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Population Growth – The Major Determinant of Environmental Impact


If enacted, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA, S.2611) would be the most dramatic change in immigration law in 80 years, allowing an estimated 103 million persons to legally immigrate to the U.S. over the next 20 years-fully one-third of the current population of the United States.

We postulate that enactment of immigration legislation before the Senate could result in an increase in U.S. population of at least 135 million by 2050. From an environmental perspective, the addition of 135 million people to today¹s U.S. population of some 300 million over the next 45 years would be an extremely destructive scenario because population size is the major determinant of environmental impact.

It would be of more than just domestic concern because U.S. population size and consumption have a larger global effect than that of people anywhere else, an impact currently greater than that of China and India combined! Our cars and industrial processes cause some 30 percent of all greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, climate change and increasingly-destructive weather events. And the U.S. is the major contributor of the gases which cause thinning of the protective stratospheric ozone layer.

Up close, considering "environment" as our immediate surroundings, it's obvious that the increase would bring more congestion, delays, crowding, public expenditure for additional needed infrastructure and faster depletion of finite resources like coal, oil, gas and mineral commodities which would affect our people and all people worldwide through higher prices.

While humans can adapt to change relatively quickly, plants and animals generally cannot. So, the impact on ecosystems, and even on inanimate systems like glaciers, would be far greater than the impact on people. But a 45% increase in U.S. population, within a time-frame about three-fifths of an average U.S. lifetime, is so large and so fast that, even for humans, adjustment would be difficult.

While our concerns are global, an environmental focus on the U.S. makes sense.

1.) The U.S. is our habitat. We want to maintain its natural endowments for future generations.
2.) U.S. population is growing, albeit needlessly, at a far faster rate than that of any other large industrialized nation.
3.) The U.S. is looked upon as an example by many.

Third World nations whose people equate our population growth with economic success. Our population growth impacts other species mainly through competition for habitat and food. It impacts inanimate Nature through increasing use of topsoil, pasture, forest and waters, often in irreversible ways like wind- and water-erosion, salinization, coastal salt-water intrusion, desertification and preemption of lands and waters through paving, mining, drilling, damming, over-pumping of ground- and surface-water sources, draining of wetlands, siltation and air and water pollution, particularly toxic pollution.

The environmental impact of a rapid 45% increase in U.S. population, today due mainly to a continuing Immigration Boom, the highest numbers in American history, would be greater than the considerable impact of the post-WWII Baby Boom, a 65% jump over a 40-year span, occurring when our population was some 125 million, less than half today's. Thatearlier population surge had an enormous impact on urban change, growth in energy demand, and in expansion of highways and other infrastructure, encouraging sprawl. It ushered in new concerns about pollution, smog, acid rain and nuclear accidents.

Today the Boom would be starting from not only a much larger U.S. population number but also a much-depleted natural base. U.S. population is already so large that many water supplies are no longer being renewed naturally at a sustainable rate. Air pollution is endemic in urban and industrial areas and downwind from them. Even Grand Canyon, Great Smoky and other National Parks are impacted! Less than half of America's waters are fishable and swimmable. Even the Great Lakes are seriously polluted, particularly from heavily-populated areas like many others where expenditure for sewage-treatment and overflow-prevention facilities have not kept up with population growth. In efforts to meet the demand for fossil fuel, minerals and timber, natural areas are increasingly encroached upon and exploited. Our overpopulation has put some 1,000 U.S. plant and animal species on the threatened and endangered list. Some of them have already been rendered extinct.

Today's unsustainable U.S. population growth is mainly the result of adoption by Congresses and Administrations of out-dated 19th Century-era open-immigration, pre-environmental-preservation policies. And our government encourages the births of more than replacement numbers of children by offering tax credits and other incentives and by instituting impediments to family planning.

An environmental perspective recognizes that long-term sustainable population numbers are limited by the essential ecosystem services that Nature can provide renewably. And it recognizes that U.S. numbers have exceeded that limit since the 1950s.

Government policies which directly or indirectly encourage increase in U.S. population are therefore irresponsible, rob the future and must be rejected.