Americans planted trees, organized park clean-upsand hosted community events to promote conservation and sustainability for Earth Day 2019.
All those activities are important. But they don't address one of America's biggest environmental challenges —rapid population growth. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the U.S. population has increased from 205 million to 327 million.It'll surge to 404 million by 2060, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Would adding another 77 million people to the United States cause great harm to the environment? It’s a question we need to ask ourselves.
The answer to that question is obvious if one considers the effects of U.S. population growth. We'd have to develop millions of acres of open space to house and feed all these new people.
It's not too late to put America on a more sustainable path, but that would mean having an honest discussion about what’s driving U.S. population growth. Almost 90 percent of population growth is fueled byimmigration, according to Pew Research.Humanely scaling back future levels ofimmigrationwould help America pursue a sustainable future.
Earth Day's founder, the late Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin), recognized the need to addressimmigrationlevels.
"It's phony to say 'I'm for the environment but not for limitingimmigration,' "he noted. "It's just a fact that we can't take all the people who want to come here."
He's right. Nearly 160 million people around the world want to move to the United States.There's no feasible way to accept them all. Which means Americans need to make hard choices about who we let inand, most importantly, how many.
Right now, we're refusing to make those choices. Ourimmigrationsystem is running on autopilot due to "chain-migration" policies, which allow recentimmigrantsto sponsor their extended family members for green cards. Most of the 1 million legalimmigrantswho arrive in America each year come through chain migration.
Another 1 million illegalimmigrantswill slip through our porous southern border this year.
These levels ofimmigrationare historically high. For much of the 20th century, America took in just 250,000 or so foreigners each year. It wasn't until theImmigrationand Nationality Act of 1965 thatimmigration levels started to surge.
The ensuing population growth has already damaged the environment. Developers have paved 40 million acres of forests and fields —an area the size of New York, Massachusettsand New Jersey combined —since the early 1980s to make way for more housing, roadsand other structures.
Florida is all too familiar withimmigration-fueled urban sprawl. It adds 900 new people to its population each day, and more than half of that total areimmigrants. That's equivalent to adding the population of Orlando to the state every year.If this trend continues, more than 5 million acres of farms, forestsand open space in Florida will be lost to development by 2070.
This sprawl doesn't just lay waste to beautiful open spaces. It threatens our quality of life in other tangible ways.
Consider water pollution, for instance. Developers are paving over fertile cropland to construct housing developments, shopping centersand highways. To feed a growing population with less land, farmers will turn to harmful pesticides and fertilizers to boost their crop yields. And since we're paving over natural land with impermeable asphalt and concrete, much of that fertilizer will run off into our water supply.
This future isn't inevitable. If Congress simply ended chain migration for recentimmigrants' non-nuclear family members, it'd reduce the projected U.S. population in 2060 by tens of millions of people —without forcing anyone currently in the United States to leave.
Likewise, requiring all employers to use E-Verify, a free online system that vets people's ID papers to confirm their work eligibility, would humanely deter illegalimmigration. Most illegalimmigrantscome here to work -- if they know they won't find jobs, they won't make the dangerous journey north in the first place.
Planting trees and cleaning up parks is great. But if Americans really want to preserve open spaces for future generations, they'll need to think bigger. It's time for environmentalists to call for humane reductions inimmigrationlevels.
Glen Colton is an environmentalist and long term sustainability activist who lives in fast growing Fort Collins, Colorado.
