals of social justice are achieved. But if those dreams of equal treatment under the law are suddenly achieved they too will disappear with the bees.

 “Everyday is Earth Day “is a slogan that was adopted long ago but never followed. We need every leader of every country to quit worrying about who is in charge and realize that Mother Nature reigns supreme. She is telling us she is tired, frustrated, bleeding, aching, being emptied of fish and fresh water, and creatures who have been so much better at earning their right to roam her landscapes and swim in her oceans with millions of years of practice. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream for equality but he also knew that equality needed to live on a viable planet. Every human action takes from the earth. Nature counts the lithium in our batteries and measures the gasoline we burn. It counts our disposable diapers and the bottles of water we drink. We are a pretty innovative bunch, but our answers to power our bulldozers with electricity or some magical form of non-polluting energy only makes the destruction go faster.

 What does it mean to make every day Earth Day? It means listening to our mother. Mother Earth has been telling us to clean up our room, limit our guests and quit spending our resources like there was no tomorrow. She needs us to learn our multiplication tables and the exponential factor. Mother Earth has already quarantined us. Now we need to stay in our room and do our physics homework until we can apply it to our lives. An easier way would be to consult with indigenous people. They didn’t need books to tell them that they would suffer if they broke Mother Earth’s rules. They won’t be waiting for our call, however, they are too busy fighting the pipelines that will soon poison the water of their remaining lands. Perhaps we should join them on their picket lines instead of giving lip service to a day that just sells products now.

Is it modern human arrogance that keeps us scratching deeper into the earth for the newest resource to power our skyscrapers and rapid transit? Perhaps it is. But it is our fault as leaders who know better to demand a wake-up call and a total change of our dominant story before the earth celebrates every as earth day by herself with only a few surviving scorpions and cockroaches to share in the festivities.

Free Willy: AND OTHER AVOIDABLE DISASTERS

America is a place where myths, fables and fairy tales thrive better than facts. Long before the war on facts in social media took root, America established itself as a land where mythology thrives, and facts take a back, less sexy seat. We love our fantasies, cartoons and other endless escapes from reality now brought to you by the billion-dollar corporations like Netfllix. Nothing proves our love of the world of fantasy better, however, than the phenomena of the Disney Corporation.

In 2018, their fantasy theme parks earned over 7 billion dollars in revenue drawing in over 157 million visitors. 20 million dollars in a day in profit is a testimony to the ability of Disney to know how to capitalize on a deep American desire to be divorced from reality. We want to be wowed with talking mice, dazzled by rides like the billion-dollar Galaxy’s Edge and enveloped in the glow of the future as told by the likes of Epcot Center. All of these fantasy experiences are happily offered by the Magic Kingdom for $100+ entrance fees.

Problems are hard enough to solve with facts in hand, but when myths become firmly welded to the American psyche, life can become a petri dish of mutating trouble. Some of our cultural myths begin with innocent or even noble intention, after all Disneyland is fun, but often unfold to create real problems down the road.

Take the movie Free Willy. It’s a story, for those who don’t remember, about an Orca (often called Killer whale) trapped in captivity at a Sea World-like place, forced to perform for visitors. In the happy ending of this Warner Bros. 156-million-dollar grossing film, the young protagonist finally releases his captive friend to a free life in the ocean. It raised awareness to be sure and it would have been great if it just stopped the awful capture of wild Orcas, but public demand for the release of captive orcas grew to a fever pitch. The real-life captive Orca, named Keiko, was released under pressure from those who loved whales. They thought he would be in store for a happy ending too. But Keiko was too tame and not able to adapt to migration and soon died of pneumonia in the cold ocean waters bordering Norway. Beware of Americans who think they are doing the right thing without fully vetting the potential results of their actions. Whale and zoo experts warned of Keiko’s fate, but they had facts in their wheelhouse and these well-meaning citizens had their weaponized feelings about whales in their quiver. Beware of Americans bound and determined to do the right thing as defined by their very own ‘wokeness’.

We let cats roam free because it’s their ‘nature’ and then low and behold they kill billions of birds because that is their nature too. Another embarrassing trend in our society is that we often offer inaccurate, palatable answers that don’t work once we become aware of a given problem. Spaying and neutering programs are offered up as a way to lessen the number of birds that find themselves in the mouths of these domesticated predators. These fixed cats are then released outdoors and continue to contribute to the feline annihilation of the bird world. Just because a cat can’t reproduce, doesn’t mean it stops the killing of birds and we can’t catch all of these hungry predators. The tally of this bad decision? An astounding 2.4 billion domestic cat-killed birds a year in the US and Canada.

 Americans are often just unaware they are absorbing lies because they are told to believe things with the help of billions of dollars in advertising. Because we do love our myths, we do so often without questioning industries which stand to make a profit if they can just fool enough people. “Cigarettes make you sexy” was a huge push by the tobacco industry until lawsuits and millions of early deaths knocked them down a few pegs.

Sometimes so-called experts write books filled with nonsense and we believe them for years. JW Conway may not be a familiar name now, but he wrote “The Prevention and Correction of Left-Handedness in Children” in 1936 and it became a foundational principle for teachers who continued to think for years that this simple brain development had to be corrected.

The joys of hand feeding wildlife is a destructive myth I had to deal with for many years as a director of a nature center. People who say they love nature want to have wild animals come up to them because well if Snow White can do it why can’t they? The result is often fatal. I witnessed the sad fate of a pair of wild geese when teenagers with nothing better to do, speared and tortured these innocent waterfowl which had been hand fed, becoming easy marks for their brutality.

What myths are hurting us now? There is a long list that would turn this essay into an encyclopedia. There are two deeply connected myths which need to jump into the interrogation seat, for they will frame the future of America. The first is the myth embodied and emboldened by France’s gift to us, the Statue of Liberty. Many well-meaning and educated Americans believe the myth that only thing stopping millions more from becoming Americans is our prejudice. Just like the Free Willy story, they believe they are helping people by insisting on a more liberal pathway for more people to become US citizens. This dove-tails into the other myth, that says that our streets are paved with gold. America is full of promise and wonder for all who come knocking. The sentence needs to end with America is full. These myths prevent seeing the ecological, sociological and economic realities of unending demands for limited resources. Buying into these myths allows people to easily ignore the resources we are already running out of, which more people will just exacerbate. If I were a betting person, I would put lots of money behind the guess that most haven’t a clue of that this iconic statue, gifted in 1885, arrived 280 million Americans ago.

When our rivers no longer run to their proper ocean destination, when our cities reek of pollution, when climate change is drying out the ever popular southwest it is time to re-access the intersection of these two very dangerous myths.

I would like to propose the radical notion that one can be anti-racist, pro-immigrant AND want to procure much tighter regulations at our borders. I consider myself to fit into that seemingly gerrymandered category. Being called a racist for proposing that the US cannot take on more citizens due to its overburdened social, economic and ecological systems is an unjustifiable lie which will burden the future generations. It is much easier to call someone a racist than it is to listen to their heartfelt pleas. Name calling is a lazy way to resolve an issue one knows little about.

We would love to think we have done something for whales by freeing just one of them, but even if Keiko would have survived, it would have amounted to a small effort in a hurting world. The Campaign for Nature’s 30 by 30 project is a much-needed endeavor with a goal to protect 30% of the world’s biodiversity by 2030. 100 conservation organizations have joined in a unified voice to call on policy makers to commit to what is being called a new deal for nature. President Biden admirably says he is committed to this broadly scoped plan but he is also creating a pathway for millions more to become Americans which will add to our already bloated numbers. His immigration policies are as well intended as those who wanted to Free Willy and release neutered cats, but they only sound good to those who cannot hear the gloom in their forecast. This is a very different kind of gerrymandered stance which doesn’t hold up to deeper scrutiny. You can’t be about preserving nature while loosening immigration rules. You can’t keep the faucet turned on if you don’t want the room to flood. Americans are so good at hypocrisy and nothing could be more hypocritical than promising to save room for wildlife while continuing immigration policies that will keep us growing until our open land is all but a memory.

The myth of wanting two diametrically opposed things is unfortunately also very American. We want our fancy coffee lattes and rainforests, our cheap food and higher wages, our speedboats and clean water. The multi-billion dollar weight loss industry exists side by side with ubiquitous donut shops proving we also want our ‘cake’ and waistlines too.

We want to extend a helping hand to all who want to enter our overpopulated land and want our rivers to run free and our wildlife to flourish. We want good jobs and health care for all no matter how big our society gets. This is a great script for yet another myth-making, damaging Hollywood film but it is not possible in the current overpopulated state of America. We need to become and can become an anti-racist, ecologically sound, socially responsible America.

Putting out the “WE ARE FULL” sign out on our borders is about letting go of these two myths and embracing reality, for they stopped serving us long ago. We must consider the overall impact 330 million Americans already living here has on our declining resources. Although it is shameful how we consume and waste resources on excessive products in this country, just the impact of our basic needs is unsustainable. I offer up our over-taxed aquifers as Exhibit A. This will require incredible courage, forgiveness and some mental gymnastics, but we will be all the fitter for it.

Ode to a Red Fox

A red fox family
moved into the neighborhood
readily clearing the landscape of leftover herbivores
delectable snacks for the insatiable six pairs of eyes
ready to tussle over this evening's offerings
from parents who never needed a hunting license or credit card to perform their parental duties
Defying all things domestic
Ignoring the sirens, dodging the cars
powered by those too busy to notice
the kind of beauty and cuteness
reserved only for those brave enough to
live on their own terms under sheds and fallen trees
among those who've done
their best to tame all hints of wildness from where ever they make a homestead.
Your curiosity wrapped up in the fluffiness of your new spring coat offers a reminder that we are not completely in charge.
Welcome.

More Relevant than Ever

The Passover table set with the best of linens

Four cups of wine and well-worn Haggadahs waiting for the youngest to recite the age old question:

Why is tonight different from all other nights?

Ritual reminders of

An ancient story told and retold for thousands of years

By Jews who wanted us never to forget

This foundational story of redemption

But these herculean efforts to turn back the clock to a time of

Evil kings and plagues

Of desert survival

And following a promising leader to and ever elusive

Promised land

Are not needed this year.

The symbols on the seder plate glare up at us

As if to say, “I told you so”

For this year’s retelling could be lifted off the 24/7 news cycle

And the daily struggles of our lives.

This ancient story with Moses at the helm

has morphed into our modern life

with enough eerie relevance

to give us all shivers.

We no longer need to imagine what it feels like

To live under the rule of a king so wicked he would put the biblical ones to shame

Or what it means to live during a plague that spreads to kill the most vulnerable among us

We no longer have to sit through an entire retelling of

A story of survival

In order to realize what being a survivor means

Why is this night different from all other nights?

It isn’t

Except we now can sit and recall all of these ancient stories

And realize their lessons and values

are more important than ever

For they are not ancient at all.

Live the Possibility; Forget about Probability

I truly believe that we need to let go of outcomes and focus on telling the truth as we know it. Now matter what issue you are working on, probability is most likely against you, but possibility, however minuscule is where activists must live and breathe for our own sanity. It's the Buddhist way though I am not a Buddhist per se, I do like the philosophy of detachment to the temporary.

We must be reminded that in the big picture there is always an end game and that no matter how successful we are, that too will be temporary. Our sun will one day become a red giant star and engulf our precious earth and once again turn us all into cosmic dust. So we do our best and enjoy the present trying to make life now better. As author and philosopher Eckart Tolle would say, all we have is the now, the past and future are illusions, but if we attend to the present, tomorrow will have more promise.

Paint Your Day with Dignity

Paint Your Day with Dignity

Paint your day with your finest brush

Dipped in dignity

For those not of your gender

For those not of your faith

For those not of your station in life

For those whose ancestry tells of disregarded tales

Expressed in beautiful shades of color.

Hold them to standards worthy of a civil society

But do not paint with too broad of a brush

Until you’ve walked many miles

In their tattered shoes.

Save your brush strokes of hatred for evil-by-design

Rigged systems that favor the already rich,

The all  too powerful, greedily

Using the poor as their punching bags

And the Earth as their slave.

Throw away the paint labeled ‘self-appointed judge and jury’

For a conspiracy you created in your science-bereft head

With the help of those who will never visit you in jail

Listen with your full palette

Laced with compassion

Dip your thickest brush into justice

And never forget those with feathers and fur.

The Land of the Discarded

 We now live in the land of the discarded

We see them with their cardboard signs

When they are not shivering in their tents

But mostly they live out of site in discarded places

Under bridges

And abandoned factories which once offered gainful employment

before automation greased the wheels of greater profits and

Drove the rest overseas.

We know why the American dream passed them by

chewed them up and spit them out:

The rich became our big box, high tech, blue-blooded royalty

With all of their extreme wealth and the power it could buy, scraped off the backs of the innocent

Who wanted to work

Who wanted to afford a roof over their heads

Who didn’t want to abandon their dreams

into the bottom of a bottle

But the whiskey knew the game was rigged

And offered the only escape hatch

They could afford.

Minimum wage is always the debate

By those who spend more than that on their dog sitters and frothy lattes.

Maximum wage is never on the table

Only how much of a feeble handout to give those who lost it all at the pandemic’s beckoning.

That we even consider giant permission slips to bring in more desperate millions to our shores

So the newly enriched can reach into their pockets

And complain that providing health care costs too much

Is a fool’s game from the scrap heap of time

We have little to offer the desperate, and what we do have comes with a heavy dose of racism

To keep the machinery of greed churning.

So much needs to be fixed in the land of the free and the home of the brave,

The promised land is now the broken land

And we must embrace our new reality

With a difficult hug

For when millions are already scouring food banks

You don’t dangle a carrot in front of more.

Nature Doesn’t Recognize our Differences, But She Does Count Our Feet: Why We Must Protect Our Parks from Drilling AND from too Many of Us.

If I hear one more time that we must change our relationship with the natural world in order to stop our road to extinction, I am going to scream. Our beloved Beatles told us that “all we need is love”, when love is a just a missing ingredient to a much longer recipe. We certainly need to operate with more love toward each other and our planet, but there is more than an attitude change and an embrace of trees that needs to be addressed. Something is standing in our way. Something both huge and hugely ignored. Website after well -intended website tells us to all get connected to nature, sing Kumbaya and all will be better in the world. Nature is a soother, a healer and a place to come to get grounded, oh yeah and please bring your sustainably harvested yoga mat. Though on the surface this is good advice, it is not and cannot be a complete response to the roaring engine that is becoming our planet’s 6th extinction.

 Getting back to nature can mean anything from donning a backpack and heading out into the wilderness, to finding a hiking trail in a local park. The rewards of such endeavors are provably positive, but we cannot escape into the woods and ignore why all of nature is under threat. It is due to our overwhelming presence. Access to nature and the solitude it promises become less and less available to us in this overbuilt and overpopulated country of ours. It’s hard to know what will dismantle the fairytale that spews stories of our inexhaustible resources in the good ole US of A.

Dwindling opportunities to do what is newly referred to as, “forest bathing,” is not due to a lack of interest as much as it is to the way in which our ever-expanding post-industrial society has bulldozed so much of our natural world. Telling people to get out into nature assumes there is nature to ‘get out into’ or that it won’t be full of others trying to do the same once we arrive.

 Universally absent from this otherwise noble effort to reconnect us to nature is the fact that US overpopulation has made the ability to find solitude increasingly difficult. While it is clear that we continue to suffer from “nature deficit disorder” as defined in Richard Louv’s book The Last Child in the Woods, nature is hurting more. The natural world needs to be intact in order to operate according to her evolutionary prescription. While being instructed to get out into her beauty we need to pause and examine why our natural world is fragmenting and declining.

 To have access to the comfort of a forest, prairie or marsh is as important as it is rare. I should know. For 28 years I did all I could to help create nature experiences for urban kids and families. Our nature center was so close to an international airport that we had to often wait to interpret the bees, trees, birds and mammals until the jets passed over. I managed 150 acres sandwiched in between a freeway and a major county road and yet we did our best to create experiences for our visitors that both increased their knowledge and stewardship toward the natural world. It is a beloved oasis in the midst of an ever-growing city, but the pressure to keep out the noise, invasive species and litter was, and I am sure continues to be, a never-ending challenge.

I am born, raised and live in Minnesota. There are 267,000 acres preserved within the lovely 66 state parks in our midwestern state known for our 10,000 lakes. With our current population of 5, 640,000, that means that there are only 21 acres per Minnesotan in state parkland. In the last decade, Minnesota grew by 376,412 residents. Our parkland cannot and will not grow to accommodate the potential demand those additional people represent. Not only is the land already spoken for, but the state park system remains grossly underfunded by millions of dollars as it is a poor competitor for funds otherwise demanded for education, transportation and other human services.

 The ‘nature pie’ of all of our parks is getting sliced ever thinner as our population grows. There are 83 million acres of National Park land that the last administration worked hard to destroy with policies that allowed more access to their mineral riches. Those national parks were once in the hands of much better stewards, as the First Nation People never felt compelled to build large visitor centers or pave access roads in them in order to convey their value. Be that as it may, in 1872 there were just under 39 million Americans listed in the US census. Today, in 2021 there are just over 330 million of us. That means that for purposes of illustration, we now have only a quarter of an acre per person in preserved national park land. These statistics may not be a very practical example of how our population growth has undermined our access to nature, but they are ratios that illustrate how we are eating away at nature, its wildlife and our access to its beauty.  It’s great to tell people to get out into nature, but this pandemic has let us know how quickly our parks can be overwhelmed with visitors. The detrimental effects of even well-behaved visitors in such high numbers meant overcrowded experiences for those who just wanted to commune and get away from CNN for a while. It also meant more trash and not so well-behaved visitors.

 Humans are encroaching everywhere. No mountainside or ocean view seems to be off-limits to population-driven development. Suburbs are sprawling over precious farmland and high rises are becoming the norm. Land near our parks of all types is in high demand. Increased noise, traffic and commercial development soon follows, further diminishing the park’s value to longtime residents and wildlife. In order to be great stewards of the land, in order to accomplish the praise-worthy efforts of NGO’s like the Rewilding Institute, we need to have a more forgiving ratio between humans and the nature world. We can only do that by paying attention to where growth comes from and realizing the detrimental effects of our continued growth in a country with more than double the population nature can afford.

 Nature doesn’t care whether we grow by births or immigration. Nature doesn’t care where anyone comes from, what language they speak or whether they are skilled or unskilled workers. Nature only cares about total numbers of this bipedal hominid which has overwhelmed its position as top predator on the food chain of life. Those numbers, 330,000,000 and counting, spell out overpopulation inspired OVERSHOOT in America in capital letters. The challenge is that if we really wish to awaken an enlightened re-embrace of the natural world, we can start by singing Kumbaya but must not end there. We need to continue care about policies and support funding for our precious park lands but we cannot stop there either. We have to care about limiting how many are going to be demanding to use them.

 If we were growing mostly by total fertility rate per woman in the US then that is where most of our efforts should be. We could, and still should, become  better at funding  education, woman’s health and policies that encourage small families. Alas it is not where most of our growth is coming from. According to a recent research study conducted by scientist Dr.Leon Kolankiewicz, ( “Population Growth and the Diminishing Natural State of Arizona.") Kolankiewicz concluded that the biggest reason for that state’s population growth was federal immigration policies forcing the loss of 1.1 million acres. Yes, as unpopular as that will seem to today’s myopic public discourse, it remains undeniably true.

 According to Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/, “The arrival of new immigrants and the births of their children and grandchildren account for 55% of the U.S. population increase from 193 million in 1965 to 324 million today. The new Pew Research Center projections also show that the nation is projected to grow to 441 million in 2065 and that 88% of the increase is linked to future immigrants and their descendants.” Those numbers should give us great pause without allowing any hatred in our hearts. Remember that nature doesn’t recognize our differences, but she does count our feet.

 We are indeed growing mostly by immigration in the US, and while many activists have written about how the US is already exhausting its many natural and human resources I wish to add nature’s voice to the mix.

 Ironically, Democrats and Republicans act in opposing ways when it comes to protecting park land. Democrats are pretty good at park land preservation policies and consistently get higher ratings than Republicans from groups like the League of Conservation Voters. https://www.lcv.org/. Republicans get very poor ratings on their policies toward our national park lands. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, in 2017, under the Trump Administration, the Department of the Interior was told to review and repeal the standards that protected oil and gas drilling inside parks like the Everglades, Grand Teton and Mesa Verde.

On the other hand, when it comes to controlling the increase in US population which comes from immigration, Democrats get failing grades. Democrats need to get all of their good conservation grades from protective regulations against mining, because when their constituents hear about border restrictions they are reminded of the xenophobic rhetoric of Republican administrations.It is political quicksand for Democrats to even come to the table to discuss the many benefits of going back to the legal immigration allowed back when my grandparents came here from Russia in the 1920’s. Most of my relatives came to our shores just after the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which set an immigrant quota at 3 percent of the number of immigrants in the 1910 census (about 358,000.) While these laws were more about controlling ethnicities and not preserving our parks, we can and need to change our motives for revisiting and creating new morally improved immigration laws.

 We now seem trapped in a no-win scenario where on the one hand we want to keep America a country built on immigrants and to honor those who want to be united with their families. On the other hand, a flood of new immigrants to already overcrowded cities will immediately increase both their carbon footprint as well as the number of feet who will be wanting someday to have access the respite offered by park land. We want to protect our parks from drilling but not from the number of visitors? In 2020, the national park service saw 90 million less visitors due to the pandemic, but they still welcomed a whopping 237 million people.

 So if we continue to grow in numbers as many in power seem to see as the only politically correct thing to do, the new trend of nature bathing will have to be as virtual as our ubiquitous zoom calls, because we are running out of nature to bathe in just when we’ve rediscovered its value.