Executive Summary

At the start of the 21st century, U.S. environmental groups have cast aside the way most environmentalists 30 years earlier had understood the task before them. The “Foundational Formula” of environmentalism at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970 had explained that the total environmental impact is the product of the average individual impact on the environment (a combination of a variety of consumption factors) multiplied by the number of people. Many environmental groups saw population growth in this country — because of the size of individual consumption rates — as the most important in the world to stop. By working on both U.S. population and U.S. consumption factors, the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s had a comprehensive approach to move toward sustainable environmental protection and restoration in this country.

But a survey has found that virtually no national environmental group today works for an end to U.S. population growth. Yet the effects of constant growth are among the most contentious issues in local communities: sprawl, congestion, over-crowded schools, habitat loss, destruction of open spaces. Since 1970 (population 203 million), 80 million Americans have been added, and the Census Bureau now projects that, under present federal policies and personal trends, we will surpass half a billion in this century, with no peak in sight.

How could the nation’s environmental watchdogs remain silent as those projections have been made? Not only have dozens of environmental groups failed to publicly challenge the advisability of nearly tripling the 1970 Earth Day population, they have not provided any blueprint for how the nation can prevent further environmental erosion while hosting nearly 300 million additional residents during this century.

Such behavior would be unfathomable to environmentalists had they gone into hibernation after the 1970 Earth Day and re-entered our society in the year 2001. This monograph attempts to explain what happened in the intervening years. We believe there is no simple explanation. Rather, a series of developments built on each other to create a 21st century environmental movement that is so radically different from the one that emerged around 1970.

We believe the following five developments substantially explain the American environmental movement’s retreat from population advocacy (each is explored in much greater detail later in this monograph):

1. Dropping Fertility.  By 1972, the fertility rate in the U.S. had declined, naturally and without coercion, to a level low enough to eventually produce zero population growth (ZPG), as long as immigration remained reasonably low. Many Americans, including environmentalists, apparently confused “replacement-level” fertility with ZPG, and mistakenly concluded that the overpopulation problem was solved. With ZPG supposedly achieved, support for organizations and programs focused on population began to drift away.

2. Anti-Abortion Politics.  To the Catholic hierarchy and the pro-life movement, the legalized abortion and population stabilization causes have been inextricably linked. In the 1990s, it was still difficult for a pro-stabilization person or group to get a hearing among many Catholic or pro-life groups without automatically being considered an abortion apologist.

A number of leaders of philanthropic organizations and politicians involved with population efforts in the 1970s have said that active measures by U.S. Catholic bishops and the Vatican were the greatest barrier to moving population measures and in setting a national population policy. The population movement began to be tarred as anti-Catholic. Environmental groups seeking membership, funds, and support from a wide spectrum of Americans had good reason to steer clear of population issues altogether rather than risk offending their own current and potential members who were also members of the largest religious denomination in America.

3. Women’s Issues Separate Population Groups from Environmental Issues. Population groups have grown apart from environmental groups. During the late 1960s, the environmentalist angle on reproductive and population issues tended to be pushed out front as environmentalism reached mass popularity. But as environmentalists abandoned population issues in the 1970s, the population groups more and more de-emphasized environmental motives in favor of feminist motives. The 1994 U.N. conference in Cairo, for example, contained hundreds of recommendations about women’s rights but made no mention of the connections between population growth and environmental ills (which had been a key focus of earlier U.N. conferences).

4. Rift Between Conservationist and New-Left Roots.  The modern environmental movement includes at least three roots. The two of these that go back a century — the wilderness preservation movement and the resource conservation movement — tend to be philosophically inclined to accept the proposition that, with humans as with other organisms, greater population size inflicts greater impacts on the environment. A third root of modern environmentalism is much younger. It emerged only in the 1960s and was an outgrowth of what was called New-Left politics. It came to focus more on urban and health issues such as air, water, and toxic contamination, especially as they related to race, poverty and the defects of capitalism. The “Environmental Justice” movement and Green political parties grew out of this root. The leaders of this root have always forcefully downplayed the role of population growth as a cause of environmental problems.

This third root grew strong enough in many organizations that by the 1990s it forced an end to their U.S. stabilization policies and later defeated efforts by many conservationists and preservationists to reinstate those population policies.

5. Immigration Becomes Chief Growth Factor. Modifications to immigration law in 1965 inadvertently set in motion an increase in immigration through extended family members that began to snowball during the 1970s. At the same time that American fertility declines were beginning to put population stabilization within reach, immigration was rising rapidly to three or four times traditional levels. During the first decade, some groups directly advocated that immigration numbers be set at a level consistent with U.S. environmental needs. The following are reasons why that advocacy ceased:

• Fear that immigration reduction would alienate "progressive" allies and be seen as racially insensitive. Because most immigrants were not European, immigration advocacy groups labeled efforts to reduce the numbers as being racially motivated.

• The transformation of population and the environment into global issues needing global solutions. Under this new thinking, the population size of individual countries was not nearly as important as the size of the total global population.

• Influence of human rights organizations. By the 1990s, it may be that environmental groups had conceded higher moral ground to those human rights groups defending the rights of poor workers and their families to cross national borders if they could improve their standard of living. In many instances, environmental groups may have tacitly agreed to press for environmental goals only when they did not conflict with the human rights agenda.

• Triumph of the ethics of globalism over ethics of nationalism/internationalism. Many environmental elites now believe immigration pressures on U.S. population growth are best relieved by addressing the root factors which compel people to leave their homes and families and emigrate to the U.S. In this view it would be unethical and impractical to stabilize the U.S. population while population and poverty expand in less developed countries.

• Fear of demographic trends. Some environmental leaders express fear that if they are perceived as "anti-immigrant," a backlash against environmentalists could develop among immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants. This fear has been fanned by threats from certain leaders of certain ethnic groups whose numbers are expanded by immigration. During the Sierra Club’s acrimonious internal debate in 1998 on an initiative supporting reduced immigration, one Mexican-American Club activist proclaimed that if the initiative passed, "I plan to quit. I am a Chicano and blood is thicker than water." The head of the California League of Conservation Voters beseeched the Sierra Club not to "commit suicide over the immigration issue."

• The power of money. Shifts in population emphasis might have had more to do with the funding of environmental groups than any other factor. Many foundations have a mix of directors that include politically left-leaning globalists and right-leaning representatives of multinational corporations. For separate, even disparate, reasons, both types are strongly inclined toward high immigration levels.