How Many People Equal Too Many In America?

Life Less Pleasant…

Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” in 1968 when the United States housed 200 million people. At the time, the planet supported 3.7 billion. In 1990, Ehrlich wrote “The Population Explosion” when America featured 280 million. At that point, the humans grew to nearly six billion, and today, accelerate past 6.7 billion on their way to 9.2 billion in 40 years.

In the past 40 years, the USA added 100 million people, primarily via immigrants fleeing overpopulated countries around the world. At current immigration rates, another 100 million manifest in the America within 30 years. Immigration forces the United States into the third fastest growing nation outside China and India.

In Dr. Otis Graham’s “Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration

Crisis”, he writes, “Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide, but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all–ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.”

At the time of Ehrlich’s first book: “More than half the world’s people were malnourished,” said writer Charles Mann, “How many is too many?” http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/93feb/mann1.htm “Nobel laureates were telling Congress that unless population growth stopped, a new Dark Age.”

Another book, “Famine 1975!” presented sobering food shortages in the Third World. A group of MIT researchers issued “The Limits to Growth” saying civilization faced collapse by 2070 or sooner. With current world starvation rates exceeding 18 million annually, (Source: World Health Organization)), and food shortages and riots in Asia, humanity faces some rough sledding in the coming years.

“Over time, the debate has spread between two poles,” Mann said. “On one side, according to the late Garrett Hardin, an ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, are the Cassandras, who believe that continued population growth at the current rate will inevitably lead to catastrophe. On the other are the Pollyannas, who believe that humanity faces problems but has a good shot at coming out okay in the end. Cassandras, who tend to be biologists, look at each new birth as the arrival on the planet of another hungry mouth. Pollyannas, who tend to be economists, point out that along with each new mouth comes a pair of hands.”

Biologists hit dead center. They see what Malthus claimed in 1798 when he said that humans multiply faster than food can be grown: “The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence for humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

“True, Pollyannas concede,” Mann said. “If present-day trends continue for centuries, the earth will turn into a massive ball of human flesh.”

“Much of the world is better fed than it was in 1950,” concedes Lester R. Brown, the president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental-research group in Washington, D.C. “But that period of improvement is ending rather abruptly. My sense is that we’re going to be in trouble on the food front before this decade is out.”

The National Academy of Sciences said in 1992, “That continued population growth will lead to a global environmental catastrophe that “science and technology may not be able to prevent.”

“The bad news is that since the late 1960s, 1.9 billion more people have arrived on the planet than have left,” Mann said. “Even if future rates of fertility are the lowest in history, as is likely, the children of today’s children, and their children’s children, will keep replacing themselves, and the population will increase vastly. Nothing will stop that increase, not even AIDS. Pessimists estimate that by the end of the decade another 100 million people will be infected by HIV. Almost ten times that number will have been born. Barring unprecedented catastrophe, the year 2100 will see 10 to 12 billion people on the planet.”

For a sobering reality check, Africa expects to grow from 767 million to 1.4 billion in 40 years.

Few places in America illustrate overpopulation better than Los Angeles, California. To expose that state’s horrific future, it grows by 1,600 people daily. (Source; www.capsweb.org) Another 400 cars add to their already gridlocked highways EVERY DAY! You can live and you can die in traffic. At 44,000 deaths annually on our nation’s highways, it’s a toss-up whether or not you make it home in LA each week. Legal and illegal immigration drives most of California’s growth. Fogel/Martin “U.S. Population Projections” predict California’s growth to rise from 37.5 million to a low trend of 65.6 million and as high as 79.1 million in 40 years. Like cattle down the slaughter chute, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Boston and Denver follow California into the demographic “Human Katrina” maelstrom.

“We’re trying to sustain physical growth on a finite planet,” Dennis L. Meadows said, who helped produce “Limits to Growth”. “Growth will stop in our lifetime through ecological breakdown.”

“We suffer a worldwide epidemic,” said Anne Ehrlich, a research associate at Stanford University, a veteran Cassandra, and the wife of Paul Ehrlich.

As Lester Brown reports, “Erosion steals 24 billion tons of soil from the world’s farmers annually; a figure that the ecology-minded cite as plain evidence that humanity is exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet.”

“Nobody ever dies of overpopulation,” Garret Hardin lamented.

They die of famine, pestilence, contaminated water and war. Wow! That’s comforting! Hardin introduced the Tragedy of the Commons. In short, if you introduce two horses into a two acre fenced paddock (finite area, like a finite earth), and a water tank—both horses can eat their fill, poop and pee with unlimited personal safety. However, if you run 100 horses into that two acre paddock, they overwhelm the water tank, eat all the grass as well as trample it, create terrible waste problems and crowd themselves into angry confrontations with nowhere to escape. Voila! Tragedy of the Commons!

Charles Mann said, “As the human presence increasingly dominates the earth, new difficulties emerge at ever greater speed: The ozone layer. The exhaustion of fisheries. The greenhouse effect. The overuse of aquifers. The need to increase yields of tropical foodstuffs. Each must be evaluated, absorbed, treated, even as the next problem appears. The loss of biodiversity. The collapse of the infrastructure. The destruction of rain forests. And on and on.”

“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases of population, locally, nationally, or globally.” Dr. Albert Bartlett

As citizens of this American civilization, we must ask ourselves if we expect our future generations to endure China’s horrific demographic legacy. Our children would most certainly answer: no dad and mom! We desire a viable, sustainable and enjoyable life experience on a healthy planet with a stable human population. What actions are you taking toward a sustainable future?

Frosty Wooldridge is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece.

He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at his website: www.frostywooldridge.com