VP Harris’ Missed Opportunity

When Rob Harding attended the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) this winter, participating governments had already failed to meet the targets they had set over the previous two decades (ICYMI, North American birds have declined by a third since the first Earth Day, a loss of over one billion birds). After experiencing COP15, Rob expects that trend of failure to continue.

“When the overall driver of biodiversity loss isn’t even on the agenda,” he writes, “we shouldn’t expect to succeed.”

In fact, Rob believes most countries, including the United States, are “faking it when it comes to their pledges to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.”

Meanwhile, the White House recently scrambled to do damage control when Vice President Harris uttered the words “reduce population” in the context of promoting a cleaner environment, saying she meant to say “reduce pollution”. A variety of social and political commentators swiftly expressed their disdain because they reflexively inferred that Harris was referring to getting rid of people already here in the U.S. But this was never Harris’ intention, nor is it of anyone else who is concerned about U.S. population growth. Rather, it’s all about how much we are going to grow our population in the future. The White House missed an opportunity to broach a critical topic for the future of our country. How big do we want to be? What is our ideal population, for long-term sustainability and to safeguard the quality-of-life for future generations?

Habitat loss is the single greatest threat to biodiversity and ecosystems, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report, even more than climate change. Population growth is the main driver of habitat loss and species extinction in the U.S. and globally. Federal immigration policy is the main driver of U.S. population growth, making it (among other things) a biodiversity policy, a traffic policy, a housing policy, and – yes – a pollution policy. Yet the White House won’t touch it.

On one hand, the Democratic Party platform proclaims that Democrats “will protect wildlife habitats and biodiversity…by conserving 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” Not to be outdone, the Biden administration also promised that by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced to 2005 levels. But anyone familiar with NumbersUSA’s sprawl studies understands that both of these promises are undercut by the Biden administration also incentivizing both legal and illegal immigration — accepting more than 3 million migrants per year.

None of these population-related considerations were on the agenda at COP15 either. Harding writes:

The U.S. Congressional Budget Office projects that U.S. population growth will be driven entirely by immigration within two decades. Readers take note, because you won’t see this truth shared by the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, or any other American environmental protection organization.”

How did it come to pass that the environmental movement that sprang out of the first Earth Day, abandoned their own fundamentals? I spoke with Professor Philip A. Cafaro about that.

In “Forsaking Fundamentals, The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization,” originally published in the Journal of Policy History in 2000, Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz identified five developments that led the environmental movement to forsake the fundamental issue of population:

Development 1: U.S. Fertility Dropped Below Replacement-Level Rate in 1972

Development 2: Abortion and Contraceptive Politics Created Organized Opposition

Development 3: Emergence of Women’s Issues as Priority Concern of Population Groups

Development 4: Schism between the Conservationist and New-Left Roots of the Movement

Development 5: Immigration Became the Chief Cause of U.S. Growth

“Immigration emerged in the 1970s as the leading cause of continuing U.S. population growth,” Beck and Kolankiewicz wrote. “Immigration was an issue that none of the environmental groups had ever handled. Almost overnight, the U.S. population growth challenge had changed from being driven by American fertility to federal immigration policy. That forced environmental groups to make a choice to either (a) pursue U.S. stabilization by working for immigration reductions, or (b) abandon U.S. stabilization.”

To many observers, it appeared that foundations were pressing environmental groups (which they funded) to compromise with immigrant rights groups (which they also funded) by agreeing to step away from any advocacy for reductions in immigrant-driven U.S. population growth.”

In 1996, the Sierra Club dropped its long-held concern for immigration-driven, U.S. population growth when a major donor, David Gelbaum, threatened to stop his donations. Other environmental groups followed suit. With no major environmental groups discussing U.S. population stabilization, the media dropped the issue as well.

“Journalists are aware of the controversial nature of the population issue, and prefer to avoid it if possible,” wrote T. Michael Maher of the University of Southwestern Louisiana in his 1997 analysis of the news media’s retreat from the issue (“How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection.” Population and Environment, vol. 18, no. 4).

“Most interviewees said that a national phenomenon like population growth was beyond the scope of what they could write about as local reporters.”

Last Fall, Christopher Ketchum took his own stab at “how we learned not to talk about human numbers,” and he suggests we follow the money. “More people means more consumers and also more available workers to keep wages low and put labor in cannibalizing competition with itself in the global race to the bottom,” he writes.

But maybe Americans care about green things that don’t simply fold in their wallets. Todd Wilkinson cites NumbersUSA’s national study and reports that Montanans “are questioning the rationale that prosperity must come at high cost to community values and other things they revere far more than money.” Sprawl, they say, is ruining their state.

JEREMY BECK is a V.P., Deputy Director for NumbersUSA