Reinventing Malthus for the 21st Century:
A Bicentennial Event on Malthus' Original Population Essay
A presentation sponsored by
Negative Population Growth (NPG) and The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
held at National Press Club, Washington, DC, July 14, 1997
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Executive Director, Western Virginia Land Trust |
Good afternoon. Some of you may remember me from when I was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in the Carter administration where I had the opportunity to initiate the National Agricultural Land Study. Lester Brown remembers the last thing I wrote from that product. It was an op-ed page piece in the New York Times the last line of which stated "asphalt is the land's last crop." I think he has used that a few times since and I'm glad he has. I'm glad to see that perpetuated.
Currently, I am executive director of a new land trust based in Roanoke Virginia. Land trusts exist to save local landscapes trough voluntary agreements like conservation easements and, in the case of our organization in Roanoke, we are looking at open space from Roanoke to the Cumberland Gap, trying to get private landowners to protect views along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Greenway trail networks, wildlife habitats and historic sites. So that's just my way of a commercial you can turn off the slide projector and we can get on to why Malthus was right.
Now let's consider the effects of human population growth on one particular place in America ö a place whose residents by and large don't think they have a population growth problem. After almost seven years as a resident of Southwest Virginia's Roanoke Valley, I'm convinced of two things: One, that most of my neighbors would say they're satisfied ö I'm tempted to say smugly satisfied ö with the quality of life they enjoy in "The Capital of the Blue Ridge" and, two, that very few of them would agree immediately with the proposition that too-rapid human population growth, locally or in the United States, is impairing their mental or physical health, their cultural and natural heritage, or their freedoms.
Roanoke City's population, you see, has been stuck at about 100,000 for years. Even the metropolitan area's quarter-million population is growing relatively slowly, though some neighboring rural "bedroom community" counties' populations are booming. This slow regional rate of population growth, residents fear, puts our part of the state at a disadvantage relative to the faster-growing parts of the Old Dominion. Why? Because congested Northern Virginia and the other parts of the state's "Golden Crescent" stretching southeast through Richmond to Norfolk are in fact gaining political clout in Richmond and Washington at Roanoke's expense.
So considerable effort currently is being devoted to creating industrial parks, small business incubators, and other incentives to attract new businesses with attendant new jobs (and families) to the Roanoke Valley and to the larger region surrounding it ö the so-called "New Century Region" extending from Covington to Wytheville.
There's a vocal segment of Roanoke society that believes that family size is no one's business but the family's. The Blue Ridge Chapter of Planned Parenthood constantly is on the defensive for providing family planning information and abortion services. And there's a well-attended local annual celebration of the important contributions that recent immigrants from all around the world have made to the economic and social vitality of the Roanoke Valley, called "Local Colors." So, while you and I know that the nation's population has doubled since Pearl Harbor Day, and is growing every year by the equivalent of two cities the size of Detroit, still, in Roanoke, Virginia, the terms population control and immigration control are viewed by many as impolite and unwelcome words.
However, local citizens' expressions of concern are frequently heard in the Roanoke news media and on the street regarding a variety of problematic developments that stem directly from population growth. It's the connection between those local or regional problems and human population growth that hasn't been made in many residents' minds.
Take the heavy truck and car traffic on Interstate 81. Increasingly long convoys of semis ferrying commodities between the West and the populous Northeast have caused the 45-mile commute between Roanoke and Virginia Tech at Blacksburg ö which hundreds of university workers make twice daily ö to become a major pain in the neck. This traffic growth helps justify construction of additional lanes and wider bridges on the interstate highway, as well as a research project called the "Smart Road" which will pave over productive farmland in a beautiful rural valley located between Virginia Tech and Roanoke. The Smart Road will be a test bed, designed to find ways to increase the safe carrying capacity of our highways through automated car controls, while also providing a new auto route cutting 10 minutes off the drive between Tech and our "Star City of the South."
Won't that be fun, when the road takes over control of our cars? It's seen as needed to cope with envisioned future highway congestion.
Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent just in the Roanoke region to address population growth-caused traffic jams. Soon to come in our back yard are north-south Interstate 73, supplementing U.S. 220, and the east-west Trans-American Highway, supplementing U.S. 460. These two mega-roads may intersect in downtown Roanoke, both using already-congested I-581 there. What a mess that's going to be.
But do we often relate these highway-capacity problems to population growth? Do we even see them as problems? Road- and bridge-construction firms see profitable work ahead, the state transportation department sees big contracts to administer, and the research university sees a stream of research grants coming to help support its graduate students and faculty. We are about to pave over more of our beautiful region, inviting more vehicles to our airshed where their exhaust emissions will further pollute the air and harm human health and the health of the natural ecosystem on which we depend for so many free services such as oxygen-production.
Is provision of less-polluting, more efficient alternative transportation modes seriously being considered, such as rail passenger service, expanded public bus service, or making commuting to work by bicycle easier? Not really. That would take thinking outside the box.
Take the increasingly poor visibility from the 470-mile-long Blue Ridge Parkway, the Nation's most-visited National Park System unit. Take the urban sprawl construction along that Parkway near Roanoke, where unfettered development has rendered views from the Blue Ridge Parkway in our valley no different from that along any other road. The Blue Ridge Parkway brings millions of affluent tourists through the Roanoke Valley every year. Tourists driving the Parkway in Virginia spend $340 million a year in neighboring towns like Roanoke. As polluted gray air and housing developments degrade the view along a growing number of miles of the Parkway in Virginia, surely we are killing the goose that lays our tourism golden egg.
Critics blame the American Electric Power Company, whose coal-fired plants in the Ohio River Valley spew toxic oxides of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur that prevailing winds carry our way, for the air quality deterioration. They say spineless local government officials and greedy developers are to blame for the conversion of pastoral vistas to acres of cookie-cutter subdivision housing and huge industrial and commercial buildings.
Some would deny the population connection. But what's a power company in a coal-rich region to do when required to provide dependable electric power at controlled rates for a growing population? What are local governments and developers to do when people need homes and jobs? It is population growth, together with a blithe willingness to spend public money to build roads anywhere to accommodate growth and a reluctance on the part of county boards of supervisors to direct where and how growth occurs, that is to blame for our smog and sprawl.
And, speaking of our local electric power company, American Electric Power, what but envisaged population growth ö a greater future "load" ö could possibly justify current plans to build a new 765 kilovolt power transmission line with its attendant towers and cleared right of way from AEP's Ohio and West Virginia power plants through the heart of the scenic Jefferson National Forest in western Virginia and across the popular Appalachian Trail to Roanoke? Already several of the area's most prominent ridgetopsöTinker Mountain and Poor Mountain, for example ö are littered with towers for electric power, television, radio and telephone transmission. Power line and gas pipeline transmission line rights of way already slash their arrogant way across many otherwise pristine mountainsides in the region.
They were built ö and more are planned to be built ö to serve the needs of a growing human population. And when the debate focuses ö as it does today ö on which side of the mountain to build the new power line on, the side seen by the most people or the side that's less seen but part of a quasi-wilderness area, the battle seems almost lost.
A growing urbanized human population requires more electric power, which leads not only to more coal-fired electric generation plants, transmission towers, and cleared rights of way, but also to more dams for hydroelectric power, such as Smith Mountain Lake ö and there go our free-flowing rivers and streams, together with migratory fish runs and recreational canoeing and rafting opportunities. Expensive dams also are required to provide more potable water for our growing population, supplementing, in Roanoke's case, inexpensive natural springs and wells that once were adequate. Thus we now have to pay for the construction of the vast Spring Hollow Reservoir in Roanoke County and divert into it part of the historic flow of the Roanoke River, a tremendously productive aquatic environment with several endemic (unique) fish species and other aquatic creatures. Their well-being is at risk not only from reduced flows but from the chlorine used to treat the waste water at our regional sewage treatment plant. The extremely high cost of increasing the capacity and thoroughness of treatment at the Roanoke Regional Waste Water Treatment Plant ö absolutely necessary because of regional population growth and industrial expansion, particularly in downstream Bedford and Franklin counties where Smith Mountain Lake (on the Roanoke River) soon will be used for drinking waterö recently was described by the Chairman of the Board of the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors as "high enough to gag a maggot."
Not only is the Roanoke River which bisects the city of the same name being used as a water supply and a waste sink, but its natural banks and flood-absorbing floodway are about to be straightened and channelized by one of those classic U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control projects which sends the flood water problem downstream while turning part of the river in the city ö a tree-lined linear park and bona fide trout habitat now ö into an ugly paved ditch. For the same amount of money the structures to be protected by this flood reduction project ö structures built in the wrong place in the first place ö could have been moved out of harm's way permanently.
Take the silt load that appears in the Roanoke River and its tributaries, covering valuable fish habitat, with every heavy rain. Where do you suppose that silt pollution comes from? Some, of course, is topsoil from farmers' corn fields and other croplands where the owners have been slow to convert to no-till or low-till plowing practices, and some comes from sloppy logging operations too close to streams. But most of the silt is coming from soil disturbance accompanying road construction and home-site preparation associated with urban sprawl, despite sedimentation-control laws and regulations. Should we blame the farmers, who produce the food we need, or the loggers, who produce the wood we need, or even the developers, who build the homes we need? Or should we identify and address the real culprit ö population growth?
Take the clear cutting that goes on, on both public and private forest lands in western Virginia. It's demand-driven, and the demand for wood products comes from human population growth. Don't blame Westvaco or the Forest Service; the public wants its paper and its lumber, and the only choice forest landowners have is whether to get all of the wood from one large spot at a time or to build more roads to enable the trees to be cut "selectively." Sometimes the road-building causes more soil loss than the logging, so it can be six of one and a half-dozen of another as far as the environmental impact of clear-cut logging or selective logging is concerned. The point is that trees will be harvested to meet the growing population's needs ö if not in western Virginia, then somewhere else in the world, where the environmental impact may be even worse.
Take the steep decline in the average size of a farm in the Roanoke Valley and the rapid conversion of once-extensive apple and peach orchard lands there to industrial and residential uses. Farms, because they are accessible flat land, are easily and cheaply developed. If every community adopts the same attitude mine has ö that we can easily continue to obtain sufficient fresh vegetables, fruit and dairy products from somewhere else ö many American communities soon will be importing most of those kinds of perishable foods... and hoping that those other fruit and vegetable growing countries' pesticide residue-level regulations and their enforcement are the equivalent of ours. As American Farmland Trust President Ralph Grossi wrote in the Roanoke Times recently, 80 percent of America's fruit, vegetable and dairy products come from counties in and around urbanizing areas, and almost 50 acres of this unique land is being destroyed every hour.
I'm going to miss being able to go to Roanoke's historic farmers' market for locally grown fresh vegetables and to a nearby orchard for fresh cider and crisp apples every fall. The attitude of the county staff in the county losing the most orchard acreage in the Roanoke Valley, however, is that the conversion of their county's farms and orchards to population growth-induced industrial development and housing subdivision is a positive sign indicating that their county is "growing up" and not remaining a rural backwater. Botetourt County wants to be Fairfax County, I guess.
We could consider the large amount of open space and other resources being devoted in the Roanoke Valley now just to burying the tons of trash our people generate every day ö a new railroad spur line called the Trash Train has been created just to transfer our garbage to an expensive new landfill at Smith Gap ö or we could look at the deteriorated condition of Roanoke's inner-city housing stock and the abandonment of industrial sites in the City, while both homes and industries engulf scenic rural areas on the urban fringe. Both are signs that anti-environmental incentives are at work to discourage the recycling of both our trash and our inner-city housing and industrial sites. But we're out of time to look in detail at every population growth-related phenomenon in my region.
So I will conclude by expressing my conviction that Parson Malthus was on the right track 200 years ago and that John Rohe is right on target in his new book, A Bicentennial Malthusian Essay. One line of Rohe's I particularly like is the following:
"If we remain indifferent to the limits of visual abuse on interior viewscapes, then we will sacrifice not only a prime natural resource, but we will also diminish ourselves in the process."
Thank you for your attention.
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