Population Controls

Thank you for the balanced article on world population by Meadows. It’s an effective answer to those who are actually calling for a higher U.S. birthrate. If it’s one thing America doesn’t need, it’s a higher rate of population growth.

Through births and immigration (legal and illegal), we add the population equivalent of four Washington, D.C.s every year, another New Jersey every three years, and another California every decade. Each year we lose a million acres of vital topsoil and farmland to development.

It’s true that Third-World population is growing much faster than ours, but we should keep in mind that our 5% of the world’s population consumes 11 times the world’s average in energy, 6 times the average in steel and 4 times the average in grain.

People who care about the planet’s capacity to sustain human life should write their local and national legislators to fund family planing at home and abroad. Such funding has decreased in the last decade. If Gov. George Deukmejian’s budget goes through, it will all but disappear in California.

ANN ALPER

Pacific Palisades