Center Paper 18, March 2001

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When the Society for Environmental Journalists held its annual conference in Chattanooga, Tenn., in October of 1998, urban sprawl was a recurring theme.

And no wonder: U.S. population growth was every bit as potent in 1998 as it had been in 1970: Some 2.5 million or more Americans were being added each year, at a rate faster than some third-world countries and ten times faster than Europe. It was a volume of growth nearly matching that of the Baby Boom years that helped trigger the 1970-era environmental/ population movement. The Earth Day 1970 vision of a stabilized American population within a generation had never materialized.

To put U.S. growth in perspective, consider that the decades between 1950 and 1970 had added 52 million Americans — driving total population to 203 million. That two-decade growth was not only unprecedented in a long history of continuous expansion, but almost double the growth of the next largest two-decade period. But growth barely abated in the 1970-90 period, with another 46 million added. Furthermore, the Census Bureau projected that growth in the next two-decade period (1990-2010) would exceed even the Baby Boom era. The nation already approached 275 million as the new century dawned.

Urban sprawl was featured in the keynote address of the environmental journalists’ 1998 Chattanooga conference. City officials proudly conducted tours of their efforts to control sprawl (although some admitted that they feared Atlanta’s massive sprawl could within a few years swallow all their efforts). Few journalists were from cities not struggling with the bitter fruits of the urban sprawl blighting late-1990s America: Mounting traffic congestion; endless disruptive road construction; spreading smog; worsening water pollution and tightening water supplies; disappearing wildlife habitats, farmland, and open spaces; overcrowded schools; overused parks and outdoor recreation facilities; the end of small-town life in communities that until recently had been beyond the city; the impending merging together of separate, unwieldy metropolitan areas into vast megalopolitan miasmas; and the overall deterioration in quality of life and the increasing social tensions of urban dwellers reflected in such phenomena as gated communities and "road rage."

Yet, the population growth exacerbating all those problems was strangely missing from a popular session in which a panel of newspaper reporters and editors discussed their expansive coverage of the problems from, the causes of, and the solutions to urban sprawl in different parts of the country. The panelists talked about problematic zoning, planning and lifestyle choices, but not about the 25 million new residents added each decade — or the sheer amount of space required for their housing, worksites, schools, roads, recreation facilities, shopping centers, and other infrastructure.³¹

When challenged from the audience, all the panelists agreed that urban sprawl would be far less destructive without the massive population growth that is occurring in America. And they agreed that urban life and environmental losses would be immensely different if some 70 million people had not been added to the U.S. population since 1970. But they indicated that they had not addressed U.S. population growth in their urban sprawl reporting because they wanted to direct readers toward solutions to urban sprawl per se. Since nothing could be done about population growth, they indicated, it couldn’t be part of the solution; thus, they did not write about population.

In the late 1990s, as in 1970, the problems stemming from U.S. population growth were huge news. But the underlying population growth itself and its causes were barely being mentioned. Al Gore, the "environmental vice president," gave it no emphasis in his national campaign against urban sprawl.³² In virtually a complete reversal of the 1970 conditions, U.S. population growth was treated by most environmental leaders and journalists as an implacable natural phenomenon, which, like hurricanes and earthquakes, we could not prevent but only adjust to.

Historians may find that the key reason for that fundamental shift in the way the public learned about environmental issues through the news media was the behavior of environmental advocacy groups. Journalists tend to look to competing interest groups to define the issues they cover. Business groups always have defined one end of the growth issue spectrum as they pushed for ever more population growth. At one time, environmental groups defined the other end by calling for no growth. By the late 1990s, however, those groups no longer emphasized population growth as something a nation could choose or reject. Most of the scores of American environmental groups either ignored U.S. population growth altogether, treated it as a negative but inexorable force whose effects can only be mitigated, or even suggested that growth in human numbers is environmentally benign.

That dramatic change in the strategy of the American environmental movement was reflected in the back of the Chattanooga hotel room where the sprawl panel took place. There, a representative from the national Sierra Club headquarters had placed a display of literature from the Club’s major new campaign against urban sprawl. The highly-publicized, multi-million-dollar campaign mentioned population growth only in passing, and then only to minimize its role. None of the materials suggested stabilizing U.S. population as one part of the solution to urban sprawl. The Sierra campaign instead focused its advocacy on creating more regulation and management of U.S. growth to ameliorate its adverse effects on the environment. And it assumed — and tacitly accepted — that the U.S. population would never stop growing.

According to this view, instead of shunning the compact development and higher housing densities of a country like Japan as foreign to the American Dream and our traditional notions of "elbow room" and freedom, more closely packed dwellings ought to be embraced so that population could continue to grow without spurring more sprawl. Pile people on top of each other instead of allowing them to spread out. Yet none of these density enthusiasts bothered to ask whether people like the Japanese actually choose to live compactly — or are forced to by circumstances. "Perhaps nothing defines Japan, the Japanese psyche and a Japanese person’s daily life more than space or the scarcity of it," concluded a Washington Post article. "You definitely have a feeling of no privacy," said one Tokyo resident, who hears every time a neighbor flushes a toilet, turns on a washing machine, or shouts at his children. "Japanese daily life is filled with rules and more rules, and many of them exist because of the space shortage," observed the story.³³ This was the sort of future anti-sprawl, pro-population growth environmentalists were urging on America.

That Chattanooga room’s anecdotal reflection of the news media and environmental movement in the late-1990s was verified in national research by Professor T. Michael Maher of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He conducted a study of news coverage of urban sprawl, endangered species, and water shortages — all issues profoundly affected by population growth. In a random sample of 150 stories on those issues, he found only about one in 10 even mentioned population growth as one source of the problem. And only one of the 150 stories mentioned that one part of the solution might be to try to stabilize the U.S. population.³⁴

The journalists told Maher they were uncomfortable raising the population issue on their own. Without environmental groups themselves calling attention to the population factor, the journalists had few ready quotes or perspectives that would help them add that element to their stories. With the business and political establishments continuing to push for "more growth" and the environmental establishment now pushing for "smart growth," the special interest groups had defined a spectrum for the media that excluded "no growth" and "greatly reduced growth" from the range of available, acceptable options. Maher studied the membership materials for the nation’s environmental groups and discovered: "Population is off the agenda for the purported leaders of the environmental movement."³⁵

So far off the agenda was population for established environmental groups that it actually took a developer’s organization — the 200,000-member National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) — to remind the Sierra Club of population’s decisive role in forcing suburban sprawl. In a news release criticizing a Club report associated with its anti-sprawl campaign, the NAHB stated: "As in previous reports, the Sierra Club failed to acknowledge the significant underlying forces driving growth in suburban America — a rapidly increasing population and consumer preferences. The U.S. needs to construct between 1.3 and 1.5 million new housing units annually during the next decade simply to accommodate an anticipated 30 million increase in the nation’s population."³⁶ (Obviously, the NAHB was not publicizing population growth’s influence because it wants to stop that growth — because of course its members profit directly from an ever-growing population with an ever-growing demand for housing. Rather, the NAHB was strongly implying that population growth is an inexorable, unstoppable force that must be accommodated at all costs.)

Out of dozens of national organizations in the late 1990s, there remained only one group — the National Audubon Society — which had an aggressive program to spotlight the environmental problems of U.S. population growth. And even then, Audubon did not address immigration, the overwhelming cause of present and projected U.S. growth. Nor did Audubon work for federal policies that could achieve stabilization. (Audubon’s Population and Habitat Campaign, in fact, distributed a fact sheet belittling immigration’s role in U.S. population growth.³⁷) There were only two other groups — the Wilderness Society and the Izaak Walton League — which had official policies that specified federal action to move the country toward stabilization, but neither one invested program or staff into lobbying on behalf of their official policies.³⁸

That was all that was left of the large coalition of environmental groups that in 1970 endorsed a resolution stating that "population growth is directly involved in the pollution and degradation of our environment — air, water, and land — and intensifies physical, psychological, social, political and economic problems to the extent that the well-being of individuals, the stability of society and our very survival are threatened." The same groups had committed themselves to "find, encourage and implement at the earliest possible time," the policies and attitudes that would bring about the stabilization of the U.S. population.³⁹

The authors have given special emphasis to the year 1998 in this monograph because that was the year when the environmental movement erupted in a highly public battle over U.S. population issues. After more than two decades of dwindling interest in population issues, many of the old environmental guard from the 1970 era and many of their followers openly challenged the national leaderships of two influential organizations, the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, to put U.S. population stabilization — and the reduction in immigration levels it entailed — back on the agenda. The Sierra Club and ZPG, once so outspoken in the 1970s on the urgency of U.S. stabilization, had each changed their policies in the two years prior to 1998 to disassociate themselves from this cause. That is why the pro-stabilization environmentalists focused most of their efforts on these two groups in internal wrangling that garnered months of intense news coverage around the country. Because of that and the fact that both groups were the nation’s strongest proponents of U.S. stabilization in 1970, we use them as primary case studies in exploring how such a remarkable shift on such a core issue of the environmental movement could have occurred since 1970.

In 1998, the national Sierra Club leadership defeated those who tried to return their organization to its earlier pro-stabilization policy, which advocated both lower fertility and immigration.⁴⁰ It remains to be seen whether this failed attempt represented the last gasp of the 1970-era environmental-population movement or if it was in fact the opening skirmish in a resurgent struggle.⁴¹ One indication that the latter might be true is that below national boards and staffs there were large numbers of members and activists who never dropped their commitment to population stabilization; in the 1998 Sierra Club national membership referendum, 40 percent of voters chose to overturn their national board of directors on the population issue, in spite of a concerted board effort to marginalize and stigmatize stabilization advocates.

End Notes

³¹ Roy Beck’s notes from participation in conference. On the subject of space and land requirements, Cornell University ecologists David and Marcia Pimentel (two of the world’s leading authorities on the environmental dimensions of agriculture) have estimated that each person added to the U.S. population leads to the loss (i.e. "development" or conversion) of about one acre of agricultural land, open space or natural habitat (David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel. 1997. "U.S. Food Production Threatened By Rapid Population Growth." Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network).

³² National Public Radio, "Morning Edition," May 4, 1999. In this 5-minute report, ironically, the only mention of population growth as a force driving sprawl and traffic congestion came from the spokesman of a coalition advocating greater public funding for more highway projects to expand capacity; Terry M. Neal. 1999. "Gore Seeks to Tap Voter Concern on ‘Livability’ Issues." The Washington Post. May 5.

³³ Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan. 1999. "Never Far From the Madding Crowd: Japanese Have Most Things in Life — Except Space." The Washington Post. July 29. p. A1, A26.

³⁴ T. Michael Maher. 1997. "How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection." Population and Environment, Vol. 18, No. 4.

³⁵ T. Michael Maher. 1998. Personal communication with Roy Beck via e-mail.

³⁶ National Association of Home Builders. 1999. "Sierra Club Report Ignores Underlying Forces Behind Urban Growth." Press release distributed by PR Newswire. October 4.

³⁷ National Audubon Society, Population & Habitat Campaign. 1998. "Population and Migration."

³⁸ The Wilderness Society had a comprehensive population policy which stated that: "As a priority, population policy should protect and sustain ecological systems for future generations....To bring population levels to sustainable levels, both birth rates and immigration rates need to be reduced." And the Izaak Walton League (a society of anglers founded in 1922 to conserve fish and their aquatic habitat) stated that "current levels of natural resource consumption and population are not sustainable." It urged government actions that would help stabilize U.S. population, with the understanding that "international migration must be addressed as part of a comprehensive strategy to manage U.S. population size."

³⁹ Resolution sponsored and circulated by ZPG; adopted by the Sierra Club on June 4, 1970.

⁴⁰ Dell Erickson, a 1998 candidate for the Sierra board of directors, in a lengthy 1999 e-mail to the authors, offers numerous details of the sometimes questionable lengths to which the Sierra board and leadership went to defeat what became known as Ballot Question "A". Other participants corroborate his evidence and conclusions. See Brenda Walker. 1999. "Why the Sierra Club Chickened Out on Population." Focus, Vol. 9, No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network. See also Ben Zuckerman. 1999. "The Sierra Club Immigration Debate: National Implications. " Population and Environment, Vol. 20, No. 5, May. Zuckerman, a Club board candidate from the Angeles chapter, who was also on the front lines of the Club’s nasty immigration skirmishes, accused the Sierra Club’s leadership of "dirty tricks and demagoguery" in a "win at any cost" campaign that included blatant violations of Club bylaws, obfuscation, suppression of debate, and race baiting. 

⁴¹ Dirk Olin. 1998. "Divided We Fall? The Sierra Club’s debate over immigration may be just the beginning." Outside, Vol. 23, No. 7, July.