WHAT IS YOUR GROWTH STORY

WHAT IS YOUR GROWTH STORY?

It turns out that our worst subjects in school were the ones we needed most. It is an understatement to say that physics and math were not my best subjects in high school. Only the geeks, yes that’s what we called them then, were interested. The rest of us stole tests and did everything we could to pass these boring classes. None of the topics seemed very practical to me. When would I need algebra? Truth be told I can’t say I ever needed algebra in my ‘real’ life. Knowing how electrons behaved didn’t offer any help to get us out of the Vietnam war, which was our focus at the time. I loved nature though. It seemed to live outside the realm of these challenging and most boring of school subjects. Someday I would teach about nature and say goodbye to my dull textbooks which looked as new on the day I got rid of them as the day I had to buy them.

 As it turns out, these topics are central to protecting the natural world. They teach about limits and what happens when a species exceeds those limits. Just because our economic systems try to operate outside of the laws of physics, doesn’t mean they could ever be successful in any sustainable way.

 I don’t remember an ecology class being offered in my high school in the late 60’s, which would have been helpful. I only had physiology available to me where I could’ve dissected cats, rats and mice. I quickly got a pass out of that class which I only signed up for because the teacher was cute. Looking back, he was only a few years my senior.

 Through it all, I somehow landed in the world of environmental education, where I learned to adopt a lens inspired by both physics and math. It turns out that the natural world, in all of its cycles and organisms needs to be protected so that humans can live on this fragile layer of earth we call the biosphere. This all means that in order to truly be human-centric we must operate with a bio-centric focus. With all of our inventions, which are impressive on some levels, we have outsmarted our future. We been able to challenge the limits set in place by nature with our ability to extend life and postpone death.

 Anyone not currently in a coma, will observe that the world is experiencing the kind of devastation that can readily be traced to our transgressions of physics, math an ecology. Oh, that my teachers could have found a way to teach physics and math as survival topics. At a young age we would have learned about how we are not all powerful and that our power was, in the end self-destructive.

 We cannot blame the uptick in wildfires on the lack of funding for fire fighters, even though that would be beneficial now. We cannot blame the scarcity of water on the earth cycles. We must examine our growth story. What is your growth story? How is your community growing and how is it impacting your life? Does it feel good to see all of those high-rises appear in your city? Do you like the added noise and traffic? Do you like the constant construction of roads and buildings? Do you like going into a section of town and not recognizing it do to its development? Do like all of the water bans now that you have to support more demand? How is wildlife impacted in your growth story? Are you seeing more or less birds in your neighborhood?

 Growth is created in two ways, more births than deaths inspired by our total fertility rates ( number of offspring per woman) and in some countries like the US, by immigration. Our growth story should send shivers down our nearly 8 billion spines. It would have been great if my math teachers would have taught us about the impact of the exponential function as Dr. Al Bartlett lamented so often in his overpopulation lectures.

 We have extended lifespans and eliminated many causes of death. We have made multiple and premature births successful too. All of that has added up to a problem many choose not to face. When those of us who do understand its threat to humanity’s future try to discuss this issue. we are thrown under the bus. But as anti-human as it seems, it is really the most pro-human of narratives, for to be anti-growth is this day and age is to be pro-humanity.

 Now we face a newer threat, the threat that countries which have been able to reduce their total fertility rate, albeit and higher than sustainability population, are now growing by immigration. This undermines their ability to become sustainable and contributes to everything from water scarcity to traffic increases. What happens when people from low carbon footprint countries come and live in the developed world? The net gain of global carbon emissions goes up, hurting us all.

 Physics, if taught in a way that we would have all understood, would have made it clear that we cannot keep adding people, no matter what their ethnicity, to our limited country. Learning how to pay well for jobs that need to be done is a much more sustainable path than believing Americans are permanently helpless and need to accommodate more growth in their neighborhoods for those who have come here to fill vacant positions.

 Ecology, if taught properly, would have educated us about how we treat animals and plants lower on the food chain is critical to our livelihood. If it is all about people, it won’t be about people at all. If zoning laws run over open space to create more housing, wildlife will suffer. Natural fires will have no place to go except into our living rooms. If water is diverted for irrigation for crops that are sold overseas, we will be following the global growth story down its unsustainable rabbit hole. Sure there is money in growth, for the moment and for the few, until we look around and see that valuing the earth and its limited resources was what had the most value of all. 

The Thief at the Door

 The Thief at the Door

The thief at the door

Is knocking

But deaf ears respond

Excuses mount

Tethered to fatally flawed notions

Of the proper direction to take

The thief steals so much more than it

Is ever put on its ever-enlarging plate

Has never

Been jailed for its transgressions

Which have not been silent

But which have been silenced

By those who think they stand to gain

With the current system in place

But this train takes all as prisoners

heading for the cliff

Only a handful know is there

Snagging so many of the innocent along the way

As they disappear from the pages of existence

Decline is difficult to witness when it is chomped away slowly

By the thief’s deadly jaws

Consumption’s multiplier remains unnamed for we are

Wrapped up in the daily struggles of life

Anesthetized by

technology’s wizardry.

The blindness to the thief’s role in breaking nature’s rules

Throws a monkey wrench into all noble actions.

Many scream into the ether not to let in this thief at the door

Destroying our neighborhoods

Decimating our forests

Igniting our landscapes

Drinking our rivers to their last drop

Disrupting any hope of cohesion

As numbers overwhelm & overshoot limits

That were never ours to set

OVERPOPULATION.

I Am a New Fan of Peer Pressure

Righting the wrongs I see world in the has been a lifelong mission with the intention of making the world a better place. Arrogant? Perhaps, foolhardy? Probably… but when I see a smoke coming out of house, I have no choice, I must call the fire department.

 When I know how bad pesticides are for our water, insects, human health and are a general disregard for biodiversity, I say something and do something. When I see a world bursting at the seams with too many people and too much consumption, causing all kinds of suffering, I say something and do something.

 But now I have a new challenge. I have recently learned that some of the closest, smartest and dearest people I know have found their way to a steadfast resistance of getting vaccinated. I was shocked to learn that I know of at least 10 people who are choosing to remain unvaccinated against Covid 19. For reasons that appear very flimsy next to the evidence I have researched, they are next in line either to get very sick themselves or spread it to others. What is even worse their so-called choices will keep us in this pandemic cycle longer than we need to be because thanks to science, we have found a way out.

 There has never been a perfect vaccine or medicine, but the efficacy of this vaccine, when enough people take it, has a proven track record of getting us out of isolation and back into our lives. Social media puts information at our fingertips has allowed us to find whatever evidence we want for whatever narrative we believe. I have been told of cases of side effects and places where the vaccine hasn’t worked. I know of otherwise rational people who are losing sleep over the vaccine’s side effects they keep reading about. They pay attention to hearsay and find reasons not to believe the CDC. They’re more concerned about the long-term effects of the vaccine when there may never be a long term to worry about. The long-term effects they need to be worried about include: spreading the virus as an asymptomatic person, further stretching our health care workers who would rather not be spending their days putting ventilators on those who paid attention to the wrong risks, and putting their own choices and independence before health mandates which keep us safe from each other’s poor choices.

I am not writing this because I think I will change anyone’s mind. I am writing this because I want a record of trying. If they end up sick or do die, I will be able to say I did my best to stop their suffering, after all I do deeply care about them all. The problem is I don’t think this is about reason and science. I think it’s about story and perspective. Like I wrote in my last book, ‘Change Our Story, Change Our World,” it’s about the stories we believe, they run our lives more than reason. Thanks to those who value power over our country’s well-being, the whole pandemic was politicized by our last president and his cronies. Only now are Republican governors stepping up to the plate because either they found their conscience or they are afraid of losing voters, a more likely scenario.

 Now vaccination itself is all about emotion over critical reasoning and it is not just among those who consistently vote red. Doubt of the vaccine’s efficacy has entered the world of people with multiple political stripes as well as the apolitical. While I would love to get at least one of my unvaccinated friends/relatives to sign up for the safest way out of this nightmare we have been living for almost 2 years, I do not have much hope of that because I only have reason in my toolbox.

 According to reports and to my own experience, some feel somehow that the government is in cahoots with the Big Pharma and they don’t want to support the billions they will make. Others believe that since they already have had the virus, they are now immune, still others are needing more research about future side effects. Here’s a tip, worry more about the very real side effects of avoiding the vaccine: cemeteries and sympathy cards. Just ask the families of the 600,000 victims of this fast-spreading disease. The reality is that those who do survive Covid may suffer long term side effects of lung and even memory damage. How do you avoid those side effects? You get vaccinated.

I can dismiss all of their claims with scientific evidence, and even though I am not a huge fan of Big Pharma, but we need their vast resources to mass manufacture and distribute this life saving drug. It is another sad consequence of our overpopulated world, that we will need 331,000,000 million vaccines in the US and nearly 8 billion globally. No, of course I am not interested in solving our overpopulation problem with more death, ( just fewer births and stricter immigration laws) besides just to end our world population growth we’d have to lose over 200,000 people a day to Covid. But I digress.

 I could try to shame these vaccine refusers (I guess they are really not anti-vaxers) into realizing how many countries are begging to fill their understocked shelves of the vaccine while so many of us shun the opportunity to wrap ourselves it its safety net. But that isn’t working very well either. States and cities have had to resort to bribing people to get the vaccine which I couldn’t wait to get. It’s so sad, and yes aggravating, to learn that many of the unvaccinated who now have the virus are, as we speak, gasping for breath in hospital beds which should’ve been reserved for those who didn’t have a pathway out. The fact remains that 97% of the covid patients that are being whisked in desperation to emergency rooms are those who have not been vaccinated and could have been. It is too late to be vaccinated when you are in the ICU, but many are begging for it in a desperate attempt to live.

I have been told by these unvaccinated friends that they respect everyone’s choice to get it or not. Well quite frankly I don’t. Only those with underlying conditions and with a reputable doctor’s permission to avoid it are exempt in my book. With all due respect you can find a doctor to tell you what you want to hear, I have seen that story play out several times.

 What does seem to be working is peer pressure. What you are not vaccinated? Well then don’t expect an invitation to my home or for me to babysit your kids or walk your dog. When there are consequences for our choices, apparently people start to reexamine their beliefs. Consider this my effort at peer pressure.

Attention Population Groups: Nothing Good Ever Trickles Down

 Wanda Sykes is a funny comic who does a great bit about how nothing good ever trickles down. Paint trickles down walls, food trickles down our chins and sweat trickles down our foreheads, you get the picture.  On the other side of her argument is that money, something we all need to survive, never trickles down to those who could use it. The other thing that doesn’t trickle down is the way many population groups are discussing overpopulation particularly in the US. I know because I used to embrace their narrative. I used to think and say in my presentations that if you take care of overpopulation, immigration as a cause of population growth will become a non-issue. I naively thought that if you just empowered women ‘over there’ they wouldn’t overwhelm our resources here.  

 Yes, I too used to buy into what I now call the ‘trickle-down theory of overpopulation.’ It looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work. Like Wanda says, nothing good ever trickles down. Many population groups full of dedicated staff and members work tirelessly on an issue many don’t even acknowledge as a problem. I commend them, many are my dear friends. But I also challenge them. They avoid the issue of immigration like the plague, which it indeed can be, I am not that naïve. The Overpopulation Project describes the missions of 38 organizations working on overpopulation issue. Immigration is only mentioned in two of them, though some may deal with immigration in some of their work. (https://overpopulation-project.com/organizations-dealing-with-overpopulation/) My request is that at least population organizations don’t give out false messages about the things that could actually work in real time rather than the fantasies that somehow reducing births across borders and oceans will magically translate into lowering the over 1 million legal immigrants arriving on the overfull US doorsteps each year.  They ignore how policies promote the continued stream of people to come into the US (and other countries) under the assumption that we can and should be the release valve for more seriously overpopulated countries. Besides, if we had smaller families, it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s important to note that though population groups keep pushing for small families, native-born Americans have had replacement level fertility rates for decades and that at current levels of immigration, the US population cannot stabilize even if native-born fertility dropped to one child per woman. It seems so unfair to ask for those who want families to sacrifice their dreams only to be undermined by growth from new arrivals.

The theory goes that if NGO’s promote family planning and incentives for small families, then there won’t be people wanting to move from the ‘less than’ countries to the ‘more than’ countries. The proof that nothing good ever trickles down, is the fact that after decades of efforts by the UNFPA(United Nations Family Planning Association) and many others, we are still growing globally by 80 million a year on a planet which gained 6 billion in the last hundred years.

While high birth rates do indeed inspire migration, there are other reasons to leave your home, family, language and venture into unchartered experiences. Those reasons can be everything from economic opportunity to sexual and religious freedom to simply wanting to be reunited with family members. If it is easy to come and go, then human nature will bring countries with less material wealth to those with more.

Our 47 billion dollar per year foreign aid budget is designed to help other countries, but using immigration as a release valve for other countries’ overpopulation inspired poverty is a no-win path because relative to its resources the US is already seriously overpopulated. I often think how frustrating it must be for empowered and educated women and men already in the developed world to choose small families so that they may be raised with more open space, more water and wildlife only to look up in the sky and see high-rises being built to accommodate growth now mostly coming from immigration. If numbers matter, if we can agree that resources like water, open space, room on our highways and good jobs are local and limited, then overgrowing that capacity needs to be addressed wherever and however it is happening. Numbers can’t matter just when it’s about family planning, they must matter when it comes to immigration too. Humans are overrunning resources and living unsustainably everywhere on earth. It is understandable that people want to live better. That is why it is critical that every country address their own overpopulation problems by addressing both fertility and immigration. Garrett Hardin wrote about the metaphor of potholes. Potholes are a global problem but they must be addressed locally. That holds true with any environmental problem. Light pollution is an issue but we have a better chance of asking our local city authorities to pass laws about lighting type and usage than we do about insisting that something be done across the ocean in a country where we have no voice.

The world could not be set up any more unfairly. Barely an 1/8 of the word’s 8 billion live in a country that is desirable, the rest would like to move to where life could be better and yet that is impossible. How do 6+ billion pick up and move without creating chaos at their destination? Chaos is a relative thing. If you lived in Florida ten years ago the Florida of today appears to be bursting at the seams with traffic, development, pollution and loss of wild places. But if you come to Florida from a country so overcrowded and impoverished that malnutrition is everywhere, the 2.7 million increase will go unnoticed, it just seems like you have landed in paradise.

 We are melting under the weight of our carbon atoms, how can more people be the answer for anyone? As David Attenborough has been quoted as saying, “There are no issues that we wish to solve which wouldn’t be easier with less people.” Population groups will admit this privately to me but they fear that their funding might dry up if someone takes a truthful stand on the ‘I’ ( immigration) word. I want to acknowledge that reality while saying that we are smart enough to find the nuance in taking care of Americans and America that doesn’t include hatred or mistreatment of anyone.

 Who will pick the crops and do those jobs no one wants to do at the wages offered ? This represents a poor and uncaring argument which has real answers that industry ignores because it can. Immigrants who have it rough in their home countries are exploited, underpaid and hiring them ultimately undercuts domestic labor. Corporate America knows it can get away with inhumane treatment of a global workforce under our current set of laws. We subsidize the sugar industry so that unhealthy food remains cheap. We could subsidize domestic farm workers with those dollars, give them living conditions and competitive wages so that higher wages do not translate to outrageous prices for vegetables at the market.

Several population activists have recently asked me, “How can we lock our doors when we took over this country from First Nation Peoples?” The colonized world with all of its atrocities must be taught with all of its horrible truths in our schools and added to our country’s narrative, but it is the world we have inherited. We must not destroy the future based on the genocidal actions of the past. It is a sad reality that our country has so many genocides as its foundation. It is even sadder to use that as an excuse to be bad stewards of the land today, thereby allowing the further destruction and even more genocide because the destruction of our portion of the biosphere will gain steam under the weight of more feet.

The future will only be made worse by ignoring that growth comes from two places, TFR ( Total Fertility Rate) and FPC which I am coining now to mean( Feet Per Country.) While singularly focused on TFR, population groups are ignoring that FPC is what matters and where we have the most and only control now. FPC in the US is growing mainly by immigration.

We cannot help traffic by building more lanes. We cannot lower our carbon footprint enough by using reusable bags to buy our plant-based food stuffs. And we cannot do the sustainable thing and stabilize and reduce population in the US (and other developed countries ) by only offering to empower women in other countries. This narrative justifies looking the other way while lax immigration policies keep the US and other ‘first world’ countries growing unsustainably.

 Sensible immigration and employment enforcement should be said in the same mouthful as sensible gun policies. Both are intended to make our country more livable. E-verify for employers looking to make sure their employees can legally work here, limiting chain migration and curbing visas are just a few ways more potentially successful in an immediate way than the ineffective trickle down approach of offering birth control in other countries. We don’t even fund birth control properly here in the US! If we could give a microphone to the underserved in this country I wonder what they would say to the very idea of adding to what we already invest in other countries when their neighborhoods are crumbling due to lack of investment.

 Justice will be better served when America is not bloated with more people than its resources can handle. No immigrant bashing allowed, this is not personal.  However a recognition that only suffering lies ahead as America seems destined to grow by the tens of millions because we are afraid of telling the truth about how we are (mostly) growing. The latest Census projections also show that our nation is projected to grow past 400 million by 2060 and that 90% of the increase is linked to future immigrants and their descendants. Assuming that is true, how does sending aid and funding programs in other countries address this? The answer is that it doesn’t. It’s like bringing a set of matches to a forest fire.

All population groups are busy working to bring awareness to this terribly important and mostly ignored issue, but they must do more soul searching on their offering of solutions. Numbers matter and if we ( or any other country especially the developed ones ) are growing mostly by immigration than we cannot pretend that condoms and education are as important as enforceable sensible and humane immigration policies. I am not asking them to all take on this dicey issue, but I am asking them not to act like their solutions will actually work when it comes to reducing population within the US in the coming years. I am asking them to defer to those who are the experts and at least not work against the truth about US growth in an effort to appear to be among those who despise racism. If they truly want to be aggressively anti-racist then be honest about what life will be like for the already marginalized in the US as we grow by the tens of millions because we were afraid of the backlash of being honest with the American people.

 There is one good thing that trickles down that Wanda missed. Good ideas can trickle down enough to matter. Uniting behind sensible immigration policies is a humane idea and one that needs to trickle down so that the goals of population groups can be achieved in a time frame that will make a difference.

The Footprint of Cold Feet: Our Continued Environmental Impact After Our Run is Over

Not to be too morbid, but we must face up to the fact that we do not stop consuming when we stop breathing. While it has been fairly well documented that the whole death industry is pretty environmentally devastating, what about years after someone dies?

According to Joanne Tang (Greater Greater Washington, Jan 9 2019) Each year, burials in the United States use 30 million board feet of wood (each board foot is 12 inches by 12 inches by 1 inch), more than 104,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete for burial structures, and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid. This doesn’t even account for the granite dug out of quarries for tombstones.

Now cemeteries can be pastoral, quiet places suitable for mourners and can attract wildlife like coyotes, foxes, rabbits, birds and such, a welcomed respite amongst high rises and freeways. But long after the tears have dried and the mourners have gone home, cemeteries keep using resources. First of all they take up land, about one acre per one thousand people according to an initial Google inquiry, or about 330,000 acres in the US with our current population. But nowadays they have underground irrigation systems to water their acreage in the absence of rain and use herbicides to keep their lawns looking uniform. They also continue to impact the economy because their estates must continue to pay for their upkeep, so much for stopping our purchases when we are no longer above ground.

We often ask when a state like Colorado becomes popular, when its open space is coveted by those tired of crowded cities, what will happen to the water supply, the air quality and wildlife? The 'Californication' of Colorado has been well discussed as a trend that destroys the very beauty people seek. What has been less discussed is the fact that all of those new migrants will need to be put to rest somewhere. Since 2010, Colorado’s population has grown by 745,000 people. Assuming most will not have their bodies shipped back to their birthplaces, that means a death impact of needing to find 7,450 acres in cemetery space.

People will answer that cremation is a space saving answer, though many urns are also put into cemeteries requiring long term maintenance. But it may not be a viable option for everyone. According to Jade Colley ( May 3,2019 in Solace), many religions prohibit or discourage cremation including the Eastern Orthodox, Orthodox Jews, Islam, and some Presbyterians. Others suggest burials in natural areas so people can become trees or even burials at sea. Again all of this assumes there is still room for the millions who will need the space.

On a country wide level, as we continue to grow mostly by immigration, we need to consider that we will need to find more space to eventually bury these new arrivals and continue to service the land they occupy long after they are gone. According to Pew Research Center, “U.S. population projections show that if current demographic trends continue, future immigrants and their descendants will be an even bigger source of population growth. Between 2015 and 2065, they are projected to account for 88% of the U.S. population increase, or 103 million people, as the nation grows to 441 million.” While this might be great news for those in the funeral and tombstone industries, it doesn’t bode well for a country that will eventually be overrun with unsustainable cemeteries.

It is hard for even die-hard environmentalists to imagine our water supplies dwindling from overpopulation pressure, since our aquifers are out of sight and we are disconnected from seeing our reservoirs on a daily basis. But most people drive by cemeteries every week if not every day. It is easier for most of us to imagine the dwindling supply of land needed to accommodate the coffins of the future. Where in the world will we bury everyone?

When considering our ability to absorb new immigrants in a land that is suffering from so much abuse and overuse, it’s time to add this rather morbid issue to the table. As the Tombstone pizza commercial cleverly asks, “What do you want on your tombstone,?” I would answer, “Olives and mushrooms and a quote in granite that says “Overpopulation needs to be unearthed as an issue that really matters.”

Dirty Windshields and Greasy Streets

I dedicate this poem to the memory of naturalist extraordinaire, my cousin Jeff Shryer, who would've understood that I am mourning his loss and the loss of a time when there was more nature.

I long for dirty windshields

The kind so common not so long ago

All splattered

And scattered

with delicate wings of dragonflies

And insects of all kinds

Smeared into a mushy mess by my wiper’s attempts

To clear my driver’s view

After a day’s drive in the country

That is no more.

I long for squishy, greasy streets

Of mayfly hatches and frog migrations

Causing cars to swerve

And drivers to curse.

I was always sad to see so many

fabulous creatures who died because of me but

Their ancient magnificence

Was better off

When I had to scrape their innocent bodies

Off my windshields and tires

For that would mean they were still

Here in the kind of volume nature needs

Now I save money on carwashes

And mourn the loss of their collective beauty

And contemplate what it means to live in a more

sterile world without dirty windshields and greasy streets.

23 Million People Ago: California's Overpopulation Quagmire

On June 14th 2021 Dan Walters decided it was important to warn us about the pains of California’s so-called baby bust. (Calmatters.org)  The growth gravy train has brought superhighways, skyscrapers, 5G wireless Internet, mansions, swimming pools and all things modern to this popular state. California has been a beacon for all things sunny and extravagant for decades. Its mild weather, mountains and deserts, canyons and coastlines have been a magnet for outdoor lovers. Its farms have required laborers and its Hollywood studios attract actors and producers with dreams to become famous. To accommodate the popularity of a state with so much natural beauty and promises of a better life, we’ve had to pave it. We’ve sacrificed its beauty for the demand it can not sustain. We now must allow access to Yosemite via lottery and operate under the illusion that adding more lanes to freeways like the 405 will help with congestion. We also are forced to witness more victims of mudslides and wildfires in each successive year.

I first started going to California 23 million people ago. It was 1961 and I went there for my cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. I was 7 years old. Imagine much less traffic, the less frequent water shortages and the roomier visits to Yosemite back when California had 16.5 million residents. Due to a combination of immigration and natural growth the golden state’s population has risen to its current bloated total of 39.5 million in just 60 years, barely a blink of an evolutionary second.

While we spent most of our time at the synagogue and at relative’s homes on that visit, I’d like to imagine that the wildlife did better in those days too. With all the talk about schools having to close if the population doesn’t keep growing, I’d like to give voice to endangered animals like the San Joaquin kit fox. “More than 800 species in the state are now at risk – including half of all mammals and one-third of all birds. Of these, 134 species are listed as threatened or endangered, that is, facing a real possibility of extinction.” Leon Kolankiewicz Daily News (2008/2017). Though they will never get their name on Hollywood’s walk of fame, wildlife matters. The open space they need away from our kind has the added benefit of allowing the water cycles to work and the land to breathe.

Certainly putting the brakes on population growth and getting back to a much more sustainable number will have its de-growing pains, but we can figure out those challenges. We can restructure our economy and start seeing that growth in a finite place is as problematic as any economic Ponzi scheme. What we can’t figure out in our current perpetual love affair with growth, is how to bring back the land, its watersheds and all of the wonderful species so integral to the biodiversity that sustains us.

Striving to have less people in this once beautiful state will be more beneficial to the ability of our environment to sustain more wildlife and support a quality of life that doesn’t include the added air pollution, overall scarcity and mudslides of population growth. Framing current demographic trends as a ‘Baby Bust’ not only ignores immigration as a significant source of California’s population growth, it sounds a false alarm. I like to think of it as getting our collective undies in a bundle about how someone forget to polish the silverware on the Titanic. How ironic that focusing our attention primarily on humans is ultimately detrimental to the very species we are trying to protect. We must move upstream to see the long term impacts of our decisions to embrace growth over the ability of the land to support us. It will be tricky, because we must do this without invoking draconian measures because the ultimate goal is to prevent suffering, not cause it. If I were a betting person I’d bet that the wildlife and the future residents of California will thank us when there is still room to roam and water is still coming out of their taps.

The Right Drives Me Nuts, And the Left Makes me Crazy.

The polarization of our society is nothing new, but I used to be able to align myself on most issues with the left, thinking that they were at least trying to create a bigger tent and were less self-serving. But the Left is now cursed with the audacity of ‘wokeness’ symbolized by the lumping of Senator Al Franken in with the likes of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. Yes, the senator I knocked on doors for was taken down because we just couldn’t tolerate all his successes in the senate to help women and veterans, due to a photo staged years before on a USO tour to entertain our troops. In the interest of trying to reach unreasonable goals of perfection we shoot ourselves in the foot. The band, The Buffalo Springfield told us in their song, “For What Its Worth” “ There's battle lines being drawn
nobody's right if everybody's wrong,” nicely captures this sentiment.

It goes without saying that I join in the righteous indignation of police brutality suffered by so many in the black community right here where I live and countless other cities in the US. Any caring person would. Any person who deeply gets it that America is experienced very differently depending on your color of skin. Anyone who has studied our history through the lens of those who have lived a very different American experience know there are volumes of covered up history that needs our honest scrutiny.

In this regard, it’s easy to see why the “Right” can drive those who agree with the above statements into a mind-numbing frenzy.  The “Right’s” toxic cocktail of white supremacy peppered with misogyny, a huge dose of the all too familiar anti-Semitic tropes and frosted with a love of cult driven autocracy, makes even the most superficial conversations all but impossible. But the left’s deep embrace of a social justice-framed kinder gentler approach to humanity is not without an enrollment in crazy town too. It’s focus on trying to out-do each other’s wokeness is creating a variety of blind spots which are steeped in anthropocentrism and will not be our saving grace in the end.

 Both extremes are heading us off a cliff of ecological collapse. The right is offering a standing room only cattle car to ride in and the left is offering a comfortable ride in a high-speed electric train, both have the same destination. The first to experience the suffering are the already marginalized. Overpopulation activists, like myself, struggle to bring the conversation about justice upstream, because when the big picture is ignored, justice is never served. The only thing that can exist in the gap between the increasing demand for limited resources is suffering, misery and early death.

 To overcorrect and make every issue about how we treat individuals is not going to cut in when it comes to surviving as a whole society. I believe there is a sane, caring middle approach which is based on ecological sanity and honors our deep need to create a world which nurtures equality. The two are deeply intertwined.

The recent outcries about population decline have been nothing short of ridiculous. First, it’s the rate that is declining, not the actual population. Secondly, if we understood how overpopulated we already are it would be welcome news. Try to imagine how civility and empathy are going to thrive in a world of dwindling resources in the face of populations which continue to rise. Try to imagine treating your fellow human well when the water distribution lines lengthen, and the relentless heat of the unforgiving sun is beating down on you and your family.

The best example I can think of in how hamstrung we have become by both the right and the left is the issue of immigration. One narrative is full of hatred, xenophobic rhetoric, and demonization of those attempting to come into the US particularly though the southern border. They are the ‘build the wall’ people. The other side focuses their lens on the easy to document suffering of those, often children, who are only trying to better their lives by risking their lives to enter a country which has been built by those who came in various waves of immigration throughout its history. They are the ‘have a heart’ people.

The reason ‘none of the above ‘is the proper choice between the two narratives is that one uses inflammatory bigoted language to prevent ‘those people’ from entering the US and the other ignores the whole issue of sustainability in the name of their version of justice.

 It is okay to say sorry we are full. It is necessary to acknowledge the negative effects of the doubling of the US population in my lifetime. As a child, I woke up in a world of 180 million people. As an adult I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that we are nearing 330,000, 000. All around me I witness what we have lost in the process. More traffic, overcrowded schools, densely packed crime-riddled cities, more pollution, more homelessness, and less wildlife. Nothing in the US can improve with the addition of more people, which is now happening mostly due to immigration. Everything will get worse. Even living a modest lifestyle requires an extraordinary amount of water, wood, energy, and infrastructure. With already overtaxed aquifers, rivers drying up, where do we expect our water to come from when we do nothing to stop the hemorrhaging of resources created by our growth mainly due to outdated immigration policies?

In the modern world we still measure our success by growing which only means more pavement, less wildlife, less access to fresh water. As our carbon footprints increase with the more feet we allow into our borders, we will experience, more droughts and severe storms. Saying we are full need not and should not come from a place of racism. It must come from a place of ecological honesty and biological integrity. Both sides of the political dialogue seem to have skipped out on their ecology classes.

Meanwhile it’s time for those of us who want to live in a more sustainable, just, and peaceful world, where wildlife is not continually threatened by our growing presence, to grab a part of the political discourse and claim it for sanity. It’s the only way justice can truly be served, for our better future is only possible when ecology gets a seat at the table.

An Open Letter to Sarah Kaplan of the Washington Post

Dear Sarah,

This is personal. You have my late mother’s beautiful name first name and my niece’s last name. We share a long history of Ashkenazi Jewish roots that might even get Henry Louis Gates of the PBS show "Finding Your Roots," excited. You have obviously absorbed the compassion that is baked into the clay of our people who have fought and are still fighting antisemitism going on 6,000 years of our persecuted history.

This otherwise admirable trait has however, seems to have tainted your article claiming that overpopulation has nothing to do with climate change. The history and topic of overpopulation is often a trigger word for those, like yourself, who are always on the lookout for those who have racist intentions. But I invite you, as a journalist, to look deeper. Look deeper into the science, the ecology. I invite you to investigate why someone like me, with your same background, would have written books and numerous articles over the years about how this issue is itself causing not only climate change but so much of the suffering you are trying to prevent.

I first got interested in the overpopulation issue when my rabbi at Beth El synagogue in Minneapolis had our discussion group read Paul Ehrlich's book, “The Population Bomb,” when I was in 10th grade. I went back to the same synagogue as an adult, the year Jane Goodall came to speak there for Earth Day, to discuss the reason Jews should care deeply about this issue which is causing our planet to bake and our resources to dwindle. In the dozens of speeches I have given on overpopulation around the world, I make sure I tailor each one to fit the audience. That time I started, “It’s all Rabbi Abelson’s fault” referring to the way he required us to read Ehrlich’s book so many years before. There was a lot of uncomfortable twitching in the audience because, like me, they had been raised to focus on replacing the Jews slaughtered in the holocaust by having at least three children.

The US has grown by a 125,000,000 people since I was in 10th grade. How can that growth be dismissed as impacting the issue you care so much about? The answer is it can’t. The continuing growth of US population, now mostly due to immigration, in one of the worlds’ largest greenhouse gas emitters can’t help but be a factor in climate change.

There are three important things to consider. The first is the concept of infinite growth on a finite planet. Our resources are going down rapidly as our population continues to rise. The addition of nearly 6 billion in the most recent century all needing and wanting food, water, shelter and energy is often unnamed source of so many of the problems you talk about. The second is that it is a mistake to focus solely on the rise of global temperature and its terrifying consequences.

Overpopulation is behind our need to continually destroy habitats to keep people fed and housed. Water scarcity is becoming a huge issue as you must know, but it is not just due to climate change, there are now billions more people who are thirsty. The third is the most important. It speaks to our mutual concern about preventing suffering, misery and early death. We must reduce the gap between declining resources and increasing demand. While it may be more politically correct to try to increase our crop yields and a myriad of resource-costly inventions, that only keeps up the demand for our country and our planet’s limited resources.

I hope you can join me upstream to see and discuss the big picture of the collective human footprint that is not only about heavy duty energy consumers but also about how many total feet that need and are going to need even the basic resources in the years ahead. Overpopulation not only causes climate change, but is responsible for injustice around the world. You cannot have justice in a world grappling for dwindling resources. Working to educate people with your platform as a journalist about the truth about overpopulation and its role in climate change and loss of biodiversity etc, would be a great example of journalistic rigor.

Sincerely,

Karen I. Shragg

Author of Move Upstream a Call to Solve Overpopulation

www.movingupstream.com

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.”