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From sentience to silence: how the environmental establishment changed its tune on U.S. overpopulation.

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THE ERA OF CONCERN

In the heady days of the new environmental awareness, at the first big Earth Day celebration in April 1970, the ecological threat posed by U.S. population growth was part of every discussion. David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, had encouraged Paul Ehrlich to write The Population Bomb, which became a runaway best-seller. The educational work of the new organization Zero Population Growth, or ZPG, became familiar to American school children. In 1972 the Sierra Club, the nation's premier conservation organization, adopted a ZPG platform, declaring as one of its objectives to "... bring about the stabilization of the population first of the United States and then of the world." Other groups made similar commitments.

This stance was nothing new for the Sierra Club. As early as 1959, at the Sierra Club biennial Wilderness Conference, Resolution Seven said, according to one historian, "that there was no point in talking about wilderness, which would only be an incidental victim of the coming malignant population explosion." (1) Loss of wilderness, a cornerstone issue for American environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, was now seen as a symptom of population growth.

During the 1970s, U.S. overpopulation attracted concern. Because of the impact of the post-World War II "Baby Boom," the threat of population growth was serious. Between 1950 and 1970, U.S. population had grown by fifty-two million people, almost double the increase during the prior twenty-year period. In 1970, U.S. population stood at 203 million. (2) Popular books addressed the problem in urgent tones. Corporate leaders sounded the alarm with banner advertisements in leading newspapers. (3) Even the federal government took note: at the request of President Richard M. Nixon, Congress empanelled a commission headed by John D. Rockefeller III to conduct a two-year study of population and the American future. The commission's 1972 report generated such interest that it was republished as a mass-market paperback. Famously it stated, "We have looked for, and have not found, any convincing economic argument for continued population growth. The health of our country does not depend on it, nor does the vitality of business nor the welfare of the average person." (4)

THE ERA OF UNCONCERN

Why isn't the threat of U.S. population growth taken as seriously today? In a stunning reversal, the idea that the United States might be overpopulated is extremely controversial today, even within the environmental movement. The subject has essentially been declared taboo by the environmental establishment and the leaders of the major environmental organizations, an assemblage I'll call "the Enviros."

Whatever lies behind this change, it certainly isn't the numbers. In 2000, U.S. population was more than 281 million, having grown by fifty-five million between 1980 and 2000, a larger increase than the Baby Boom growth of 1950-1970. Yet today's environmental establishment is silent on the subject, routinely quashing attempts by its own activists to...

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