According to the United Nations, the world’s population has passed seven billion. (The U.S. government says that milestone will occur early in 2012.) Just twelve years ago, the number reached six billion; twelve years before that, it passed five billion.
By any reasonable criterion, such growth is unsustainable. Consider that 48 percent of the globe’s population is living on less than two dollars per day; if all seven billion humans lived like Americans, you’d need five planet Earths to supply what we’d consume. Even in the United States, whose population swelled by about 10 percent between 2000 and 2010, much of the growth has been concentrated in regions where everything from freshwater supplies to electrical generating capacity is already stressed. (With the economic downturn, unemployment is now higher in the Sun Belt than in the Rust Belt, yet the South and Southwest continue to attract the majority of immigrants, legal and otherwise, seeking work in the United States.)
By many criteria, America may not seem overpopulated. Yet even here, further population increase genuinely threatens both national and global welfare. In part this is because Americans consume so profligately; a recent Oregon State University study found that over time, an American child will generate seven times as much carbon dioxide as a Chinese child and 169 times as much as a Bangladeshi child. This study also found that the greatest contribution individual Americans can make to fighting climate change is to have fewer children (or none).
Yet when was the last time you heard an earnest discussion about overpopulation? When did you last hear terms like population bomb mentioned in a contemporary context?
It’s too often assumed that overpopulation as a topic went out of fashion thirty years ago or even that it’s taboo. So what better time than humanity’s passing of the seven-billion mark to move this critical subject back to center stage? The United Nations launched an initiative titled 7 Billion Actions “to renew global commitment for a healthy and sustainable world.” Closer to home, the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity distributes condoms whose packaging links birth control with environmental preservation: “Wrap with care, save a polar bear,” says one. The Population Media Center and the Population Institute have started a campaign of their own called Population 7 Billion: It’s Time to Talk.
Talking may be only a first step, but it’s an important one. We’re not likely to get anything done about our still-growing population crisis if we don’t talk about it first!
Most of all, we need to recognize that overpopulation is not a problem that went out of fashion with rust-colored shag rugs and avocado appliances. Our world was overpopulated in the sixties; it was even more overpopulated in the seventies; and it’s desperately overpopulated now. In all likelihood there has been a “too many people” problem since experts began expressing systematic misgivings on the subject in the 1950s. In large part, our world of today bears the marks of our past failures to come to grips with population issues. From rush hour in Atlanta to starvation in South Sudan, we are living in the dystopian future that sixties “population bomb” prophets predicted. Granted, conditions aren’t quite as apocalyptic as writers like Paul Ehrlich foresaw—we’re not living in a Mad Max horror-world scoured by food riots—yet—but we should scarcely imagine from that that we’ve ducked the Malthusian bullet altogether.
So let me spark a conversation among secular humanists by taking a traditional third rail firmly in my teeth. The U.S. birthrate is 2.0 per woman, just slightly below replacement rate. So why did the population swell 10 percent in the last decade? Immigration, legal and illegal, accounts for most of it. In addition to the numbers they add simply by entering the country, immigrants to the United States tend to start having children earlier in life, and to have more children, than the general population. If not for immigration, America would have a static or even a slowly declining population, like many countries in Western Europe. So like it or not, if the United States has a population problem, it is an immigration problem.
Immigration is often thought of as a vexed subject that generates more heat than light. But instead of having arguments over whether immigrants “steal jobs” from the native-born—instead of pitting a racist critique of Latino culture against often-uncritically held ideals of American openness—should we not instead examine the issue of immigration through the lens of population policy? Perhaps we need to ask more openly how many more people of any ethnic background America can afford to feed—or how many more can be supported by available and sustainable freshwater supplies. Perhaps we need to consider that the last time America welcomed immigrants at a rate anything like today’s, it was the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, when the manufacturing economy demanded large numbers of workers at every skill level. Last time I looked, employment prospects today were far less rosy.
So, I would submit, the question needs to be asked: Is it time to take down that proverbial torch beside the golden door and instead post a sign that reads “Sorry, America is full”?
I raise this topic knowing that it’s hard to discuss without shouting. Just ask the Sierra Club. Up until 1996, this venerable environmental group had as one of its long-standing core agenda items limiting immigration in order to slow population growth. In 1996 the Club assumed a neutral stance on immigration, and that’s where things have stood ever since. In 2004 there was bitter division when dissidents led by former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to elect a slate of candidates to the Club’s board of directors pledged to restore immigration reduction to the group’s agenda. It was a vitriolic contest in which then–executive director Carl Pope did not quail from charging that the dissidents were “in bed with racists.”
Let’s try to ratchet down the fury just a bit. The two modest proposals I’d like to float before FREE INQUIRY readers are as follows:
1. It is at least logically possible that someone can favor reductions in immigration to the United States without being a racist. I’m not denying that there are racists in the anti-immigration camp; I am just suggesting that an automatic charge of racism is not warranted if one has a sincere concern that the nation might lack sufficient room and/or resources to support, say, the 423 million Americans projected to inhabit this country in 2050!
2. As secular humanists—people who seek the best for the human future and seek to reach it through the application of science, reason, and common sense—we should embrace our obligation to do all we can to propel the issue of overpopulation back into the spotlight as a subject for discussion and then action.
Note: Some data for this op-ed came from the Population Reference Bureau.
Tom Flynn is editor of FREE INQUIRY, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and editor of The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Out of concern for overpopulation he and his wife have remained child-free.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
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