Americans recently celebrated the 53rd anniversary of Earth Day. The holiday has changed drastically over the past half century — and so has the natural environment that activists are seeking to protect.
Today’s green activists tend to mark Earth Day by focusing on ways to minimize their personal impact on the environment — through regular recycling, cleaning up local parks, planting trees, driving hybrids, or shopping with reusable bags. But the activists who celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970 had a much broader focus — they were primarily concerned about our collective impact on the environment. As Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), the founder of Earth Day, put it in a speech, activists’ goal was “a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well-being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution.”
In particular, they feared — with good reason — that America’s rapidly growing population was overtaxing fragile ecosystems. As Sen. Nelson later noted, the U.S. population had soared from 98 million the year he was born in 1916 to 200 million by the first Earth Day, and “tremendous ecological damage occurred as a result of this growth” since vast expanses of green space had to be cleared or bulldozed to make room for houses, offices, malls, roads, and all the other trappings of civilization.
Since then, the likes of Joe “Heckuva Lot More People” Biden has come upon us like a scourge, and America has added over 130 million of the world’s excess to its population. That growth has taken a toll on the environment and the wildlife that live there. Our nation lost 68,000 square miles of open space from 1982 to 2017. That’s an area the size of Florida. And 67% of that habitat destruction resulted from population growth, with the remaining 33% due to increases in per-capita consumption.
And there’s no end in sight. In the next 30 years, our population is projected to hit 373 million, primarily due to immigration and births to immigrants. This will inevitably lead to more urban sprawl, more traffic congestion, more water shortages, more air pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, and more loss of biodiversity.
If we truly care about protecting our planet for ourselves and future generations, we need to address the root cause of environmental degradation: overpopulation. We need to promote policies that limit immigration to a sustainable level and encourage smaller families through voluntary means. We need to educate people about the environmental benefits of having fewer children and provide them with access to family planning services. We need to do all the things that we’ve not been doing, since the craving for more people has trumped the environment altogether.
Earth Day was an opportunity to celebrate our achievements and raise awareness of our challenges. But until this Woke quest for more people ends, there’s not much chance for the environment — or for us.
For more, see the Boston Herald website.