The Flaw in the Statue of Liberty and its impact on our endangered species

I wrote a version of this essay in 2019, when the US had 4.5 million less people, in spite of the pandemic which killed 700,000 Americans, so I thought it was time to revisit the topic.

The talented and hard-working men who replaced our patio door had heavy Russian accents. I soon discovered that they were from the same part of Russia, Belarus where my grandparents were born. I have intentionally traveled to countries populated with people with different languages because I enjoy learning and absorbing different cultures. I have devoted my professional life as a naturalist to make our nature center accessible to everyone. The doctor title before my name was earned in a degree that was steeped in social justice.

I have not wavered from my steadfast belief in the justice for all concept in our constitution, but I am continually stunned by how so many of our policies completely ignore nature’s laws and the way we as a species depend on them. It is time to have a more nuanced discussion about immigration that includes the environment. In this time, on this planet, in our country we have a reality shaped by how many people are already here.

The Statue of Liberty, was originally known as “Liberty Enlightening the World” and was given by France in 1886 to celebrate the Franco-American alliance during the Revolutionary war. It was given when our population was just over 50 million people as a gift to celebrate liberty. When the poem by poet Emma Lazarus was added later in 1903, it was a game changer for it turned statue which graces Liberty island in New York’s harbor, into a symbol of a different notion: as a never-ending welcome mat for the world’s downtrodden. It is a narrative that has permeated our culture for 118 years. I am arguing that it has contributed to the gaining of 280 million people since these words were added to the base of the statue.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The flaw in that sentiment is that it assumes that our country will always and forever more be better off with more and more people. It ignores the land stolen from so many Native American Indian tribes, still working to get it back. It assumes we will have enough farmland, fresh water, open space, wildlife, wildlands and everything that makes for a quality of life, now and forever more.

When the currently silenced voice of environmental measurement is allowed a seat at the decision-making table, it will speak a shocking story. It turns out, according to data from Global Footprint Network that if we are to look at immigration and the US population through the eyes of sustainability then we passed up our sustainable numbers at least 150 million people ago.

I am in my sixties now. Our population in the US has more than doubled in my lifetime. Those additional 167 million consumers have transformed this country. They are responsible for our crowded cities and traffic congestion, more pollution and less open land. More people make a wide variety of negative impacts on the environment on which we all depend, and it doesn’t matter from this perspective the nationality, religion or race of those additional people. It is significant however, that we are growing in the US it mostly due to our ecologically outdated immigration policies, not due to our fertility rate. The Census Bureau projects that the US population will increase by another 79 million people by 2060, passing 400 million in 2058. Almost all of that increase will be due to immigration. Therefore, we can hand out all the condoms on street corners that we want. We can even use the Endangered Species Condoms so cleverly produced years ago by the Center for Biological Diversity, but we will not affect US population growth much if we focus on our total fertility rate, which is now officially 1.7 per woman. With the current and increasingly more permissive immigration policies, we would be best to focus on Washington DC and the policies currently in the hopper. Here comes one of the metaphors I am becoming known for, we are trying to clean up the disease of US overpopulation with soap and water when antibiotics are required. Antibiotics (aka sensible immigration policies) are more expensive and have side effects, but they do at the end of the day save the patient.

We are all consumers. We can and should try to consume less but we all need water, energy, food, jobs, open land and none are in a limitless supply. The consumption in the US is so high that those who keep the statistics on this like the Global Footprint Network, tell us that it would take five planets to supply the globe with enough resources if everyone were to consume like we do in the US. Adding more high-level fossil fuel consumers to the US due to increased immigration from lower footprint nations is not what our warming planet needs.

Yes, overpopulation is indeed a global problem, but it will be much easier to stabilize and reduce our own population with our own political systems than to try work only on the global stage. Population Media Center and UNFPA (United Nations Family Planning Association) have wonderful missions and have had some admirable successes on the global population stage, and it is critical that both get much more funding. However, since they both formed in 1998, we have added 1.8 billion people to the planet. They have an extraordinary and overwhelming task before them no matter how well they are funded. It would be so helpful if each of the 195 countries recognized by the UN assisted them by recognizing that their own futures are in peril if they do not take on the task of addressing the overpopulation issues within their own borders.

Let’s put in it terms of saving endangered species. Those who wish to save them might listen to the argument that we need a more local approach to overpopulation. They may agree that although still very challenging, it is at least theoretically easier to save Florida panther from extinction that it is to save the African Elephant. Both are suffering from overpopulation and the way it ravages ever-shrinking habitat on both continents. Clearly, no matter how many address labels and cloth bags we collect from our donations to international conservation groups, we have more political power to save the Florida panther.

In 1973, I vacationed in Florida, the same year that the Florida panther, a subspecies of mountain lion for which their hockey team is named, went on the endangered species list. The population of Florida then was just 7 million. The panther formerly ranged from Canada to the Andes but was hunted to near extinction to protect livestock and make room for humans. Thanks to intensive conservation efforts there are estimates of 120-150 Florida panthers now trying to exist alongside 22 million humans within its borders. Many are hit by cars and struggle to find suitable habitat. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, most of those 15 million Floridians added in 48 years are due to inward migration followed closely by foreign immigration. Florida with its shrinking habitats and some of the worst traffic congestion in the country has truly taken Lazarus’s poem to heart. It did name the Florida panther as the state’s official animal back in 1982, but it needs to do much more.

I wish I had the space to do justice to the 1,300 endangered species on the US list like the lesser prairie chicken or the lovely pollinator, the Karner blue butterfly, but that’s the point of this article, we are all running out of space due to overpopulation and our continued growth.

I acknowledge that this is a very difficult discussion to have. I have personally benefited by having ancestors who came here. I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. But I know for sure that human numbers and how we grow is a part of the equation that needs to be on the table. Overpopulation has been ignored, dismissed and trampled upon for far too long, often under the pretense of political correctness. We absolutely cannot allow our overpopulated country to be an excuse for treating immigrants inhumanely. Atrocities are indefensible. But it is equally hard to imagine that we can make good decisions about our country’s future regarding immigration policies while ignoring the tragic state of our country’s limited life-giving resources. Is it really fair to welcome people into a place that is already over-pumping its aquifers and draining its rivers to support unsustainable development? I know for sure it isn’t fair to the hundreds of species hanging on by a thread.

We must acknowledge that we all suffer when we exceed our country’s environmentally determined limits, and we have already exceeded them by many measures. We must try our best to walk that fine line between loving our fellow human and our planet’s support systems. It would have been great if a Emma Lazarus would have added these words to the end of her poem “until it is no longer sustainable to do so.”

The Statue of Liberty would then truly have an opportunity honor the US, its future and its goals of liberty and justice for all.

The Same Rules Apply: Gaggles of Geese, Herds of Deer and Swarms of People

Cultural diversity and biodiversity are intimately related. But those who fight for one rarely dialogue with those that fight to preserve the other. Perhaps it all started in high school. The bell rang and you went to a completely different class, with unique textbooks and teachers. Biology class was different from music, language and social studies. It had different assignments, perspectives and teachers. No wonder we have developed into a world where we can focus our lives on one arena without incorporating the other. In today’s human-centric world we are supposed to focus exclusively on cultural diversity and righting the wrongs of the past, not a bad goal at all, but one that cannot be achieved without a tandem look into the perilous condition of our country and worlds’ biodiversity. As the world tumbles off a human created cliff of neglected biodiversity it will take all of us with it, and the already marginalized will suffer first.

This all means that while it may be okay to teach about population limits for animals like geese and deer, it cannot continue to be out of bounds to discuss population limits for people. It is feared it will create a world of even more unequally applied policies. Fair enough, that fear is actually grounded in both history and present-day continuations of deeply ingrained racism. But it is also fair to proclaim that unless we find some way around this politically dicey quagmire we will be strangled by our good intentions. Ironically, stopping these discussions because some may be afraid of unintended consequences is exactly what will cause nature to have very intended ones.

Let’s examine the status of the white tail deer, for example. While we were busy overpopulating  the US in the last century ( we’ve added 222 million since 1921) we were also busy creating  the deer’s preferred fragmented habitat. We are helping to encourage the deer population because they prefer what is referred to as ‘edge’ habitat. Deer first evolved on the planet between 10-20 million years ago. Due to our increased presence, in the last 100 years, this large mammal increased its population from 1 to 30 million in the continental US.  One deer needs about 7 pounds of food a day, on average. You do the math. Instead of needing to provide 2 ½ billion +  pounds of the over 600 plants that deer eat a century ago, we now must provide over 75 ½  billion pounds of plants per year. No wonder my most of my tomato plants this year found their way into this ungulate’s digestive tract.  

 Canada Geese have increased their populations 4-fold in the last century, due to deliberate re-introduction into the US and due to their preference for mowed lawns and golf courses. They are thriving in a world where the endangered species list is gaining more victims. My state of Minnesota now has the second largest population of geese in the lower 48. When I directed a nature center not too far from the Minneapolis International Airport, it was discovered that ‘our’ geese, were now finding their way into plane engines. Not so fun fact, the Minneapolis International Airport is a stone’s throw away from where we once counted 77 goose nests in our 70 acre marsh. A goose reduction program was instituted immediately. Ironically in the ‘70’s geese were brought into my nature center, their wings clipped in an effort to increase their numbers. I will never forget the day, during my tenure there, when one of my favorite walkers came to my office with muddy knees. A goose had knocked her down, she had come too close to a nearby nest. Every effort was made to reduce the population of this human made problem. Egg shaking was tried, but the female’s do not eat while waiting 31 days for their young to hatch and they will starve if they remain unhatched. Netting was also tried. Nothing worked until we were fortunate enough to have coyotes move into the nature center with geese on their menu. I say all of this because we are no different. Humans are subject to the same laws of ecology. The geese were innocent even as they gathered and made the boardwalks greasy with their excrement. They became hated by many, nonetheless, even though we had artificially increased their numbers and then scratched our collective heads when they responded to our efforts with too much success.  

Every animal on earth needs three basic things: food, water and shelter. Add energy for humans. Those do not come in unlimited supplies and something always suffers under the weight of too much demand for those limited resources. When populations get out of control it usually means that natural boundaries of curbing growth have been eliminated and food has been increased. Take away the wolf, the deer’s natural predator, and cut down the forests for increased population growth- fueled development and you have a perfect storm for population explosion. Encourage geese by clipping their primary wing feathers and imprinting them on new habitats, in a landscape with few predators and multiple lawns and you get the same.

So why have humans become so numerous in spite of multiple wars and disease? The same rules apply. A human created petri dish where overpopulation thrives is brought about by a confluence of many factors including: religious edicts for large families in order to keep power in the hands of the already mighty, lack of access to birth control, lack of women’s empowerment in patriarchal cultures, and large investments in curing disease and preventing accidents. In individual countries like the US, numbers are increased by unrestricted immigration policies favoring cheap labor and social justice narratives.  Math has a role to play here too. When two people have even just two children, in four generations there will be 8 progeny.

We must form a bio-centric world view. It has always been required, for to keep growing in a limited landscape is a death sentence for humans        and much of our wild populations too. A human centric world full of hospitals and the worshipping of growth by our economic systems is not human centric in the long run. To promote humans to the exclusion of wildlife to is create misery, suffering and early death for humans.

We see it over and over again. Destroy the forests to build housing and human infrastructure and watch the soil erode away. Starvation follows planting crops in the sand that is left. To place more and more people in denser and denser cities is to ask the water supply to do more than it can. Lake Mead is crying for us to pay attention to the suicidal continuation of growing population in an already water scarce region. Our economic system was set up to keep expanding using natural capital converted to wealth chasing a story with collapse as its only possible ending. These are just a few of endless examples of the need to stay in our ecological lane, just like geese and deer and so many other examples from the wild world.

Geese and deer do not overconsume however, they just consume. They do not own jet skis or private aircraft. Overconsumption is a simply a result of too many of them in a given area. Their higher than normal numbers are almost always due to our failings as the species in charge. We get rid of natural predators and wonder why rabbits are so numerous. My nature center had room for 3 deer, the forest became a wasteland when their numbers grew to 45 in 5 years. No one wanted to do the responsible thing and cull them, but they also wanted the forests to be full of birds and other wildlife. The bad actions of the past only leave us with worse choices today, but they are far better than what nature has in store.

Humans, however, can and do overconsume especially in the developed world. It becomes particularly egregious when our tax laws and poor union regulations help to create billionaires. Private jets, yachts and multiple homes have huge carbon footprints in a world choking on its own fumes.

Remove those billionaires, however and we still have an attack on biodiversity due to our huge out of control numbers. Adding millions of people in the US and billions worldwide in the last 100 years all needing fresh water, a source of food, energy, health care and materials for housing and infrastructure is a demand causing the earth to throw up its hands as if to say, What are you thinking? The conversation seems to always go south and become a discussion about the horrors of attempting any reasonable solution. That is a reflection of focusing solely on cultural diversity.

It is reasonable to require cities to prove they have enough water to support any new development before it is permitted. It is reasonable to first calculate the country’s ability to absorb immigrants without harming existing biodiversity and the quality of life of those already here. It is reasonable to look at the world through a more holistic lens with our specie as only one part of a complex, fragile system.

Nature has a its own chaotic solution to our overpopulated world knocking at our door right now. Out of control wildfires, stronger more devastating hurricanes and lengthening droughts are messages from a planet we have overwhelmed with our numbers and appetites. Business as usual will not work it was never on track to serve us. Biodiversity must be respected and cultivated for cultural diversity to ever get a stronghold in society. Nature is a harsh teacher, but here is its main lesson : There can be no equality on a dead planet.

Don't Give Incentives to Boost US Population ( printed in the Sarasota Herald Tribune 8/4/21)

Politicians in both parties want to solve the “problem” of declining fertility.

Recently the Biden administration began sending checks to parents with minor children. Republican senators like Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have proposed their own plans to offer financial rewards for having kids. These leaders hope that by subsidizing childrearing, they can incentivize people to have more babies - and thus prevent a “population bust.”

These tactics display a mild contempt for the millions of Americans who are intentionally choosing to have smaller families. And they display an ignorance of - or apathy toward the disastrous environmental consequences caused by excessive population growth.

This sensitive subject that become somewhat taboo even within the environmentalist movement- which was originally founded to mitigate the ecological destruction resulting from rapid growth. Uncomfortable though it might be, we can’t afford to ignore these consequences. It will be impossible to conserve our wildlands, waterways, and wildlife if the U.S. population continues to boom.

The number of people in the United States grew by 22.7 million over the past decade. That means the country added 2.3 million people- roughly the population of Houston- every single year. America is projected to add another 75 million people over the next 40 years, mostly through immigration.

The notion that we’re facing a population bust is delusional. And as we allow and encourage growth, we are ravaging our limited resources. In metropolitan areas our capacity to feed, house and employ everyone is under severe strain. More than a half million Americans are homeless; some 34 million live in poverty.

As we struggle to support people, we are also straining nature. Ecologists use the term “overshoot” to describe the phenomenon of human demand exceeding the capacity for an ecosystem to renew itself- for example, when we consume freshwater more quickly that an aquifer can replenish, or overfish a species to extinction.

According to the Global Footprint Network, which measures this ratio between resource use and renewal capacity, the United States is deep into overshoot mode, sucking up nature’s bounty at up to 150% of the ecosystem’s capacity to renew. Meanwhile, studies show that as the human population grows in a given area, that area loses natural spaces and agricultural land for grazing and growing crops.

The effects have been especially acute in fast-growing states. Florida, for instance lost 10% of its natural lands, 23% of croplands and 39% of rangelands between 1982 and 2010 according to a report on urban sprawl by environmental planner Leon Kolankiewicz.

Many of us have witnessed human-driven environmental degradation with our own eyes, from the suburban sprawl that takes over former wildlands to the extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change.

Encouraging rapid growth- either through immigration or paying people to have more kids than they otherwise would- is a short-sighted response to a nonexistent problem.

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.