Earth Day founder Nelson would not laud 300 million mark
By Rob Zaleski, Oct. 18, 2006
October 18, 2006
The U.S. population soared past the 300 million mark on Tuesday, and I’m guessing most Americans - those who were paying attention anyway - greeted the news with a collective yawn.
Although there was a smattering of news stories about the historic moment, and an Associated Press article noted that our burgeoning population is the chief cause of sprawl, none of the stories I saw viewed this as a negative thing. On the contrary, an editorial in USA Today even suggested it was reason to celebrate.
What we have in this country isn’t a population problem, the editorial argued, but a “population distribution problem.” And the solution, it said, “lies not in quashing economic growth, but in stimulating it with better transportation and land-use policies.”
And, of course, no high-ranking U.S. official publicly expressed alarm about the occasion or pointed out that the U.S. population had increased 50 percent in just 39 years - which makes us by far the fastest-growing industrialized country in the world.
But I can guarantee that if Gaylord Nelson, the esteemed former Wisconsin senator and the father of Earth Day, were still around, he would have had something to say.
Nelson, who died in July 2005 at age 89, was the only public figure in this country who had the guts to talk about the dark side of uncontrolled growth - such as the enormous strain it puts on our natural resources.
“He felt we were likely to fight future wars just over fresh water,” Tia Nelson, the late senator’s daughter, noted in a phone interview this week.
Indeed, in his role as counselor to the Wilderness Society, Nelson spent the last decade of his life warning people across the globe about the perils of overpopulation. And he chastised the media, elected officials and his environmental colleagues for refusing to address the topic.
And, of course, there’s no great mystery why U.S. politicians in particular want nothing to do with it. That includes, by the way, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, both of whom declined to comment on the subject when I contacted them for a piece I did on Gaylord Nelson shortly after his death.
As Bill Christofferson, Nelson’s biographer, told me, politicians avoid the debate because it means confronting such hot-button issues as birth control and family planning - which conservatives and most religious groups fiercely oppose.
And if you talk about limiting U.S. population - which is expected to double by 2060 - it means you must address the issue of immigration, which now accounts for about 40 percent of the growth. Then you’ll be called a racist.
So we stick our heads in the sand and leave it for our kids and grandkids to grapple with the problem.
To be sure, nobody’s more perturbed about this than Tia Nelson, who is executive secretary of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands in Wisconsin.
“I’m frequently asked, in reflecting on Papa’s death, who in public office is picking up the mantle and showing leadership on population and the environment? And I’m hard-pressed to think of anybody,” she says.
“Certainly Al Gore has done a fantastic job with his film (”An Inconvenient Truth”) in bringing awareness to climate change. But if I had to name one U.S. senator who shows any kind of real leadership on environmental issues, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a name.”
Tia says that while recently digging through some of her father’s Wilderness Society files, she happened upon a note he had scribbled to himself that pretty much sums up his frustrations about society’s unwillingness to confront the topic.
“Population growth and its consequences is not a dramatic event waiting to happen,” he wrote. “Rather it is a dramatic event already in progress, just waiting to be noticed. And when we finally do notice, it will likely be too late.”
Christofferson likes to point out that Nelson felt that overpopulation was really a quality of life issue and that it simply wasn’t possible to sustain rapid growth while at the same time depleting our resources.
He believed it was just common sense, and it angered him that his liberal friends wouldn’t go near the subject because it was politically incorrect. At the very least, Nelson liked to say, we need to have the debate.
Sadly, it appears that’s not about to happen - not anytime soon anyway.
In the meantime, try to picture what Dane County’s going to look like with another 120,000 residents by 2025. Then think about the impact it will have on traffic, the roads, the lakes, the water supply, the schools, our energy needs, social services, crime and property taxes.
As Nelson liked to ask, can anyone honestly say this will be a better place under that scenario?
Richard :: Dec.21.2006 :: Personal Thoughts :: No Comments »