Stop Population--and Immigration--Growth

Exploding metropolises, overcrowded dwellings, soaring housing prices--if all this were occurring in an urbanizing underdeveloped nation, the international donor community would prescribe a national population policy.

Looking at the Census Bureau’s urbanized areas (which contain many incorporated suburbs of the central city), a study by NumbersUSA, an Arlington, Va., think tank, found that by 1990 Los Angeles had emerged as the country’s most densely populated urbanized area.

Between 1970 and 1990, metropolitan L.A. reduced its per capita land area by 8% but covered 25% more land area. All of this sprawl was fueled by population growth.

On the first Earth Day in 1970, activists and others viewed the future as something we could plan and shape. In 1972, the federal Commission on Population Growth and the American Future urged Congress to adopt a national population stabilization policy. Almost as an afterthought, the commission noted that immigration policy would have to respect population goals.

Perversely, by enacting ever-higher immigration quotas and approving many refugee set-asides, Congress unleashed a source of population increase that supplanted the tapering-off domestic growth. Today, 80 million people later, national population policy is disturbingly absent from our social agenda.

Journalists and politicians unquestioningly accept the inevitability of growth. As immigration has replaced fertility as the source of population growth, few ask why our immigration policy is neither environmentally nor demographically accountable.

California, once one of the ecological wonders of the world, has been labeled by Oxford University ecologist Norman Myers as one of the world’s 25 biological “hot spots” because the state has lost 70% or more of its primary vegetation. Since 1950, California’s population has soared from 10 million to nearly 34 million. With a growth rate about that of Bangladesh, California is looking at a population of 50 million by 2025 and 100 million by 2065.

Californians are aware that population growth undermines their once golden environment. In a survey last May, 76% of respondents told the Public Policy Institute of California that they felt the state’s rapid population growth was contributing “a lot” or “some” to the state’s electricity shortage. The same could be said of water shortages, traffic congestion and the housing shortage.

Alas, Congress, not California, sets population policy. Congress as a body seems predisposed even more than the U.S. voter to ignore problems that grow incrementally until they have reached daunting proportions.

We must not let Congress regard as “business as usual” cities racing to emulate the Third World in housing, water and energy shortages. These are signs of a serious overextension of population, what UC Santa Barbara ecologist Garrett Hardin rightly terms “a longage of people.”

As the most populous and environmentally threatened state, California is the logical birthplace for a renewed political cry for population stabilization. When will Congress regard a future with 1 billion Americans early next century as one to be avoided at all costs?

We must yell “stop” to forces that feed population while we still have the capacity to provide for those people who are already here. Averting our gaze from population growth does not spare us its consequences.