The Environmental Movement's Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 123-156

  Beck, Roy ^a   Kolankiewicz, Leon ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; BIRTH RATE; CLASSIFICATION; CONTRACEPTION; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ENVIRONMENT; ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION; ETHICS; HISTORY; INDUCED ABORTION; LEGAL ASPECT; METHODOLOGY; MIGRATION; POLICY; POLITICS; POPULATION GROWTH; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS; STATISTICS; UNITED STATES; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

ABORTION, INDUCED; BIRTH RATE; CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES; CONTRACEPTION; EMIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION; ENVIRONMENT; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; POLITICS; POPULATION GROWTH; PUBLIC POLICY; REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS; UNITED STATES; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 0009999549     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2000.0001     Document Type: Article

References (84)

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2. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York, 1968)
3. Rachel L. Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, 1962).
4. Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement, 1890-1975 (Boston, 1981).
5. Examples include the University of Georgia's Eugene P. Odum, A leading ecologist and author of the textbook Fundamentals of Ecology (Philadelphia, 1971)
6. the University of California-Davis' Kenneth E. F. Watt, a pioneering systems modeler and author ofPrinciples of Environmental Science (New York, 1973)
7. the Conservation Foundation's Raymond Dasmann, A zoologist and author of The Destruction of California (New York, 1965)
8. the University of Califomia-Berkeley's Daniel B. Luten, A chemist, natural resource specialist, and author ofProgress Against Growth (1986); and
9. Garrett Hardin, A human ecologist, president of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and author of the most reprinted article ever— “The Tragedy of the Commons”—in the prestigious journal Science (13 December 1968).
10. Edward Goldsmith, Robert Allen, Michael Allaby, John Davoll, and Sam Lawrence, A Blueprint for Survival (New York, 1972), 48.
11. The authors were all editors of The Ecologist. 6.
12. Gaylord Nelson, personal communication, 1998. Former U.S. Senator Nelson is widely credited as the founder of Earth Day.
13. Doug LaFollette et al. “U.S. Sustainable Population Policy Project—Planning Document,” unpublished, 20 June 1998. Doug LaFollette is Secretary of State of Wisconsin.
14. R. B. Smythe, “The Historical Roots of ΝΕΡΑ,” in Environmental Policy and ΝΕΡΑ
15. Past,Present, and Future, ed. Ray Clark and Larry Canter (Boca Raton, 1997), 12.
16. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American Future (Washington, D.C. 1972). Excerpt above from transmittal letter.
17. T. Michael Maher, “How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection,” Population and Environment 18.4 (1997).
18. T. Michael Maher, Personal communication with the author, 1998.
19. Dirk Olin, “Divided We Fall? The Sierra Club's debate over immigration may be just the beginning,” Outside 23 (July 1998).
20. President's Council on Sustainable Development, Sustainable America: A New Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment (Washington, D.C. 1996).
21. Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth,” Science 171 (1971), 1212-17.
22. Mathis Wackemagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact Upon the Earth (Philadelphia, 1996).
23. In 1970, the “black and other” Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was 3.0 (National Center for Health Statistics, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 [1976)). By 1997, black fertility had fallen to 2.2, slightly above the general population's replacement rate of 2.1. Overall Hispanic fertility even in 1997 stood at 3.0, well above replacement level. That of Mexican-born women residing in the U.S. was 3.3 (National Center for Health Statistics. 1999. National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 47, no. 18)—actually higher than the fertility rate of women in Mexico itself (2.9 in 1998 according to the U.S. Census Bureau at http:// www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbsum).
24. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the TFR of non-Hispanic white females was 1.8 in 1997 (compared to 2.1 for replacement level). Using Census Bureau data, it can be calculated that in 1970, non-Hispanic whites comprised 83 percent of the U.S. population and accounted for approximately 78 percent of the births. By 1994, non-Hispanic whites comprised 74 percent of the population and accounted for 60 percent of the births. With immigration included (approximately 90 percent of which originates from non-European sources), the non-Hispanic white share of current population growth drops well below 50 percent. According to medium projections of the Census Bureau and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, non-Hispanic whites will account for 6 percent of the nation's population growth between 1995 and 2050, blacks for 18 percent, Asians for 20 percent, and Hispanics for 54 percent (James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston, eds. The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration [Washington, D.C. 1997], table 3.7.) By 2050, non-Hispanic whites are projected to have declined to 51 percent of the U.S. population from 87 percent in 1950 (table 3.10, The New Americans).
25. James Scheuer, “A Disappointing Outcome: United States and World Population Trends Since the Rockefeller Commission,” The Social Contract 2.4 (1992).
26. “The Vatican and World Population Policy: An Interview with Miltonp· Siegel,” The Humanist (March-April 1993).
27. David Simcox, “Twenty Years Later: A Lost Opportunity,” The Social Contract 2.4 (1992).
28. Stephen D. Mumford, The Life and Death ofNSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy (Research Triangle Park, N.C. 1996).
29. Carl Bernstein, “The Holy Alliance,” Time, 24 February 1992.
30. George D. Moffett, Critical Masses: The Global Population Challenge (New York, 1994), 190.
31. George Weigel, “What Really Happened at Cairo, and Why,” in The Nine Lives of Population Control, ed. Michael Cromartie (Washington, D.C. 1995), 145.
32. Lindsey Grant, “Multiple Agendas and the Population Taboo.” Focus 7.3 (1997)
33. reprinted from chapter 16 of Juggernaut: Growth on a Finite Planet (Santa Ana, Calif. 1996).
34. Celia Evans Miller and Cynthia P. Green, “A U.S. Population Policy: ZPG's Recommendations.” Zero Population Growth policy paper, 1976.
35. Alan Kuper, “ZPG or ZCG?” E-mail to list, 10 April 1999. Kuper, a long-time Sierra member and one of the population activists who spearheaded the 1998 referendum, pointed out that seven out of ten questions on ZPG's latest Earth Day quiz related to consumption. “Based on what I have, I’d say ZPG is promoting in classrooms across the US, reduction in consumption more than reduction in numbers.”
36. Judith Jacobsen, “President's Message,” ZPG Reporter, February 1998.
37. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1973 rev. ed. [1967]).
38. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, Mass. 1959, 1969)
39. Douglas H. Strong, Dreamers and Defenders-American Conservationists (Lincoln, Neb. 1971, 1988).
40. Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass. 1995), 127.
41. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York, 1971).
42. James R. Hepworth and Gregory McNamee, Resist Much, Obey Little, Remembering Ed Abbey (San Francisco 1996), quote at p. 104
43. John F. Rohe, A Bicentennial Malthusian Essay: Conservation, Population, and the Indifference to Limits (Traverse City, Mich. 1997).
44. Dave Foreman, “Progressive Comucopianism,” Wild Earth 7.4 (1998).
45. Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants in the United States—1998: A Snapshot of America's Foreign-bom Population,” Backgrounder (Washington, D.C. 1999).
46. Poster Project for a Sustainable U.S. Environment, 1998. Based on Census Bureau data.
47. Susan Jacoby, “Anti-Immigration Campaign Begun,” Washington Post, 8 May 1977.
48. Sierra Club Board of Directors, “U.S. Population Policy and Immigration.” Adopted 6-7 May 1978.
49. Sierra Club Population Report (Spring 1989).
50. Gerald O. Barnye, “Global Future: Time to Act,” in The Global 2000 Report to the President. A report prepared for President Carter by the Council on Environmental Quality and U.S. Department of State, 1981, p. 11.
51. President's Council on Sustainable Development, Population and Consumption Task Force Report (Washington, D.C. 1996).
52. Emil Guillermo, “The Sierra Club's Nativist Faction,” San Francisco Examiner, 17 December 1997.
53. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: A Blueprint for the Future (New York, 1991).
54. Katherine Betts, The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia (Sydney, 1999), 5, 29.
55. Carl Pope, online post to Sierra members, 1997.
56. Club leaders appeared unaware of or unimpressed by the numerous surveys over the years which have indicated that majorities of most minorities favor reduced immigration levels. For instance, in a February 1996 Roper poll, 73 percent of blacks and 52 percent of Hispanics favored cutting immigration to 300,000 or fewer annually. The 1993 Latino National Political Survey, largest ever done of this ethnic group in the United States, found that 7 in 10 Latino respondents—higher than the percentage of “Anglos”—thought there were “too many immigrants.” A Hispanic USA Research Group poll (1993) found that three-quarters of Hispanics believed fewer immigrants should be admitted. A majority of Asian-American voters in California cast ballots in favor of Proposition 187 in 1994. Findings such as these should have allayed the Club leadership's ostensible fears that even a principled stand against (what Club icon David Brower termed) “overimmigration” strictly on environmental grounds would spark a minority backlash. But they did not. It may well be that the Club establishment cared more about the opinions of minority elites and self-appointed “leaders” than they did about rank-and-file minority opinion.
57. Georgia C. DuBose, “ZPG official says law, local action can cut population.” The Journal (Martinsburg, W.Va.), 29 March 1998.
58. Peter Kostmayer, letter to ZPG member, 30 March 1998.
59. A prime example of this global view is A1 Gore's 1992 book Earth in the Balance (Boston, 1992). In 1998 Vice-President Gore again explicitly linked population growth to global issues when he touted increased family-planning support as one means of combating global warming.
60. Carl Pope, post to online Sierra Club population forum, 16 December 1997.
61. Brock Evans, “The Sierra Club Ballot Referendum on Immigration, Population, and the Environment.” Focus 8.1 (1998).
62. Carl Pope, “Think Globally, Act Sensibly—Immigration is not the problem.” Asian Week (San Francisco), 2 April 1998. The irony of using the Titanic analogy to represent overpopulation and immigration is that if the HMS Titanic's bulkheads had been sealed and reached all the way up (a standard feature in ships nowadays) instead of just part way, the ship might have been saved from sinking because in-rushing ocean water would have been confined to several compartments instead of spilling over the top of each bulkhead into subsequent ones. (The Titanic could flood four compartments and still float. It breached five.) Thus, the opposite conclusion can be drawn from this maritime tragedy, namely, that barriers between distinct nation-states may well be essential to preventing one country's failure to address overpopulation from becoming the whole world's failure. Economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding (author of “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”), in another of his insightful essays, wrote that what really disturbed him was the possibility of converting the world from a place of many experiments into one giant, global experiment.
63. Michael Hanauer, “Why Domestic Environmental Organizations Won’t Visibly Advocate Domestic Population Stabilization,” draft of unpublished manuscript, 1999.
64. Roy Beck, “Sorting Through Humanitarian Clashes in Immigration Policy,” paper presented at the Annual National Conference on Applied Ethics, California State University at Long Beach, 1997.
65. For more detailed descriptions and critiques of corporate globalism, see Sir James Goldsmith, “Global Free Trade and GATT,” Focus 5.1 (1995)
66. excerpted from his book Le Piege; Herman E. Daly, “Against Free Trade and Economic Orthodoxy,” The Oxford International Review (Summer 1995)
67. Le Piege; Herman E. Daly, “Globalism, Internationalism, and National Defense,” Focus 9.1 (1999)
68. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds. The Case Against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco, 1997); and
69. David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford, Conn. and San Francisco, 1995).
70. In a 1998 post to the online Sierra Club population forum, Executive Director Carl Pope cited a hypothetical example of 100,000 peasants moving from the Guatemalan highlands to the Peten rainforest (also in Guatemala) versus their moving to Los Angeles, and concluded that the former was worse for the global environment. Similarly, environmental filmmaker and author Michael Tobias (World War III: Population and the Biosphere at the Millennium [Santa Fe, 1994), when questioned after a 1994 Los Angeles speech on overpopulation, said he would favor relocating people from rapidly-growing tropical countries with high and threatened biodiversity to countries like the United States with less biodiversity, although he admitted this idea was “quixotic.”
71. ZPG Reporter, February 1998.
72. William Branigin, “Sierra Club Votes for Neutrality on Immigration: Population Issue ‘Intensely Debated,’” Washington Post, 26 April 1998
73. John H. Cushman Jr. “Sierra Club Rejects Move to Oppose Immigration,” New York Times, 26 April 1998.
74. Daniel Quinn and Alan D. Thornhill, “Food Production and Population Growth,” video documentary supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Theology (Houston, 1998).
75. George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York, 1993).
76. John H. Cushman Jr. “An Uncomfortable Debate Fuels a Sierra Club Election,” New York Times, 5 April 1998.
77. Ben Zuckerman, “Will the Sierra Club Be Hurt If the Ballot Question Passes?” in Population and the Sierra Club: A Discussion of Issues About the Upcoming Referendum, ed. Alan Kuper, Dick Schneider, and Ben Zuckerman (1998), 8
78. Santos Gomez, op-ed in San Francisco Chronicle, 17 November 1998.
79. Home Builders Association of Northern California, “Behind the Sierra Club Vote on Curbing Immigration: Do Environmentalists Risk Alienating the Fastest-growing Ethnic Group in California?” HBA News 21.1 (February 1998).
80. Rochester, N.Y. Resources for Global Sustainability.
81. Garrett Hardin, Living Within Limits (New York, 1993).
82. Howard Gleckman, “A Rich Stew in the Melting Pot,” Business Week, 31 August 1998.
83. Alan Kuper, Personal communication based on meeting with Sierra Club executive director, 1998.
84. Laurie Ann Mazur, ed. Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment (Washington, D.C. 1994).