When Hope Gets in the Way, the Audacity of Integrity

 Hope is in the way of progressing toward a better world. Hope feels good but it takes away our agency which is why religious institutions have used it so effectively for millennia. Without focusing on the power within us, without realizing we have critical minds and access to wise council, we become more vulnerable. Power structures like religious institutions and religion wannabees, take advantage of our hearts and reach into our open wallets.

The world is taking us down the ever-frightening path driven by overpopulation and its favorite monster-in-charge, climate change. Hope will not get us out of ever-increasing storms, drought, water scarcity, famine and everything that awaits our planet of 8 billion consumers, growing by 81 million per year, on our limited earth with its delicate biosphere. Hope did not serve the Jews of Europe well in the 1930’s. Taking action served them. Those who were the first to lose hope that Hitler was going to go away on his own were in a better position to save themselves.

Barack Obama wrote about the audacity of hope. Hope is integral to his philosophy of creating a better world. I wish to counter his message with the idea that integrity is where we need to land. Hope is sold by religion, and we know where that has brought us. Hope is why people, are still having multiple children in a world which all scientific forecasts say will make dystopian films look like child’s play. Hope is why we are giving lunch bags and bus tickets to people pouring over our borders, with complete disregard for our laws, in hopes they will have a safe landing. Hope is what male celebrities have too much of when then have children into their 70’s hoping that they will live long enough so they can see their progeny graduate high school. We need a cold bucket of ice water dumped on our heads and with it a reality check.

What we need to do is quit hoping and start looking deep into the eyes of the future which has no room for more of us and our sprawling ways. We need to live with the integrity of knowing that taking our foot off the economic and population growth pedal is the only collective act which has the power to lessen the suffering that lies ahead. It is the only thing to do which can possibly point us into the right direction. If we care at all about any kind of future for mankind and the wildlife species being destroyed by our errant ways, we must turn away from hope and turn toward integrity. The integrity of committing to the proper action also has a great dividend of creating a more compassionate world. Working to stop a development project, for instance, is a compassionate act towards those already living in the area under a cloud of scarcity.

We also don’t need to go down the rabbit hole of despair. Desperation leads to violence, and we already have more of that than we can comprehend. We need to plant ourselves in the middle of those two emotions and move forward with a mission to lessen the pain that lies ahead. We need to put on our big boy and big girl pants and quit shooting the messengers who have been warning about the dangers of anthropocentric policies for decades. We are not the problem. Hope, peppered with deep denial, is the problem. While we have been conditioned by religion to desire the discourse and promise of hope, we need to let it go. To tame our ways will be painful but it will be much easier than enduring what nature has in store for us if we continue business as usual.

We need to stop hoping and start focusing on what can be done to start moving toward a world of less. There is a laundry list of things we needed to start doing yesterday to build up our integrity. We need to do these things to lighten our footprint and help the biosphere survive, for without it we will have the same fate as the dinosaurs only this time we will be the meteor which starts the journey to our extinction.

To build integrity back into our ecological world we need to immediately stop the most egregious forms of consumption and quit incentivizing growth. Here is just some of the actions we must take:

-We have to quit building dams and take down the ones already in place for removing them improves water quality for wildlife and decreases their sediment load.

-We need to stop trying to build the tallest buildings as if we somehow win when we take all those resources of concrete and steel from the earth.

- We need to quit manufacturing luxury cruise liners, stretch limos and giant SUV’s.

-We need to stop making zip lines through the canopies of our forests.

- We need to quit building energy and resource sucking mansions and creating the class of people who can afford them with the loopholes in our tax structures and the unforgivable way we take advantage of laborers.

-We have to stop the city policies of tax increment financing, for developers and start giving tax breaks to those who live in smaller dwellings with smaller families.

-We need to stop thinking more technology is the answer to our planet crisis, for each new device takes resources and creates pollution in its wake.

-We need to override overshoot by first stabilizing then reversing population growth however and wherever it is happening within our borders for although overpopulation is a global problem it can only be solved at home. Growth happens either by birthrates which are too high for a variety of easily researchable reasons or because immigration policies are too unrestricted and unenforced. Both must be firmly and fairly addressed from a place of integrity depending on the country and each situation.

-We need to quit our religion of worshipping lottery winners and their grotesque purchases for their yachts may be affordable to their budgets, but they are too costly to the planet in both raw materials and fuel. Statistically the very rich are the largest contributors per capita to climate change, we must hold them accountable.

-We need to encourage work in the artistic sector for our creative energy is the only source of energy without limits.

-We need to start giving rivers the right to flow to the ocean and wild animals the right to live out their lives in a wilderness that must be valued.

-We need to give the natural world the right to exist for its existence is directly tied to our own.

At the end of the day, we must be on the journey of integrity as the poet Rumi once said, “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” To start this walk we must stop counting on wishbones and immediately begin concentrating on strengthening our backbones, I sure ‘hope’ we will!

Our State of the Union? We’re Overpopulated ! Why Our Rhetoric Must Match this Reality

I turned 18 in 1972. It was during the Vietnam War and I couldn’t wait to vote for George McGovern, the anti-war candidate. I just graduated high school and had little knowledge of the overpopulation issue back when the country had just over 209 million people in it. Now in 2023, with a state of the union measured in rhetoric more than reality, our population has hit 333 million and it still growing. All of those additional people need resources which cannot and have not kept up with demand for limited resources. Water scarcity in the parched Southwest is already a daunting issue.

SOTU, the State of the Union, our Union, is first and foremost overpopulated and that is behind our failure to bring about a better world and a brighter future for the next generation. Our population got a huge increase after World War II due to higher birth rates and I am a part of that baby boom generation. But the increase we are experiencing now is from the kind of mass immigration that is so unsustainable many mayors are crying for help. While we focus on what to properly call the now majority of people coming in without papers or vetting, the problem remains at the heart of our continuing decay in the state of our union.

I can think of no political job more challenging than that of a being a mayor of a major US city. While many mayors of big cities take home six figure salaries, those who take their responsibilities seriously work hard for their paycheck. They are responsible for keeping their citizens safe, addressing crime, homelessness, traffic, jobs and all issues surrounding quality of life. I think they would all agree, at least behind closed doors, that adding more people to their jurisdiction will always create more problems than it solves.

We need a dialogue that both recognizes the deeply entrenched international problems causing desperate people to pour in across our borders and that continuing to let them in is creating disastrous results within our borders. Allowing a non-stop flow of new residents to our already overcrowded cities is its own kind of cruelty. We claim in our rhetoric, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, to be about fairness and caring for the downtrodden. That makes for a good soundbite, but a horrible reality.

It is cruel to the working class, who live in underserved neighborhoods, many of them minorities. To try to divide our limited resources further to accommodate newcomers is a slap in the face particularly to African Americans still struggling for their fair shake of American generosity. This is best illustrated in the fine book by Roy Beck, “The Back of the Hiring Line”, A 200-year history of Immigration Surges, Employer bias and the Depression of Black Wealth.” (2021).

It is cruel to ask our working class to accommodate more people into their already overtaxed neighborhoods. The kindness in our political rhetoric must match the reality on the streets. There’s nothing like the social injustice of offering kindness to those from foreign lands at the expense of our own citizens.

It's expensive to our budgets and costly to American workers to keep trying to accommodate the demand put on city budgets by the increasing flow of mass immigration. According to an article by Erin Dwinell of the Heritage Foundation last September, the costs are real and steep. Dwinell is quoted as saying, "Last year, Philadelphia elected to budget $300,000 to publicly fund immigration attorneys for aliens facing deportation.” “The New York City Council budgeted $16.6 million the same year for the same purpose.” “Local taxpayers there should expect actual costs to exceed those budgets, as the numbers of illegal aliens, cases and appeals continue to rise."  These are only two of many examples. No city in America has an inexhaustible budget. No city has inexhaustible natural resources, yet our immigration policies currently reflect a premise of limitlessness.

Hanging out a no vacancy sign is an act of tough love and a much-needed relief for the way cities are becoming overwhelmed with immigrants. What city could possibly absorb 900 desperate migrants a day without creating chaos both to residents and to the migrants themselves? Certainly not El Paso Texas where a state of emergency has recently been declared. Shipping migrants to northern cities has been criticized as a political ploy, but it does demonstrate that this is a problem that is not just a border issue and needs immediate attention before our already ailing cities collapse under the weight of the demands of from millions of newcomers.

Mayors and the 'social justice' people who vote them in, want to be seen as caring by providing “free” services for an indefinite number of migrants. Any given city’s capacity for services is certainly not being decided by those already feeling burdened by the crush of people already living there and those working hard to provide housing for the homeless. It is a lawbreaking move that makes for good rhetoric for those who have been deluded into thinking that our economic pot is endless, and our open space and fresh water will be available forever. 

No amount of government hand-outs can increase space, decrease traffic, or increase the quality of life for those who are here already paying taxes and already needing government help. The only government action that can help our country continue to do serve its citizenry, is to do what we can to take our foot off the population growth pedal in ways that are already available to us.

How ironic that winner of the ’72 election, President Nixon, was more concerned about overpopulation than the president is today. He even created the 'Commission on Population Growth and the American Future'. That future is now and must be addressed with a new story of sustainable border enforcement if our rhetoric of caring for America is to ever match our reality.

 Reply  

How Best to Invest: Turning the Tide on US Overpopulation

I have authored about 15 books to date, but none has received the attention of my Move Upstream, A Call to Solve Overpopulation book. This 104-page primer to the solvable, albeit tortured problem of the burden of human numbers was published by the good folks at Freethought House Press in 2015. I am one lucky author. How many authors/activists get offers to have their book sent out to those who need to wake up on this issue? Well, I have had two, totaling $13,000.00. Two concerned citizens were willing to donate to the task of sending my book out to CEOs of NGOs and news organizations so that they would start working on spreading the word about the problem we have collectively ignored for a dangerously long period of time.

This is not a thank you note to them, however. Indeed, I am eternally grateful for the way my book inspired their willingness to open their wallets. But as an activist I have to ask myself, would this action really work? How and who would do the legwork to mail out the book and how would we keep track of the efficacy of this effort? Population groups are the only ones willing to do it and yet with their small staffs and tight work schedules this becomes problematic, besides where is the guarantee that they will read it? Who reads the books they order themselves let alone an unsolicited one? This then begs the question, if you had a significant amount of money just waiting for the perfect benefactor, who would that be? If one deeply cares about overpopulation, growth and the way it is exacerbating climate change, traffic, unemployment and wildlife issues to name a few, how could one most appropriately donate money?  

There are population groups with a focus on the very global nature of this issue and discuss the importance of supporting small families with women’s empowerment and access to birth control worldwide. There are other population groups which focus on changing our narrative in the US toward one of stabilization and the reduction of our numbers to lessen the pressure of human numbers on our environment and infrastructure. Then there are those who are working both to change the narrative and have a presence on the ‘Hill’, as they say, getting their hands dirty in the legislative policies which will shape our future.

We are living the results today of many legislative decisions made long ago. For example, the Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 authorized construction of a dam in Boulder, or Black, Canyon. Before that the Colorado River flowed uninterrupted along its 1,450-mile course from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California. Today those river dams are showing their wear and demonstrating why their construction was fraught with problems from the very beginning. But this is not the place to go into all of that, just suffice it to say that long term change for the better or for the worse begins and ends in Congress. While it’s important to be a part of groups which are trying desperately to articulate a de-growth narrative, it is not going to be productive unless it is ultimately tied to good legislation and its enforcement.

When it comes to US overpopulation, my country of birth which has  added approximately 204 million since I was born, there is a problem with too global of a focus when it comes to the wrath of overpopulation. The well-worn slogan, THINK GLOBAL ACT LOCAL applies to our current state of overpopulation and growth in the US. If you are concerned about the American Ocelot, the multiple lanes of clogged freeways, the scarcity of water and the draining of our national budget, more people will make things so much worse. Adding more people to the US in our current state of overshoot is like pouring gasoline on a fire in your home and expecting your house to be in the next edition of Parade of Homes.

So, the question I come back to for those focused on US population is rather than sending my book out to a myriad of resources what else could be done? The answer to me is clear, give the money, your hard-earned money to an NGO already neck deep in the fight to protect America from the onslaught of growth both by helping to change the narrative and by monitoring the legislation which could help stop our continued growth. Our growth is mostly happening by both legal and now mostly illegal immigration, the NGO which is engaged in this battle must be the focus of donations since they have their focus on the pulse of our continued unsustainable policies. We must go beyond looking at this issue from a downstream individual perspective and focus on the long-term results of our actions today. Legal or illegal, from whatever country, the US is already deep in overshoot and needs to put an end to policies which are essentially dog whistling to migrants that we have an open door or at least an unenforced door at our borders.

The NGO which has been actively doing this honorable work is NumbersUSA. The employees of Numbers work tirelessly on the Hill, online, and behind the scenes to do just what people who read and love my book desire. They are already highly skilled and motivated and just need dollars that are untethered to projects like the distribution of my book. Started in 1996, by founder Roy Beck, its motives are stellar and not nefarious as some would claim. Roy and the team he has built around him, including the new highly qualified CEO now running the organization, are all about maintaining the quality of life of Americans. That quality is diminished, every time we dance around the issue of immigration limits because it is and can be weaponized to hurt people. The staff of NumbersUSA are trained ‘dancers’ and they know how best to use donations to help achieve the goal of addressing overpopulation in the way it needs to be addressed. They work on both sides of the aisle and need to because that is how legislation gets passed.

While I have no say in where folks deeply concerned about US overpopulation send their donation dollars, I would like to strongly and most confidently suggest that instead of putting time, effort and funds to distributing my book, they give it directly to NumbersUSA then sit back and watch how a well-run NGO gets things done. That’s what they have been set up to do and to me that is the most effective way of making sure our mutual goals of a better, more ecologically and economically sane America can be attained. At very least I recommend to stop supporting US population NGOs which continue, along with so many others, to ignore the driving force of untethered mass immigration, for they are asleep at the wheel.

The Slick Packaging of Misinformation, How Pro-growth Narratives are Hurting all of US

This essay is in response to Jeff Wise and his Intelligencer article so frustratingly entitled, “America Could Use Another Boom.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/americas-population-could-use-a-boom.html .

His subtitle warns us that, “Failing to address population decline may exact a heavy toll.” Number one, we are not in decline. Number two, the US is overpopulated and deep into overshoot, a concept I don’t think Mr. Wise is familiar with at all. Overshoot means that we are demanding more than our resources can give. Just consulting the website of the Ecological Footprint Network would have been a way for him to bone up on the science of overshoot. Just glancing at the US Census Bureau’s population clock https://www.census.gov/popclock/ would counter his claim of population decline.

There is no other way of stating my dismay at the strung together narrative of lies and half-truths in this article other than attempting to ask Mr. Wise directly, “What are you thinking and from where are you getting your statistics?” This article is so chock full of misinformation and lack of understanding of where we are ecologically as we start 2023, that I don’t even know where to begin. 

Yes, I will give you that there are some small towns sadly losing population, but that can be resolved in many other more sustainable ways from within our country and is no excuse for thinking that at 332 million we need more people.

What statistics would impress you that we need to avoid a population boom? Perhaps the fact that since the first Earth Day we have added approximately 131 million Americans to our land creating a demand for fresh water that is already compromised in a world of varying climate and increasing droughts?

And may I further ask, what color is the sky in your world when you say that immigration  in is decreasing when it is the way we are growing? The New York Times ran a story in February of 2022 with the headline, “Amid Slowdown, Immigration is Driving U.S. Population Growth.” Even NBC News reported last October that “The number of undocumented immigrant crossings at the South WestSouthwest border for fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking the previous annual record by more than 1 million according to customs and border protection data.” Please note that these are major news sources. Is there any evidence that could get through to you and your pro-growth stance? For your eyes must be opened to the reality that mass immigration continues in an upward trend. When the resources of everything from housing to our water supplies are already in critically short supply, my claim that we cannot accommodate a boom in population is just the reality of life in the US today, ; it is simply and morally about keeping the United States of America afloat. Recommending a boom under in a country experiencing overshoot is like saying cigarette smokers could use another pack and diabetics could use a trip to the dessert bar.

It frightens me that most people don’t have the time I am taking today to think about what you and others have written, often with slick words and important sounding statistics about the false threat of depopulation. Not only are we continuing to grow by millions per year, depopulation is exactly what we need. It is the antidote to our stressed-out education systems, housing shortages, pollution, increasing traffic and deteriorating freeways  infrastructure, to mention just a few problems. The US desperately needs to stop growing. Why? Because wildlife matters, because biocapacity matters, because infrastructure is limited, because on average every American uses between 82 and 100 gallons of water a year day and water sources are already stretched beyond capacity. Because according to the US treasury, as of November of last year, it costs $103 billion dollars just to maintain our national debt, and there is currently a proposal on the table to spend upwards of $785 million to feed, house and transport even more migrants. This is happening in a country of over 500 thousand homeless Americans, ts. T, that is wrong on so many levels.

To be encouraging a boom in a country which that has tripled in numbers in about 100 years, is beyond foolish, it is dangerous. It is not only dangerous not only to the salmon which no longer run in our streams but to the people already here trying to make their lives work. Only those with dollar signs for eyes are blind to the often- irreversible damage caused by unfettered appetites for growth in our overpopulated country.

Serenity is Getting Harder fo Find

“Traveling Twice the Speed of Sound it’s Easy to Get Burned” “Crosby Stills and Nash

Serenity is what we seek and what we crave in a world that seems to move at the speed of light on a merry go round of noise and distraction. Our ubiquitous media amplifies the tension we absorb in our bones. Our brains are cluttered with loud pundits, reality shows and the constant reporting of violence which always takes a front row seat during our 24/7 news cycle. One must now travel great distances to find places where unplugging from the modern world is even possible.

I have noticed that music soundscape channels and nature videos, always chose accompanying visuals of pastoral scenes free of crowds and modern life. In fact, their scenes of mountains, waterfalls and streams are characteristically people free. There is a reason you don’t see heavy traffic and tall buildings in videos where serenity is the intention. Being overcrowded produces tension and creates irritability. Being in nature with few people and lovely breezes with plenty of trees gives us ‘that peaceful easy feeling’ as described by the Eagles.

More and more psychologists warn us that we need to find a way to cut out the noise of modern-day life. Being in an environment with honking cars, sirens and the general malaise generated by the hustle and bustle of city life is an unhealthy way to live. We need to put ourselves into peaceful landscapes and absorb their quiet energy.

Meanwhile we are doing everything we can to make sure that serenity is inaccessible to most people, by allowing our open spaces, where quiet resides, to be trampled with too many feet.

We promote a not-so-slow creep into these spaces with a more and more rapid pace fueled by growth and its relentless noise. In doing so we drown out the possibility of much needed quiet spaces.

The irony is that if we valued serenity and the wildlife that can more readily live there, we could do something about it. We have a real opportunity to preserve its value and its role in our mental well- being by tackling incessant growth. I used to joke that if everyone had access to a hot tub and a weekly massage that we would have less road rage and conflicts that end with a 911 phone call. But that is not so far from the truth.

Gregory Bratman, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, and colleagues shared evidence that contact with nature is associated with increases in happiness, subjective well-being, positive affect, positive social interactions and a sense of meaning and purpose in life, as well as decreases in mental distress (Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 7, 2019).

During the height of the pandemic many experts told us to get out into nature and calm our anxiety. I witnessed how neighborhood nature centers became overcrowded with increased demand during that intense time. Serenity is dismantled when too many people are in a space that needs to be appreciated in sparse numbers.

The US census Bureau recently revealed that 80% of U.S. population growth between 2021 and 2022 was due to net international migration. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that this growth from international migration is up about 40% from a decade ago.

The natural world is sacrificed when we think we must accommodate all of the demand to be in our country. Because of our character, and due to those who benefit from the exploitation of newcomers, we can’t seem to find the courage to hang out a no-vacancy sign. This must not out of hatred but out of the way we must protect our country’s viability. We hurt all the things we value by encouraging more and more people to come here. 

I have written about the way growth in an already overpopulated US hurts wildlife, but our mental health is also being threatened. By throwing up our hands when the flow of migrants stream across our southern border, we shoehorn more and more of us into a country already too noisy, too crowded and too mentally distraught making matters so much worse. Mental Health America reports that in 2019-2020, 20.78% of adults were experiencing a mental illness. That is equivalent to over 50 million Americans.

The National Alliance on Mental Health estimates that untreated mental illness costs the country up to $300 billion every year due to losses in productivity. As many as 90 percent of cases of suicide are attributed to mental illness. Add to this mess the fact that there are about 393 million privately owned firearms in the US, (according to an estimate by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey )– or in other words, 120 guns for every 100 Americans and it’s no wonder we have had over 611 mass shootings so far this year in the US.

We are making our country sicker not only by underfunding mental illness treatments, or by refusing to have reasonable gun laws, but by refusing to turn off the faucet of growth setting up the conditions under which it is more and more difficult to find inner peace. We must open our eyes to the costs of avoiding the difficult but necessary task of restricting our borders as fairly as we can.

If we are really concerned about being fair and moral, we need to consider the conditions growth is setting up for a continued downward spiral of our country’s mental health. Because when serenity becomes as rare as the animals on the endangered species list, we will not be far behind.

Legally Extinct: Why Overpopulation is the Criminal in the Decimation of Wildlife

 There are some great laws on the books to protect wildlife. They include, The Migratory Bird Act of 1918, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the North American Wetland’s Act 1989. There are also some iconic species which have been painstakingly saved by tireless wildlife biologists and volunteers who took advantage of the legal requirements to protect wetlands, and endangered species. But overall, these laws are palpably insufficient. Even with great laws in place they are becoming what I call, ‘legally extinct’ As the December 9, 2022 New York Times article said in its title, “Animals are Running Out of Places to live”. There is a reason they are running out of room, we can’t just keep trying to put up fences, we have to start decreasing the demand.

The World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) latest report is a sobering truckload of ice water poured over the heads of any optimistic thinkers about the future of wildlife, both locally and globally. On page 12 of The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2022 reports that 69% of Wildlife populations have decreased significantly since 1970 after studying 32,000 species. These laws in place are doing so poorly to protect wildlife, not only because of the loopholes developers are always seeking, but because they don’t address our overall human footprint which must include our total number of feet.

At 8 billion and growing by 81 million per year on a limited thin layer of life supporting biosphere, 332 million of which live in the US, we are forcing wildlife off the planet. Climate instability does of course account for some of the demise of wildlife. Polar bears do desperately need ever shrinking ice flows from which to hunt for seals. But it is even more difficult for a wolf, mountain lion or ocelot to hunt in a shopping center or housing development. It is even more difficult for salmon to swim upstream to spawn in a river that has been dammed to create a water supply for ever growing cities.

These population statistics need to be repeated over and over by those who have the microphone and especially by wildlife organizations. We need them to find their collective spines and tell the truth about how we need address the true crime of overpopulation for it is a ubiquitous and destructive force, like DDT was in its day. It has its name on the earth moving equipment and has our stamp of approval to run free in the world. In their silence these supposed protectors of wildlife have blood on their hands for they will not throw their weight behind a message of the need to stop growing and start de-growing our human numbers. I would bet the bank even in a year where we hit the 8 billion mark, that no one reading this could find any reference to overpopulation in their magazine subscriptions to National Wildlife, Audubon and Sierra Club among others.

Human population growth happens in two ways: from total fertility rates ( TFR) , births over deaths or from immigration. In general, developed nations are growing from immigration and underdeveloped nations are growing from high TFR’s. As in the medical field, environmental issues also need the right remedy for the right infection. If you have a cough, you need cough syrup, not a blood transfusion. If you have a rash, you need a salve, not an oxygen mask. If we want to see wildlife numbers go up instead of down we have to put the fight in the right place. The right solution to growth also has to be country specific. No wildlife biologist worth his/her weight in salt would attempt to save a non-local specie. A Minnesota based biologist can work on wolves, fishers, Peregrine falcons or Trumpeter swans. They would not think of personally trying to save lemurs in Madagascar. We can barely promote and challenge laws in the US to conform to our need to protect wildlife, we certainly have no hope of changing them on the other side of the world.

Along with laws intended to protect wildlife, all laws promoting growth must also be tackled as a crime against wildlife. Growth inspires both density and sprawl. Density requires hidden sprawl because the more people living in high rises still requires the plowing of land to provide them with food. The PEW Research Center states that 88% of future growth in the US is going to be from immigration if everything remains the same. That is on top of a population already seriously overpopulated as evidenced by scarcity of everything from water to open space. Climate change-caused droughts are already causing scarcity issues particularly in the West. Couple that with more people entering the US needing water and only disaster will be on the menu, while also taking a toll on wildlife. Wildlife need water too.

When many including the Ecological Footprint Network have determined that the US is a severe state of overshoot, it’s time to look at our attitudes and laws regarding immigration and recognize that current policies and lack of enforcement are having a devastating impact on wild lands and the wildlife that live there. While there are laws on the books to prevent some avenues of mass immigration, the enforcement is flimsy at best. This is fueled by a thundercloud of fervor over unexamined fears of racism as the only motive to stop this current reality of US growth.

Welcoming masses of people to the US often without proper vetting and paperwork, is like having a party at a mansion on a large plot of land with 500 party favors, 500 food items and 500 beverages and allowing the guestlist to grow by the thousands because you didn’t want the uncomfortable task of telling guests that you are full. Tending to your current guests with a focus on having adequate supplies is to be commended. Instead, because you are afraid of showing that you don’t care, you open the door to more suffering, when a much-needed act of tough love is required.

To make sure we aren’t aiding and abetting the legal extinction of wildlife, wildlife laws must expand to include the real culprit: overpopulation and the growth it inspires. We must put the most guilty party on trial. Working to restrict mass immigration will do more to prevent extinction of the species we say we care about than crafting any new protection laws. It’s time to stop overwhelming their habitats so we can truly protect the land in a way that matters to the future of all things wild and wonderful.  

Just in case wildlife isn’t your thing, keep in mind that the human journey off the cliff isn’t far behind. The mantra we are all connected is not just a new age saying it is a biological reality. As Albert Einstein reportedly said, “If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.”

Putting the Biosphere on the Ballot

 The biosphere is ailing, and yet it has no representation on the ballots we are begged to fill out by Get Out the Vote organizations. I don’t think that the reason we have to be cajoled to vote is that we realize that no one is representing the biosphere, but it is my reason.

 According to National Geographic, “The biosphere is made up of the parts of Earth where life exists. The biosphere extends from the deepest root systems of trees to the dark environment of ocean trenches, to lush rain forests and high mountaintops.” The mantle, inner core and outer core of our planet are doing just fine and will be here until our sun ends its life billions of years from now as grows into its red giant phase. To say the earth is in trouble is not really accurate, the earth is going to be fine, but the thin layer called the biosphere which offers life support to plants and animals is in deep trouble and has us on its endangered species list.

In a record 11 years we have added another billion to our biosphere. Who is going to raise the issue that growth is cutting us off at the knees? Who will stand up and counter the current growth narratives? On this issue, the two major parties and several minor ones that stare up at me from my pathetic ballot when election year comes around, offer no help at all. They are all pro-growth, pro housing development, pro-business development and oh yes let’s keep adding more lanes to our freeways.

 Historically the environment had been a bi-partisan issue. The Democrats can take credit for the establishment of the Wilderness Act under LBJ and the Republicans can take credit for establishing the EPA and the Clean Air Act under Richard M. Nixon. Nixon, a Republican, was very worried about the detrimental effects of population growth and can also be given credit for establishing the Rockefeller commission to look at population growth and its impacts on our nation.  This commission wisely recommended that our nation welcome a plan for a stabilized population. We know how that went, but at least he tried. Nixon left office in disgrace. What is more disgraceful is that when he left we had 213.9 million people and now by shelving that plan, we have allowed ourselves to grow to a much more unsustainable 333 million. If it was political suicide to bring that up then, it is radioactive now.

Without doing any homework on this, I know that everyone on the ballot in all states, blue,red or purple is for GNP growth. They seem to think that growth of our cities, population and structures is to be celebrated when the biosphere is screaming to us that it cannot handle our numbers and subsequent demands of its finite resources. Polluted waters and skies are the calling cards of too much growth on a finite planet.

In my area of the country, leaders who were hesitant about putting up more housing were kicked out in favor of those who want to just keep building more and more apartment buildings to accommodate population growth. I guess they have a magic wand to bring them the water we are running out of that I don’t know about. I looked for a measure on my ballot this year that would address growth where it lives in the US today, in our policies toward the eternally unaddressed issue of growth by mass immigration. I found none. It is something we could demand because it doesn’t interfere with choices of family-size and honors Americans and the lives we want to live, free from overcrowding and the problems that come with it.

It seems perfectly constitutional and democratic to me to demand that we take care of our communities first before trying to accommodate more, in a country with less and less to offer newcomers. I am also worried about global overpopulation, but my power is mostly in the ever- weakening power of the voting booth.

 When I vote I have to look downstream at social issues that matter to me. Issues like reproductive rights, anti-racist policies, education and health care, but I know that none of that will matter because voting for any of these pro-growth candidates is like making a healthy meal and then lacing it with arsenic. Growth is killing off the biosphere and that is where we live.

The Legacy We Leave Behind A tribute to the well-lived lives of Dave Foreman and Herman Daly

When Paul McCartney, Graham Nash and any of the rest of the Rolling Stones leave the planet I will be inconsolable. I came of age during the music revolution and their music has continued to bring joy and inspiration to my life. But I won’t mourn them in the same way I mourn environmental heroes. Although my dear parents gave me, their first-born, guitar and piano lessons, I was never destined to be a musician. I have, however, taken on the mantle of an activist, caring about the earth in my career and writings. When I hear that my heroes inspired by the Earth Day have left the planet, I feel an inner tug that asks, who will replace them?

When our musical icons die their music keeps selling and documentaries keep mining their stories. Michael Jackson died 13 years ago and even with recent documentaries detailing the dark side of his life, he still earns 362 million each year for those in his will. Other musicians, influenced by the musicians who came before them, will undoubtedly come along to play the arenas they once filled.

Sadly, when we lose our environmental heroes there is barely a whimper in the major media. There may be a story or two on social media, but the monumental efforts of their life’s work will only be fodder for a film festival someday if someone makes the painstaking effort to raising millions. Fortunately, the two greats we just lost, who were unafraid to discuss overpopulation, will have NGO’s to carry on their work.

We recently had to bid farewell to wildlife advocate Dave Foreman and ecological economist Herman Daly. I have been trying to figure out what they had in common. To me it is their relentless fearlessness at promoting their worldview to a world that is headed in the opposite direction. They each founded movements which will be their continuing legacy. Daly’s brilliance manifested in the organization CASSE, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, where he served on the executive board until his recent death. Foreman’s life’s work to save the wilderness and all of its inhabitants will continue in the work done by the Rewilding Institute which he founded.

Their lives should not only ask us to continue to support the causes they believed in, but to reflect on what our own legacies will be. They were brilliant people with activist hearts who never gave up their vision for a sustainable planet even though that meant going against the tide and swimming upstream, without a lifejacket. Neither were afraid to tackle the way humans swarm the planet in such an unsustainable way. As an overpopulation activist, I am inspired to continue their legacy by doing my best and demonstrate the same kind of courage. They endured many critics and so can I. There’s just too much at stake.

Those who didn’t know of their work when they were alive, must study their legacy of books and speeches and the work of their NGO’s, because unless we tame the beast that has become us, we will need to ask our favorite bands to start playing our swan song.

Legally Extinct, Why Wildlife Protection laws aren’t enough

There have been many great pieces of legislation written to protect wildlife and the wildlands where they live. Among them: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, The Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, The Wilderness Act of 1964 and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act of 1989. These pro-wildlife laws all sound good on paper but not only are they are constantly being watered down by pro-development judges and lawyers, there is less and less wilderness to protect. The US lost an additional 17,800 square miles of natural habitat and agricultural land to development between 2002 and 2017, according to the latest 15-year dataset from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service.

If wild animals had hired the lawyers to write these laws, would they still keep them on retainer? I don’t think so. I think they would demand to have their protections expand to include curbing human population growth. In our current state of protections wildlife may be kept from the brink of extinction, but they are not thriving. Although I love to see bald eagles and trumpeter swans almost daily in the suburbs of the Twin Cities here in the Midwest, I know that we have won a few battles but are losing the war. It’s great to see animals like bald eagles being removed from the endangered species list, but compared to their hay day, they are still rare and compromised in many states. Many ornithologists, for example, believe that the eagle population numbered about half a million birds when Columbus arrived in America, and now their numbers have reached just over 300,000.

The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet report 2022, couldn’t be more depressing: The report reveals an average decline of 69% in wildlife species populations since 1970. Sadly, we are in the era of our 6th mass extinction, the sixth one our planet has endured. This time however we are the meteor. Human pressure to expand into the range of wild animals destroys habitat, introduces diseases, invasive species, and increases deadly roadkill encounters. Our climate is so full of greenhouse gases that we are baking our ecosystems. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that our human population numbers continue to grow by over 80 million a year hitting the frightening milestone of 8 billion in the fall of 2022.

Globally growth is the quintessential enemy of wildlife. It is fueled by the number of feet as well as how much those feet are consuming. Taming growth, stabilizing our population and then ratcheting it down would do more to help reduce climate gases than all of the COP (Conference of the Parties) climate conferences put together and they are up to 27 now.

The truth is, that humans are at the top of the food chain. That is what makes our high numbers so dangerous to wildlife. Imagine if lions were as populous as locusts. They would take over and eat everything in sight, rendering our planet lifeless. That is what we are doing. We are top predators unable to do anything but behave like locusts because our numbers are so high. All of our wildlife protection laws must incorporate stopping our growth in order truly protect wildlife. No matter how much we love pandas and pangolins, we have more power to protect bobcats and wolves from within the halls of our own legal system and we need to use that power.

The tragedy is that so most of our laws are designed to promote growth. If we divided our laws into two columns, pro-growth or anti-growth, the pro-growth side would win by a landslide. Under the umbrella of growth live so many laws we don’t question their effects anymore, we just accept them as a part of our lives like sunrises and sunsets.

Permits are legally and easily issued to build apartments and stadiums, dams and shopping malls. Utah is a state with serious drought problems, yet they issued over 33,000 building permits last year, more than any other state. Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a welcome mat for developers who get legal permission to avoid taxes sometimes for as many as 50 years, so they can build their projects with less cost to them and with no commitment to the infrastructures of surrounding communities. Sanctuary cities have popped up across the country designed to combat deportation and detention of immigrants. Berkeley California started this trend. Others have followed. They typically do not detain undocumented workers, and this has become a huge pro-growth policy because it has become a dog whistle to those wanting to come into the US and increased the population of newcomers beyond the capacity of these sanctuary cities to absorb them.

This goes hand in hand with our immigration laws which are also currently acting as pro-growth laws in their lack of enforcement and refinement to address our current overpopulation crisis. They keep the doors of the US open with pressure from corporations, social justice groups and those who believe that the US can still afford to be the release valve for the world’s needy now that we sit at the bloated number of over 333,000,000.

The laws that are missing from the endangered species picture are the laws that would decrease growth. Anti-growth or degrowth laws if you will, are not a part of the national conversation, but they need to be. All of our laws need to be looked at through this lens: Do they cause the population to rise or fall? Do they encourage growth or limit its dangerous path?

Imagine a world which begins wildlife policies with this phrase:

 “We the undersigned acknowledge that our limited planet is bursting at the seams with humans. To continue to promote our growth as a top of the food chain mammal with our laws and policies, is to ensure our own demise as well as the extinction of plants an animal species on which we depend. To continue to ignore human population growth as the engine which drives the extinction train is to sign up for failure.”

Each country has its own unique resources, cultures, religions, and laws. It is virtually impossible to infuse the same de-growth laws worldwide. In order to save species and to save ourselves, each country must first assess its resources of water, energy and material goods and social services. Each nation must then determine how much it is growing, and how it is happening then implement the appropriate laws which with curb growth as humanely as possible, remembering that nature is anything but humane. Starvation, flooding, disease, wildfires are all on the menu in a world which refuses to see that humans have exceeded their carrying capacity on Planet Earth.

If total fertility rates are mainly to blame for increasing numbers, they must be encouraged to come down. Among degrowth based laws which would curb fertility: incentives for small families, more support for senior citizens who won’t need large families to take care of them, free access to birth control, more supportive and cheaper foster care and easier adoptions. There also needs to be consistent civil discussion about our imminent ecological collapse.

If immigration mainly to blame for forcing numbers up, like it is in the US, they must be tamed with more restrictive laws that are humanely enforced. Responsibly controlled borders must be a part of a formula for a nation if it wants its wildlife to survive the pressures of ecological collapse. Macro thinking is required if our natural places are to remain free from the footprints of newcomers who are not to be mistreated but need to be restrained with laws like E-verify* which are federally voluntary but are begging to required by more states. Temporary visas for educational opportunities must be just that, temporary.

These discussions can no longer afford to be sidetracked by accusations of racism. It is a flimsy avoidance strategy of a monumental degree. History has proven that descendants of slaves are relegated to the back of the hiring line every time we have a wave of immigrants come into the US. (See: Back of the Hiring Line by Roy Beck 2021). Because Black Americans in border states have recently added their voices to the protests of the uncontrolled stream of immigrants, it begs the question, how can racism be the reason for wanting responsibly controlled borders? Allowing populations to grow with either laws and customs which encourage either high fertility rates or immigration is asking for extinction to exhilarate no matter how many wildlife acts are on the books.

If wildlife were able to hire the best lawyers and sue us for allowing growth and sprawl destroy their habitat I for one would want to be on that jury and vote for the plaintiff.

*“is an Internet-based system that compares information entered by an employer from an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to records available to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to confirm employment eligibility.”

When Growth Surges and Storm Surges Meet By Karen I. Shragg

Of the 1.8 million homes in the nine counties declared a disaster area, in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Ian only 29% have federal flood insurance (Politico). Flooding is never covered by homeowner’s insurance. So those who can’t afford to buy flood insurance, or just didn’t buy it, will now be further down the rabbit hole of poverty and homelessness.

Florida keeps growing right in the pathway of storms which are guaranteed to keep getting more frequent and stronger in light of our continued fueling of the fires of climate change. So where do you put 3 million new residents who moved to Florida just since 2010? You put them in danger. You put them in the pathways of storms then make the lame effort of telling its growing millions to just evacuate, when radar indicates, on one of Florida’s only 4 major highways. Getting behind a moratorium on growth would show great leadership and foresight and help Floridians tremendously, but developers don’t donate to those kinds of leaders which are nowhere to be found these days.

Our corporate funded growth-based world has a great track record of ignoring the interface of population growth and climate disasters. Climate prediction maps are disturbingly clear, Tampa will become the new Miami in the not-so-distant future, some say by 2060.  Even though we know Miami will become a fancy underwater park as oceans rise, real estate developers are still on the prowl. I first went to Miami in 1964 when its population was just over 1.6 million. It is now still growing at over 6 million. Water is already threatening the water supply of Dade County. The intrusion of saltwater into their shallow aquifers began when the Everglades were drained to provide dry land for development, another human created disaster by our addiction to growth.

Population growth in Florida is mostly a combination of migration from other states, and both legal and illegal migration from other countries. Stopping growth in from all of its sources is called for and can only happen when we can see that it is a self-destructive journey, like welcoming gasoline to a fire.

If insurance companies were in the business of really helping people, they would become major underwriters of population NGO’s. They would save money in the long run and could help fund getting the message out which is well documented: when you keep growing and building homes in a state subject to storms in our climate altered world you are asking for even more costly disasters. This full disclosure should be required on all Florida brochures: 22 million people are already crammed into our 65,758 square miles of sinking swampland. Since we also live in a world of dangerous climate change and its ever violent storms, we are sorry, but we are full. Adding more growth to our state, from whatever source, is as dangerous as being in the target of the next storm.