http://www.americanpatrol.com/IMMIGRATION/CA_popexplosionburke000724.html

Rising population growing problem, can't be ignored

By Demographer B. Meredith Burke

(Published July 24, 2000, in the Fresno Bee)

A recent Bee article on land acquisitions by school districts striving to keep abreast of soaring enrollments fits neatly into the survey findings of University of Southwest Louisiana communications professor Michael Maher. In the mid-1990s he analyzed a national sample of 50 stories dealing with each of endangered species, urban sprawl and water shortages. Only one story in 10 even mentioned population growth as a contributory factor. Among these, "smart growth," not population stabilization, was offered as a possible solution.

Yet where are the students who will require an estimated additional nine elementary schools, one intermediate and one high school in the Clovis Unified School District? Silence on population trends seems ludicrous in a district that in the last 14 years has financed 13 new elementary schools, two new intermediate schools, and four new high schools.

Many excuses

Maher asked journalists to explain their silence. "I'm a local reporter; it's beyond my scope to deal with national and global issues," "I have only nine inches of space, no room to go into underlying or contributory causes." And lastly, "We fear that discussing population will raise issues of reproduction and from there, abortion politics, which we prefer to avoid."

Alas, these reporters are 30 years behind times. Since 1970 half of all national population growth and 60% of state has been derived from immigration -- not just entrants but their descendants. Immigration, not abortion, has become the "elephant in the living room" that it is impolite to remark upon.

In the 1990s, births to immigrant women constituted 20% of national and 45% of California's annual 550,000 to 600,000 births. Alternatively, nationally births were 25% higher and statewide, nearly 100% higher than those to native-born mothers alone. (By the 1990s U.S.-born daughters of recent entrants began their own childbearing).

Growth magnet

"Smart growth" was the subtext of last November's "Central Valley Economic Summit." Gov. Gray Davis promised that a planned University of California at Merced campus will be a "powerhouse" for regional economic recovery. He sidestepped a suggestion by an earlier panelist to hold a forum on how to protect farms from galloping developments. Yet one certainty is that a new UC campus will be a magnet for population growth that will swamp existing open space, housing and roads, and displace more native species.

The land and agriculture of the Central Valley -- one of California's last great agricultural regions, producer of half the fruits and vegetables for American tables -- will not survive a projected state increase of 20 million more people by 2025. Our land and natural beauty are already severely compromised by population's growth from 10 million in 1950 to 35 million today. Can they survive the next assault? If so, can they survive those after that?

The Valley is receiving spillover from both coastal regions and immigration. The San Joaquin portion of it (from Bakersfield to south of Sacramento) had 2 million people in 1980; 3.2 million today. A town like Modesto numbered 36,000 in 1960 and 185,000 today. Another 3 million live in Sacramento and points north.

Thirty brief years ago M.I.T. professor Jay Forrester, in his books "System Dynamics" and "Urban Dynamics," warned against piecemeal solutions to complex systemic problems. By confusing symptoms with cause, this approach guarantees futile or, worse, counterproductive solutions.

But planners and politicians are short-sighted. They fail us first by proposing local solutions to systemic and national problems, and second by accepting the (physically impossible) inevitability of perpetual population growth. Safeguarding resources and the environment for our children's children is not on the legislative table.

The President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future bluntly warned in 1972 that continued population growth threatened everything Americans held most dear. It urged Congress to adopt a national population policy with all due speed, noting that both reproductive health and immigration policies would have to respect such.

Scant attention

Yet no politician seeking a presidential nomination has commented on the Census Bureau's recent projections of 570 million Americans by the year 2100 with constant immigration levels, a full 1 billion with expanded ones.

Citizens so far have rejected what we claim we want: a leader who will force us to confront unpleasant and harsh truths. Saving our communities once and for all requires first stopping, then reversing population growth until California is back to its 1950 level of 10 million, the country to its 1950 level of 150 million: our maximum sustainable numbers.

Given the jump in childbearing-age adults in the next quarter-century, future growth is certain. In polls Americans recognize their community, state and country are demographically full. Why approve greater local and state spending when national legislators interpret these acts as a green light for incurring still further expensive, ecologically damaging and citizen-rejected population increments?

A sustainable population requires both a national population policy and our assistance in defusing the population explosion in the Third World while fostering improved living standards in the same countries. Without such policies each local school and water and planning district will work ceaselessly and futilely to meet expanding demands.

Demographer B. Meredith Burke is a senior fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization.

-- K. (infosurf@yahoo.com), July 24, 2000

Answers

I don't believe there is such a thing as Smart Growth, as long as it's planned and organized by dumb politicians and bureaucrats.

-- Uncle Fred (dogboy45@bigfoot.com), July 24, 2000.

I've got to agree....Where were all these planners right after World War II and the 1950s? That's when this country really needed their planning wisdom.... during the great post-war baby boom explosion.

-- R2D2 (r2d2@earthend.net), July 24, 2000.

Maybe we ought to get some population-control bureaucrates over here from China to teach us how to do it - abort all the girls and shoot all the second, third, and fourth boys.

-- Chance (fruitloops@Hotmail.com), July 24, 2000.

For a long time I have thought that we have the potential of becoming a third world nation, a banana republic ourselves.

You read stuff like this and it tends to prove the point.

-- Billiver (billiver@aol.com), July 25, 2000.

It's hard to believe, but it's true. The great California Central Valley provides ONE-HALF of all the fruits and vegetables consmed in the good ol' U.S. of A. I've lived here 24 years. I know.

As a Free Enerpriser, it's a difficult problem to face: How do you protect true free enterprise, and, at the same time, prevent the Central Valley from being "crowded out"?

-- JackW (jpayne@webtv.com), July 25, 2000.

Its a one way street. The breeders will have there way because naturally they are the largest percentage of the population. The only thing to do is buy your own sanctuary and have some room from the teeming hordes that believe in reproductive rights as a basic human right and watch the rest of the planet get bulldozed. There is no other solution on the individual level. I've spent decades watching this problem develop and it has far too much momentum for anything else to happen.

-- Guy Daley (guydaley@bwn.net), July 26, 2000.

this population increase is almost totally dependent on continued supplies of cheap fossil fuels

see www.dieoff.org and www.hubbertpeak.com for estimates about how long this can last

-- mark (solar@wind.com), July 27, 2000.