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http://www.wild-earth.org/curr_issue/wild.html Smart Growth and
Sapsuckers This spring I’ve been watching two families build homes in my rural neighborhood. One of the building sites is emblematic of modern residential construction. Hired contractors cleared trees with chainsaws and bulldozers, drilled a well, and installed a septic system. An excavator dug the cellar hole and a convoy of concrete trucks rolled up the road to pour the foundation. Then several massive, plastic-covered sections of the factory-built house were delivered to the site; a crane lifted them into place, they were bolted together, and in a day, a large, two-story house with attached garage appeared. The house is big—but probably not much above average for new housing in the United States. (By Third World standards it would be a palace.) Like all conventional housing, it was extremely resource intensive to manufacture; concrete, lumber, glass, copper wiring, asphalt shingles, etc. use large quantities of energy to produce and transport. Except for the concrete and gravel, it’s likely that the materials came from outside the region: framing lumber from British Columbia, perhaps; particle-board sheathing from aspens clearcut and chipped in Colorado; copper mined in New Mexico; foam insulation whose petroleum base was pumped in the Middle East. The global economy allows for the new house’s ecological foot to stretch across the globe. (Fortunately, the house site was adjacent to an existing development, required no new road construction, and did not further fragment significant wildlife habitat, as new residential development so often does.) By contrast, the second couple hired no general contractor and went about building their new dwelling the old-fashioned way. They worked cooperatively, used natural materials, and employed only muscle-power for their excavating work. When their new home was complete, they immediately started a family. Of course, as yellow-bellied sapsuckers, their space requirements are considerably more modest than those of a human family. Their nest is a small cavity about 20 feet up an aspen tree in the woods behind our house. At this writing, the chicks have hatched and the male and female sapsuckers are diligently feeding the hungry nestlings, which soon will fledge. (This may be the same pair of woodpeckers who successfully raised chicks last summer in another aspen a few yards nearer our spring, where tadpoles are now busy growing legs.) Watching these two families—human and avian—commence home-building operations has me thinking about the trendy phrase “smart growth,” which has always struck me as an oxymoron. As Dave Foreman notes in his Campfire this issue, even a modest rate of growth is impossible to sustain forever on a finite planet, despite the wishful thinking of cornucopians. The insight that, over time, incremental gains in production or efficient use of resources cannot keep pace with an exponentially expanding population is hardly new. That point was well made by the Reverend Thomas Malthus in “An Essay on the Principle of Population” written in 1798, and a veritable mountain of population-related literature has risen from this idea. Nonetheless, the orthodoxy that undergirds our economic and political decision-making assumes perpetual economic expansion and discounts the grave problems posed by human overpopulation. It ignores biological and physical reality, as well as the profound social disruptions resulting from the drive for endless growth. Substantive discussion of human population growth’s negative effects on natural and human communities is rare in the mainstream media. Little of the extensive coverage given to sprawl and urban growth issues highlights the causative factor of rapidly expanding numbers of Americans that must be fed, educated, and entertained, and whose wastes must be managed and disposed. How many of the stories on California’s current energy “crisis” have focused on that state’s population explosion, which is driven in large part by legal and illegal immigration?1 Have you seen a single news story on the president’s proposed national energy policy that made the logical link to the need for a national population policy? Probably not—for the dominant view, echoed by the current administration, says that the solution to more people using more electricity is simple: bring a new power plant on line this week and next week and so on for ten or twenty years. That’s supply-side energy policy, and the trickle-down effects will be severe for wildlife, air and water quality, and public lands. Just how many Americans should there be? What kinds of reasonable, humane social policies can move us toward that number? It is simply nonsensical to hope that we might adequately plan for future energy, transportation, housing, and other infrastructure needs without an informed discussion on how many people this continent can support—at a decent standard of living—while leaving plenty of room for woodpeckers and wolves. By any measure that leaves space enough for wild Nature to flourish, we have already greatly surpassed the land’s carrying capacity, and thus truly smart growth would be negative growth. Yet the demographic steamroller is gaining steam: When my father was born in 1935, the US population was 127 million. Today, it’s nearly 285 million. Roughly 80 million Americans have been added since the first Earth Day in 1970, and in my daughter’s lifetime,2 the US population is projected to reach half a billion. These numbers are abstractions, but the consequences of tripling the domestic population in my immediate family’s lifetimes are very real and wholly negative—for people and sapsuckers. This journal is something of an anomaly because it regularly covers the links between overpopulation and biodiversity loss. In recent decades there has been a growing balkanization between activists who address population and consumption issues, and those who work for land conservation. Isn’t that odd? If the statistics are so grim and the prospects for functioning wild ecosystems so dire, why has the environmental movement abandoned US population stabilization (let alone reduction) as a primary goal? In this issue of Wild Earth, Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz consider this irony in a condensed version of their superb article “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998),” which appeared in the Journal of Policy History last year.3 Wildlands advocates should read the authors’ astute analysis of this recent history and consider how these divisions might be overcome and an inclusive, effective campaign for reversing overpopulation (and “overimmigration,” to borrow the late David Brower’s term) be initiated. Moreover, every conservationist working for expanded wilderness or endangered species protection, and every environmentalist fighting toxic pollution and corporate welfare, should periodically remind themselves that all our efforts to create a political and social landscape that accommodates home sites for every family—human and wild—may be washed away by the rising river of human population and consumption. That old slogan, “whatever your cause, it will be a lost cause without population control,” may be out of fashion—even among conservationists—but it has never been more relevant. —Tom Butler –Tom Butler ©2001 All Rights Reserved.
Tom
Butler, Editor |
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