Center Paper 18, March 2001

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The Sierra referendum campaign was merely the most dramatic example of an almost total array of national environmental groups that had chosen in the 1990s to ignore the Foundational Formula of the 1970-era movement. (Only the Wilderness Society and the Izaak Walton League had proscriptive positions on U.S. stabilization.) Even though rapid U.S. population growth was making it ever more politically and technically infeasible to meet environmental goals set in the 1970 era, the environmental movement of the late 1990s was willing to miss those environmental goals (and newer ones) for the sake of protecting a level of immigration that was four times higher than the tradition before the first Earth Day. What was it about the immigration issue that made environmental groups, by and large, meekly acquiesce to a level of immigration that clashed head-on with the fundamental goal of population stabilization?

Years of pondering this question have led the authors to the conclusion that, of all the factors involved in the environmental movement’s retreat from U.S. population stabilization, the growing demographic influence of immigration is the single most important one. Thus we are devoting the remainder of this monograph to a discussion of its different aspects. Historians will find much to consider in the following possible explanations for the groups’ avoidance of immigration numbers:

• Fear that immigration reduction would alienate "progressive" allies and be seen as racially insensitive;

• The transformation of population and environment into global issues needing global solutions;

• The influence of human rights organizations;

• The trimph of ethics of globalism over ethics of nationalism/internationalism;

• The fear of demographic trends; and

• The power of money.

Seeking a Politically Correct Way to Reduce Immigration

There is much to suggest that advocacy of immigration reduction is a personally embarrassing position for many who serve as leaders in environmental organizations. For example, one Sierra Club chapter leader in Tucson, Ariz., called the immigration referendum "an embarrassment" even though he claimed to be alarmed by overpopulation.¹²³

Consider how immigration was perceived before Earth Day of 1970: Very few persons or groups anywhere in America had had any experience with immigration issues for a half-century. Annual immigration numbers had been averaging below 200,000. Immigrants played little role in the 1950s and 1960s U.S. population boom, which was caused almost entirely by high fertility among the native-born.¹²⁴ Immigrants were assimilating easily and quickly. Polls showed overwhelming American support for the immigration program of those decades.¹²⁵ The little hostility toward immigration policy that reached the public eye tended to be from persons and groups who resembled the textbook cases of nativism (discrimination against Americans who are foreign-born) and xenophobia (irrational fear and hatred of foreigners and immigrants) of the past. But that was before immigration quadrupled and became the predominant contributor to half the Formula for environmental deterioration.

In 1977, the Washington Post quoted ZPG’s lobbyist for immigration reduction: "Americans have traditionally thought that immigration was good and that speaking out against immigration was just like speaking out against motherhood and apple pie. Over and over at congressional hearings, ZPG is the only group that raises a voice questioning the wisdom of letting in so many immigrants."¹²⁶

Even when environmentalists knew fully the environmental necessity of reducing immigration, they risked becoming pariahs — ostracized by "progressive" friends and political allies as being like the xenophobes and nativists who also wanted to reduce immigration because of their fear or hatred of foreigners. One example occurred during the acrimonious 1998 debate within the Sierra Club, when two Club activists made a presentation to a northern Virginia chapter’s executive committee. Speaking in favor of the immigration-reduction measure, they were abruptly cut off in mid-sentence by the committee’s vice-chair, and heatedly denounced as comparable to the KKK, while other committee members sat in awkward silence.¹²⁷ In another blatant incident, UCLA astronomy professor and Club population activist Ben Zuckerman was openly called a racist to his face at an Angeles Chapter executive committee meeting by a chapter officer of Chicano background.¹²⁸ Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope raised the fear himself that if the Club came out in favor of reducing immigration levels, "we would be perceived as assisting people whose motivations are racist."¹²⁹ Paralleling the larger environmental movement’s decisive shift on the issue, Carl Pope had actually been a ZPG lobbyist in the 1970s at a time when it publicly advocated immigration reductions.

The possibility of being accused of racism was an especially big risk for environmental groups as it concerned their allied organizations outside of the environmental movement. These allies tended to identify themselves with the liberal political camp. Although one key root of the modern environmental movement was a conservationist movement that had a strong conservative and Republican component, environmental groups by the 1980s were predominantly entering coalitions with groups that leaned toward more liberal and Democratic identities. Beginning in 1981, the hostility of President Ronald Reagan and most of his political appointees toward the environmental movement (in contrast to previous Republican administrations) certainly helped push environmentalists toward alliances with more liberal and Democratic camps.

Yet, among advocates for immigration reduction in the 1980s and 1990s were some major liberal figures, such as former three-term Colorado Governor Dick Lamm and former U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy, who renounced the 1965 immigration law he had helped enact. In the 1990s, the late Barbara Jordan, former congresswoman and liberal icon, chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which examined immigration policies in terms of how they affected vulnerable American workers. In 1995, the commission declared: "The Commission decries hostility and discrimination against immigrants as antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country. At the same time, we disagree with those who would label efforts to control immigration as being inherently anti-immigrant. Rather, it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interests."¹³⁰ The bipartisan commission went on to recommend elimination of extended family categories (an action that would end chain migration) and stronger steps to curb illegal immigration.¹³¹ Around the same time the National Academy of Sciences released a major study which documented that immigration was the most important cause in the decline of real wages for less-educated workers over the last three decades.¹³²

But the primary lens through which environmental leaders in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to view immigration was not an environmental — or labor — paradigm but a racial one. According to this paradigm, immigration often appeared to be about non-white people moving into a mostly white country, just as whites themselves had done to indigenous Native Americans in previous centuries. To propose reductions in immigration was not seen as reducing labor competition or population growth but as trying to protect the majority status of America’s white population. It was seen as rejecting non-white immigrants.¹³³ Thus immigration as an issue became confused with the positive American development of the last three decades in which very few groups would want to be seen as inhospitable to non-white Americans.

Australian sociologist Katherine Betts has examined this phenomenon. She uses the term "new class" (a group similar to what former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysts"¹³⁴) to describe the intelligentsia, professionally-educated internationalists and cosmopolitans, lawyers, academics, journalists, teachers, artists, activists, and globetrotting business people and travelers. Her cogent analysis of why the new class has eschewed the cause of limiting immigration in Australia is germane to the case of U. S. environmental leaders: "The concept of immigration control has become contaminated in the minds of the new class by the ideas of racism, narrow self-seeking nationalism, and a bigoted preference for cultural homogeneity....Their enthusiasm for anti-racism and international humanitarianism is often sincere but there are also social pressures supporting this sincere commitment and making apostasy difficult." And later: "Ideologically correct attitudes to immigration have offered the warmth of in-group acceptance to supporters and the cold face of exclusion to dissenters."¹³⁵ Similar analysis in the United States suggests that it is "politically incorrect" to talk of reducing immigration.

Taboos against challenging immigration policies are enforced by a "political correctness" that often is based on honorable sentiments tied to an individual’s personal connections to immigration. These sentiments are usually strongest among those with the most direct, and recent, immigrant experiences in their immediate families, i.e. those whose spouses, parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles immigrated to the United States. Sensitivity is heightened still more for those who feel a strong personal identity as a member of ethnic groups — such as Irish, Italian, Greek, Slavic, Chinese, Japanese, or Jewish — whose members once fled persecution in other countries or who may have met with discrimination in this country. Even when such a person does recognize that U.S. population growth is problematic, and that immigration is a major contributor to it, he or she may well reason that it would be hypocritical, as a descendant of immigrants and indirect beneficiary of a generous immigration policy, to "close the door" even partially on any prospective immigrant. Dealing with immigration can become almost physically sickening for such people, who feel they must make a choice between environmental protection and their view of themselves as a part of an immigrant ethnic group. (For such Americans, their own ethnic group’s experiences seem to obscure the fact that more than 90 percent of present immigrants are not fleeing persecution or starvation but are simply seeking greater material prosperity.) Thus, the response of these Americans to the population dilemma may have more to do with their sense of ethnicity than any scientific analysis of environmental challenges.

Many participants in the 1970-era environmental movement have suggested that the strength of ties to immigrant ethnic identities was a major factor in determining which leaders abandoned population stabilization and which continued to advocate it even when it entailed tackling immigration. To learn if this was an important factor in the movement’s retreat from stabilization advocacy, scholars would need ways of quantifying this claim. Despite the reality of the above discussion about the effect of immigrant ethnic identity on many individuals, it is possible that particular environmentalists of such ethnic backgrounds were no more likely — and maybe even less likely — than other environmentalists to abandon the population side of the Foundational Formula. Careful research, quantification, and analysis are required here.

Environmental groups had also been stung in recent years with criticisms from some quarters that they were white elitist organizations with little concern about how their advocacy on behalf of wilderness, biodiversity and open space might affect the jobs and economic opportunity of working class people — particularly non-white Americans. From other quarters they were hit with the charge that they ignored environmental threats to urban areas and their mostly minority residents. Although environmentalists protested these criticisms, there was no denying that relatively few black, Asian, and Latino Americans belonged to mainstream environmental groups or held positions of power within them.

Thus, some environmental groups engaged in aggressive programs to court members in minority communities, encourage greater diversity among their staffs and boards, and promote "environmental justice." In 1992, at his Sierra Club Centennial Address, then-executive director Michael Fischer went as far as proposing that the Club should be turned over completely to minorities.¹³⁶ Professor and deep ecologist George Sessions commented in 1998 that: "The pressure upon (and even intimidation of) environmental organizations to turn towards social/environmental justice concerns has recently become enormous."¹³⁷ Environmental justice advocates believe that poor and minority communities have been disproportionately "dumped on" or even systematically targeted by corporate polluters. Arising in the late 1980s, and spurred by civil rights activists like Jesse Jackson and former NAACP leader Benjamin Chavis, the environmental justice movement was given a big boost by the October 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., at which the attendees issued a resounding "call to arms."¹³⁸ (Some observers argue that in the 1990s, the environmental justice movement was "hijacked" by the much broader "social justice" movement, which had primarily non-environmental goals.¹³⁹ In New Mexico, for example, one prominent Hispanic activist who served on the boards of two organizations dealing with consumer and environmental issues, denounced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for conducting a sting operation in northern New Mexico, an area with few job opportunities, that led to the arrest of a number of Hispanic residents for allegedly trafficking in endangered species parts, on the grounds that it was discriminatory.¹⁴⁰)

The more that supporters of continued U.S. population growth and quadrupled immigration levels claimed that immigration reduction had racist motives, the more environmental groups appeared to fear that their minority members would desert them if they continued to call for U.S. population stabilization and reductions in immigration. Some Latino Sierrans were very direct in their threats. Angeles Chapter leader Luis Quirarte said that if the initiative passed, "I plan to quit [the Sierra Club]. I am a Chicano and blood is thicker than water."¹⁴¹ Another, Al Martinez, wrote of a bad dream he had in which "Sierra Club Envirocops" rounded up hapless immigrants for deportation.¹⁴²

One of the main reasons the Sierra leadership gave in 1998 for avoiding the immigration issue was that they dared not risk appearing to be racially insensitive. Executive Director Carl Pope acknowledged that the official endorsers of the referendum trying to confront immigration numbers did not have racially questionable motives. Rather, he admitted, they were esteemed Sierrans and environmental scholars, with distinguished records of environmental service to their country. In fact, Pope said, he used to agree with them that immigration should be cut for environmental reasons. But he changed his mind because he didn’t believe it possible to conduct a public discussion about immigration cuts without stirring up racial passions: "While it is theoretically possible to have a non-racial debate about immigration, it is not practically possible for an open organization like the Sierra Club to do so. A rational position paper and the desire for national debate do not yield a rational debate in the public arena of America today...[Recent history in California has] caused me to change my view of whether it is possible for the Sierra Club to deal with the immigration issue in a way which would not implicate us in ethnic or racial polarization."¹⁴³ Pope acknowledged that it was the opponents of stabilization who were injecting race into the discussion by publicly "lambasting the club as racist." But the Sierra Club, he insisted, could not subject itself to those kinds of epithets merely in order to confront the full issue of U.S. population growth.¹⁴⁴ This attitude struck a number of observers as an evasion of responsibility on a serious national issue. "The choice for the Sierra Club is whether it wants to grow up and take part in grownup issues," wrote columnist and editorialist Al Knight in the Denver Post.¹⁴⁵

For Pope, the fear of being called a racist was more powerful than the endorsement of immigration reduction by such environmentalist heroes and distinguished scholars as Gaylord Nelson, E. O. Wilson, Lester Brown, Dave Foreman, Paul Watson, Brock Evans, Stewart Udall, Herman Daly, Norman Myers, Galen Rowell, George Kennan, and Martin Litton. These individuals, and many others, publicly indicated their support for the Sierra Club initiative for U.S. population stabilization including immigration reduction.¹⁴⁶

ZPG’s president Judith Jacobsen addressed the racial issues in a 1998 letter to members: "ZPG is already explicitly committed to building bridges to communities of color and working on immigrants’ rights as part of our long-held goal of improving the success of the population movement by expanding it to include a broad spectrum of American diversity. A policy to reduce legal immigration now would make this work impossible. We want ZPG to strengthen our ties to communities of color, not jeopardize them. In this way, we can build relationships, listen and refine our immigration policy and strategy as the public debate evolves."¹⁴⁷ Jacobsen said the ZPG board voted to take no position on reduction of immigration, "with full knowledge of immigration’s important role in the U.S. population growth, both today and in the future."

One participant at a "roundtable discussion on global migration, population and the environment" in Washington, D.C. on November 15, 1995, sponsored by the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative and the National Immigration Forum, was struck by how emphatically then-ZPG President Dianne Dillon-Ridgely dismissed any concern about immigration’s contribution to the country’s population growth as illegitimate.¹⁴⁸ At a March 1998 speech in West Virginia, ZPG Executive Director Peter Kostmayer, when questioned about immigration, told the audience: "Let me be frank. You are a wealthy, middle-class community, and if you concentrate on the issue of immigration as a way of controlling population, you won’t come off well. It just doesn’t work. The population movement has an unhappy history in this regard."¹⁴⁹ About the same time, in a handwritten note to a ZPG member inquiring about the group’s immigration stance, Kostmayer wrote, "...it would be so, so counterproductive to be perceived as anti-immigrant."¹⁵⁰ By the 1990s, at ZPG, the imperative of welcoming "diversity" had evidently trumped stabilization and environmental concerns.

It appears that many knowledgeable environmentalist leaders privately acknowledged the need for immigration reduction in order to stabilize the U.S. population. However, the harsh manner in which supporters of reduced immigration have so often been treated by the news media and intellectual and social (including environmentalist) elites understandably gave pause to such environmental leaders. Many would take such a stand publicly only if there was no risk of its jeopardizing the reputation, support, or funding of their own organizations. For example, the late Henry W. Kendall, a Nobel laureate in physics and the co-founder and chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), initially indicated his willingness to be listed with other prominent supporters of the Sierra Club population stabilization/immigration reduction measure, but retracted it after the group’s executive director told him it could be damaging for UCS.¹⁵¹ Two other well-known environmentalists also initially signed on to the U.S. population stabilization/immigration reduction measure, but withdrew their public support after phone calls from Sierra Club president Adam Werbach.¹⁵² (In contrast, at least two other celebrated environmental leaders, Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson and Worldwatch Institute founder and president Lester Brown were also approached by Werbach, but turned down his appeal to revoke their support.¹⁵³)

Other group leaders would publicly endorse immigration reduction only as individuals or as members of unaffiliated government commissions. At about the same time that the Sierra Club and ZPG both formally disavowed positions on immigration reduction, a Sierra executive along with the then-president and a future president of ZPG all participated on the Population and Consumption Task Force of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. They were joined by the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund (neither of which has ever adopted a policy on U.S. population stabilization) in issuing the aforementioned statement that "reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stabilization and the drive toward sustainability."¹⁵⁴
 

Population and Environment as Global Issues

In 1970, population growth often was discussed in terms of its threat to local or national environmental resources — in countries all over the world. The argument often went something like this: The cultures, traditions, religions, economies, health care, tax structures, and laws of each country create incentives for high birth rates. Each country has to make its own changes to bring down those birth rates to protect its own environmental resources, but nations also must act cooperatively in international efforts to provide financial and technical assistance to those nations requesting them. Because some of the problems of overpopulation were indeed global, each nation had a stake in every other nation moving toward population stabilization.

By the 1990s, most environmental group comments about population growth were that it was almost exclusively a global problem. Population growth rarely was described as a threat to localized environmental resources such as specific watersheds, landscapes, species habitats, estuaries, and aquifers. Rather, population growth usually was linked to global environmental problems such as biodiversity losses, climate change, and the decline of the oceans.¹⁵⁵ It was not uncommon to hear claims that the environment was a global issue and that efforts to address environmental problems nationally were inappropriate — both unseemly and doomed to failure. Many environmentalist elites and much organizational literature employed lofty rhetoric that seemed to echo the sentiment expressed by Erasmus in the 16th century when he proudly proclaimed: "I wish to be called a citizen of the world."¹⁵⁶ This orientation is sometimes called the "One World" perspective.

Under the new thinking, the population size of individual nations was not nearly as important as the size of the total global population. Certain top leaders of the environmental groups said this was a significant reason they no longer saw U.S. population stabilization per se as a priority goal. They especially lost interest in U.S. stabilization when in the 1990s long-term U.S. population growth was being driven almost entirely by people in other countries moving to the United States and having their above-replacement-level number of babies in America. In the ascendant "global" view, this migration wasn’t important because it was merely shifting the growth from one part of the globe to another; the global problem was not increasing because of it, they reasoned.

The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope said: "I seriously doubt that anyone is in a position to calculate exactly which changes in immigration policy would minimize GLOBAL environmental stress..."¹⁵⁷ And after all, the Sierra Club’s mission, stated on the cover of Sierra magazine, had by the 1990s expanded to embrace the lofty goal of "protecting the planet," not just, or even primarily, the American portion of the planet. Any preference for saving U.S. environmental treasures first and foremost was implicitly regarded as parochial, outmoded, and futile. This contrasted with the earlier, more patriotic image of the Club as focused primarily on saving American resources and landscapes — perhaps reflected best in the 1960s-era poster "THIS IS THE AMERICAN EARTH" of a dramatic Ansel Adams photograph of the Sierra Nevada.¹⁵⁸

When some Americans complained in the 1990s that U.S. population growth was threatening environmental resources in their own country, they were told by Sierra Club leaders that immigration-driven U.S. growth was environmentally acceptable because it was not making global environmental problems worse. Yet even on this count, the Sierra establishment had it wrong: In general, transferring large numbers of people from low-consumption, poor countries to the richest, highest-consuming country in the world was unequivocally worse for the global environment.¹⁵⁹ The typical American consumer has a much larger "ecological footprint" than the typical consumer of the developing countries which were now the greatest source of immigration to the United States.¹⁶⁰ The U.S. had the highest per capita industrial carbon dioxide (the leading "greenhouse gas") emissions of any country in the world, 19.1 metric tons/yr., compared to 0.9 tons for India (about 1/20th the U.S. figure) and 2.3 tons for China (roughly 1/10th U.S. per capita emissions).¹⁶¹ U.S. commercial energy production per capita was four times the world average, three times Mexico’s, ten times China’s, and 28 times India’s.¹⁶² Sierrans who favored U.S. stabilization criticized the Club’s national leadership for its inconsistency. On the one hand, the Sierra establishment berated lavish American lifestyles for endangering the global environment with their bloated resource consumption and enormous waste generation. On the other, the Sierra establishment apparently saw no problem with an unlimited number of migrants moving to the U.S. precisely to join in this consumption binge while it lasted.

Certain conservation leaders continued to voice support for efforts to protect American treasures even in the face of massive global environmental problems. "We may not be able to save the world, but we aspire to take care of our piece of it," wrote Geoffrey Bernard, President of the Grand Canyon Trust.¹⁶³ The former Sierra Club and Audubon executive Brock Evans wrote the board of the Sierra Club on the eve of the 1998 immigration referendum that, "[Immigration] is an environmental issue (among others). Somehow, if we love our earth — yes, even the earth of this, our own country, where we live (not some abstraction from far away) — we must face it."¹⁶⁴ But the board was not swayed by this or other appeals. Instead, Executive Director Pope wrote in AsianWeek that overpopulation and its effects on the environment are "fundamentally global problems; immigration is merely a local symptom....Erecting fences to keep people out of this country does nothing to fix the planet’s predicament. It’s the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."¹⁶⁵

Pope’s and certain other environmental leaders’ contention that it does not matter where people live acknowledges but a single spatial scale — the global — on a planet which possesses many spatial scales: from micro, to local, regional, state, national, inter-national, continental, and global, or in ecological terms, from organism, to population, community, ecosystem, biome, biosphere, and ecosphere. If it does not matter where any given number of global resource consumers/polluters are living, then by extension it should not matter if Ecuadorians continue migrating to the sensitive, ecologically-unique Galapagos Islands; it should not matter if Asia’s squalor and overpopulation were relieved by relocating its teeming multitudes to the unpopulated, virgin Amazon rain forest; and it should not matter if California’s mushrooming suburbs were transplanted to the empty Alaskan wilderness that the Sierra Club and other conservation groups struggled to preserve. America’s national parks, forests, and other public open space cannot and should not be protected with boundaries and patrolled by rangers from squatters, poachers, loggers, ranchers, rogue recreationists, and miners.

Under this same "One World" or "open borders" logic, hundreds of millions of mothers in the Zambias, Indias, Colombias, Cambodias, and Haitis of the world — with their own private reproductive decisions (and the global mobility heralded by "One Worlders") — have effective veto power over whether concerned Americans (and especially Floridians) will be able to save the beleaguered Everglades, Florida Bay, and the Florida keys from pollution and sprawling development due to South Florida’s incessant population growth (driven by domestic and international migration as well as higher immigrant fertility). Surely, treating the entire planet as a "global village" or one open commons is a formula for ineffectual local actions, for paralysis, and ultimately, for a disaster of global proportions — a "tragedy of the commons" writ large. The biggest environmental groups have largely eschewed the notion of parallel efforts, of genuinely "thinking globally, and acting locally," in Rene Dubos’ popular phrase. They now seem to consider the Earth to be one big common property resource with each and every acre belonging equally to all of humanity. In their policies and rhetoric, they have spurned the philosophy reflected in the following words of astronomer and population activist Ben Zuckerman: "...it is imperative that in addition to trying to save the world we try to save some — horrors! — merely local spots on Earth, including the U.S."¹⁶⁶

It is ironic that most environmental group leaders endorse what amounts to a laissez-faire approach toward migration, even as they scorn this sort of "hands-off" approach to other environmental/ecological issues. In a Sierra editorial entitled "Corporate Crime: The consequences of letting polluters police themselves,"¹⁶⁷ Carl Pope inveighed against a growing tendency among government regulators to approve of self-policing by industrial dischargers and collaboration with extractive industries. He cautioned against the naïve belief that "win-win" solutions are always possible in environmental disputes. "Voluntary measures and self-policing sound appealing, but they aren’t enough to keep law and order on the environmental frontier," wrote Pope. Yet when it comes to the actual U.S. frontier, across which ever more people (each of whom pollutes) migrate and wish to migrate, Pope and others seem to believe that self-policing will do just fine. That is, to migrate or not to migrate — to impose or not to impose additional ecological burdens on an already stressed America — should be the prerogative of prospective migrants themselves, not those Americans whose environment and quality of life are affected by ever-more people. Were this "go with the flow" approach adopted in other areas of environmental policy, the results would be as disastrous for the environment as today’s lax immigration policies are for efforts to contain population growth. The Tragedy of the Commons would convert "America the Beautiful" into "America the Wasteland."

Learning how population became framed almost entirely as a global problem will require some research. Two of the possible antecedents are the 1945 birth of the United Nations as a reaction to the unprecedented carnage of World War II, and the 1950s movement against the atmospheric testing of atomic and nuclear bombs. Another very strong impetus was undoubtedly rendered, if inadvertently, from an unexpected quarter — outer space. By the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. space program began broadcasting views of the Earth from its moon missions that depicted a breathtaking and seamless blue, white, and brown planet against the black void of space. These moving images certainly helped sell the notion of One World captured in presidential candidate and statesman Adlai Stevenson’s evocative term "Spaceship Earth." NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in its public programs, regales audiences with an expansive, optimistic view of ever-grander ventures into space by a united human race.

In a PBS interview with Bill Moyers, the late Joseph Campbell, author of many books on myths and a major influence on George Lucas’ creation of the Star Wars movies, spoke hopefully of the emergence of an enlightened planetary consciousness:

Moyers: "There’s that wonderful photograph you have of the earth seen from space, and it’s very small and at the same time it’s very grand."

Campbell: "You don’t see any divisions there, of nations, of states, or anything of the kind.

"This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That [Earth as a whole] is the country that we are going to be celebrating, and these are the people [all humanity in its rich racial and cultural diversity] that we are one with."¹⁶⁸

Another place to look might be the Nuclear Freeze movement toward the end of the Cold War. Global environmental and climatological disaster were at the heart of the warning from that movement against the nuclear arms race.¹⁶⁹ On this issue, it would have been foolhardy to have talked about protecting one’s own country against a "nuclear winter." The solution ultimately had to be global. In this sense, the threats of ozone depletion and global warming are similar to those that the Nuclear Freeze movement warned against. The staffs of environmental organizations typically mingle with the staffs of other non-profits, especially those with global orientations working on economic development, peace, human rights, women’s and hunger issues. As the environmental groups have reached out into global networks, this has become increasingly true. Perhaps that can help explain the transformation of population growth into almost entirely a global issue in the approach of U.S. national environmental leaders.
 

Influence of Human Rights Organizations

The influence of human rights groups and philosophies on environmental leaders may be another part of the explanation for why environmental groups were not willing to work for U.S. population stabilization in the 1990s. Michael Hanauer, the Boston ZPG leader who resigned from ZPG’s national board in 1998, pointed out that environmental groups no longer dealt with U.S. stabilization because "much of their roots, associations, history, knowledge, empathies and even networking was within the human rights movement. Offending these groups was not in the cards."¹⁷⁰ And many of those groups opposed most measures — whether reducing fertility or reducing immigration — that were needed to achieve U.S. stabilization.

Throughout the U.S. human rights community various concepts had arisen of the human right of poor workers to cross national borders if they could improve their economic condition by taking jobs in another country. Most U.S. human rights organizations — with the American Civil Liberties Union being the best-known example — actively lobbied against any reductions in immigration. Others such as the American Friends Service Committee and Amnesty International actively investigated cases of alleged abuse of illegal immigrants by the Border Patrol and other authorities. Dozens of human rights organizations were formed specifically to advocate for the rights of immigrants and for immigration. Many of those organizations also advocated the rights of workers who successfully enter a country illegally to be free from programs designed to find and deport them.

Admittedly, those immigration rights declared by the U.S. organizations have never been internationally recognized. In December 1948, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration includes the right to have a nationality, the right of freedom of movement and residence within the borders of one’s own nation, and the right to leave one’s own nation.¹⁷¹ But it does not recognize the right of an individual to enter a nation other than one’s own. Permission to move into another nation is a gift that a sovereign nation can choose to bestow or not.

But any environmental group proposing limitations on immigration in the 1990s risked provoking the ire of the U.S. human rights, non-profit advocacy groups — and risked being publicly branded as hostile to human rights and even anti-humanitarian.

There were a number of signs that 1990s environmental leaders were especially sensitive to that threat. More and more, they worked in coalitions with the human rights groups, especially on international environmental, trade, and development issues, and anti-toxics crusades. It appears that people moved easily back and forth between human rights and environmental jobs. Researchers may want to study how many of the staff members, committee members, and directors of environmental groups in the 1990s had previously worked for some kind of rights organization.

In the 1990s Sierra Club, for example, officials began to appoint people from human rights organizations to its National Population Committee. These individuals came from organizations which argued that population growth is not a cause of problems in the United States or the rest of the world.¹⁷² They opposed stabilization efforts before being appointed; they were among the most aggressive leaders in working to change the Sierra Club’s pro-stabilization policy and in fighting the referendum that failed to re-establish the policy.¹⁷³ The human rights influence was also seen in the decision by the Sierra national board to take a stand against a California referendum (Prop. 187) that had nothing to do with the environment but which threatened to take away rights from illegal aliens; likewise in its formal support for a state initiative to raise the minimum wage and against another initiative to abolish affirmative action.¹⁷⁴ All of these were issues on which a Sierra Club focusing only on environmental matters would previously have taken no stand.

While the agendas of the human rights and environmental groups should not be seen as fundamentally at odds with each other, they nonetheless are not the same. The human rights agenda is about protecting freedoms and rights of individuals here and now. The environmental agenda since the inauguration of the conservation and preservation movements a century ago, and since its rejuvenation and reorientation in the 1960s, has been about protecting the natural and human environments, now and in perpetuity.

The human rights agenda is by necessity oriented toward the immediate needs of individuals; it has what one observer calls a "temporal focus."¹⁷⁵ The environmental agenda has often also dealt with immediate threats but just as often works for goals that are far into the future.¹⁷⁶

Human rights work is about people getting their full share of rights; its ideal is freedom. Environmental work is often about asking or forcing people to restrain their rights and freedoms in order to protect the natural world from human actions, so that people who are not yet born might someday be able to enjoy and prosper in a healthy, undiminished environment.

The fact that human rights work and environmental work involve tensions between goals and philosophy does not mean that either of them must be seen as right or wrong. A democratic society ultimately must effect compromises among all of the competing interests within it, based on those interests making their best case.

But by the 1990s, it may be that environmental groups had conceded priority to the human rights groups and at least tacitly had agreed to press for environmental protections only when they did not conflict with the human rights agenda. Hanauer wrote that during the 1990s the moral high ground was often yielded to those who gave precedence to human rights over environmental protection. Alan Kuper, a national Sierra leader in the U.S. stabilization movement, challenged the view that allowing continuous population growth was moral, humanitarian, or responsible: "In The Case for Modern Man,¹⁷⁷ Charles Frankel defines responsibility as ‘A decision is responsible when the man or group that makes it has to answer for it to those who are directly or indirectly affected by it.’ Thus, those who advocate rapid U.S. population growth are irresponsible since they will not be affected by it nearly as much as others, including those denied jobs, those unborn denied what is being lost due to overpopulation, and those at home and abroad affected adversely now — non-human as well as human."¹⁷⁸
 

Globalism vs. Nationalism/Internationalism

It appears that in at least some cases a significant change in ethical frameworks was occurring among many national environmental leaders and a portion of their memberships.

Historians will want to explore the extent to which the rising "globalist" philosophies that took root in the American business communities of the 1980s and 1990s also began to replace the "nationalism" of the earlier environmental movement. The 1990s, after all, was a time in which many scholars, newspaper columnists, and other prognosticators espoused the possibility of the impending end of the era of nation-states. Major political fights erupted between those who argued that the United States should stop resisting the "inevitable" forces of globalization and those who argued for the country to retain sovereign control over its labor and environmental standards and its economic destiny.

For the purposes of this analysis of globalism vs. nationalism, we distinguish "globalism" as something quite different from "internationalism." The internationalism to which we refer is based on the "nationalist" philosophy; it is the inter-relationship of nations, all of which are working together but in their own self-interest. "Globalism," however, supersedes traditional liberal and conservative ideas of the nation-state and of working toward national solutions of national problems, and toward international solutions for international problems.

The heart of the difference between globalism and nationalism is an ethical viewpoint of whether a community has the right or even responsibility to give priority attention to the members of its own community over people outside the community.¹⁷⁹

That relates to whether a nation has the right to protect its own environmental resources before it helps some other country to preserve its environment. Is it ethical to stabilize the population of one’s own country when other countries are still growing? Is it ethical to bar a human being who is alive today from immigrating and advancing economically if the reason for barring the immigration is to preserve the natural resources of the target country for the benefit of human beings not yet born? All of these questions came up during the 1998 national debate within the environmental movement about U.S. population stabilization.

"Nationalism" as used here should not be confused with nativism, imperialism, jingoism, or super-nationalism, but is used to describe a philosophy of community. The ethical basis of nationalism is a community in which every member has a certain responsibility for everybody else in that community. The highest priority of a national government under the nationalist ethic is the members of that community. This has been the dominant ethical principle in the United States and most other nations in which the national government is expected to establish laws and regulations concerning trade, labor, capital, and the environment based primarily on the effect on the people of its own nation.

The globalist ethic that we describe here is less communitarian and more individualistic. It gives a higher ethical value to the freedom of an individual (and by extension, the corporate bodies owned by individuals) to act with fewer or no restrictions by national governments. This ethic similarly unleashes laborers around the world to cross borders to work in ways that maximize their incomes and unleashes corporations to move capital, goods, and labor in ways that maximize their profits.¹⁸⁰ Under the globalist ethic, an American corporation does not owe any particular allegiance to American workers or American communities if the corporation’s interests are better served by moving a factory to another country or by replacing its American labor force with imported foreign workers. While some might see such moves as selfish and hard-hearted, a globalist would explain that the corporation would not be able to undertake those actions unless there were ample foreign workers who saw such actions as opportunities for economic advancement.

American globalists on the political left (such as many in the artistic, university, and environmental communities) tend to disapprove of plant re-location and of many free-trade agreements. But globalists on both the right and the left (including many in the environmental movement) agree on the ethical correctness of mass movements of labor such as has occurred over the last 30 years through immigration to the United States. (The Sierra Club vigorously opposed the globalism implicit in both NAFTA and GATT, yet actively endorsed globalism with regard to labor flows, immigration, and population stabilization. Journalist Peter Beinart, writing in Time magazine, described the more consistent nationalist environmental stance that "distrusts the free movement of goods — the unrestricted flow, say, of shrimp caught in turtle-killing nets — [and] also tends to distrust the free movement of labor: in other words, immigration."¹⁸¹)

Globalists on the right have obvious financial self-interest in the globalization of labor. The globalist corporate lobby has been the most powerful in Washington, D.C. in preserving the quadrupled level of immigration of the 1990s.¹⁸² In 1996, Microsoft owner Bill Gates, reportedly the wealthiest man in America, gave a speech in Washington, D.C., in which he took Congress to task for considering reductions in employment-based immigration, provisions which were soon stripped out of the leading bills in the House and Senate. Microsoft also employed Grover Norquist, a "well-known antitax crusader and fixture in Newt Gingrich’s inner circle,"¹⁸³ to lobby on its behalf. In 1998, the information technology (IT) industry flexed its political muscle when it coaxed the Clinton-Gore administration and Congress to drastically increase H-1B visas (for skilled "temporary" foreign workers) over the protests of American computer programmers. Right after signing the legislation granting this increase, President Clinton made a fund-raising visit to Silicon Valley. This mass movement of foreign labor helped corporations increase their profits by depressing wages, especially for America’s least-skilled and educated workers, according to the National Academy of Sciences¹⁸⁴ and a host of other researchers. The IT industry’s political clout was again on display in 2000 when it successfully pushed Congress to raise H-1B levels still higher.

Globalists on the left supported the corporations’ immigration policy on the ethical principle that although high immigration might harm vulnerable American workers, most of the new immigrants had escaped economic conditions that were even worse than the ones to which lower-income Americans were being driven by the immigrants’ entrance into the U.S. labor market. Under a globalist ethic, immigration policy should not be used to protect America’s poor if it blocks the economic improvement of even poorer workers from other countries. The main difference between the two globalist camps is that those on the left often favor expanded federal programs of income redistribution to compensate the American victims of immigration; those on the right do not.

Historians should look for the strains of those globalist philosophies in the voluminous statements, memos, articles, and interviews of the environmental leaders who fought the pro-stabilization environmentalists during 1998. Environmental group positions that made no logical sense when measured by the philosophy of the 1970-era environmental movement are understandable when viewed within the globalist ethical framework. For example, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (son of the former attorney general and nephew of the former President), a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told the Los Angeles Times: "The enemy isn’t Mexican immigrants, it’s the real estate lobby and state highway departments determined to pave over the landscape."¹⁸⁵ Even as he insisted that large-scale population movements from one place to another on the planet (in this case, from Mexico across the border to the United States) were not an environmental problem, Kennedy — a model "environmental citizen of the world" — felt the NRDC was justified intervening south of the border to block plans of the Mexican government and the Mitsubishi Corporation to develop a salt production facility and port in San Ignacio Lagoon on the Baja Peninsula where California gray whales winter and calve. "This is precisely the kind of sacrifice our planet can no longer afford," he wrote.¹⁸⁶

In yet another campaign of globalist or at least continental ambition, Kennedy and the NRDC took Canadian timber companies to task for proposed logging of old-growth, temperate rainforest on the coast of British Columbia. "I, for one, am not prepared to stand by while the living reminder of our continent’s glorious natural heritage is clearcut into oblivion!" [italics added] Kennedy wrote passionately.¹⁸⁷ In the same mailing, NRDC president John Adams justified Americans sticking their noses into a Canadian issue: "After all, Americans buy and use most of the rainforest timber that is exported from British Columbia. Our nation is fueling the destruction of the great northern rainforest, and that means we have the power to stop it!"¹⁸⁸ Never-ending growth in the number of American consumers demanding forest products — a less "sexy" trend unopposed by the NRDC — went conspicuously unmentioned by Mr. Adams. Instead, he boasted that Americans had already stopped planned clearcutting in 1993 at another site on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island: "We alerted millions of Americans to the plight of Clayoquot Sound...we helped bring massive pressure to bear on the governments of Canada and British Columbia..."¹⁸⁹

This type of globe-trotting activism by some American and European environmentalists, and their belief that environmental values transcend all others, such as national sovereignty, has led to occasional denunciations of "environmental imperialism," most notably by the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

One of the most common arguments by environmental opponents of U.S. population stabilization in 1998 was that it would be unethical to protect U.S. environmental resources and achieve U.S. population stabilization at the expense of workers and their families from other nations who would not be allowed to move here to better their lives. Another major argument was that stabilizing the U.S. population merely protected U.S. ecosystems at the expense of ecosystems in other countries where population would be higher because people weren’t allowed to emigrate.¹⁹⁰ This globalist ethic seems to suggest that the American public and the U.S. government do not have a moral right to effect policies that give priority to, say, preserving and enhancing the Chesapeake Bay over an estuary in another country. Also pointless under this ethic would be heroic efforts now underway by the U.S. Coast Guard to safeguard the vast but dwindling bottomfish stocks in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska from marauding Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Tawainese, Thai, Polish, and Norwegian trawlers (which have already caused fish populations in non-American portions of the Bering Sea to plummet).¹⁹¹ A globalist view might see protection of the American portion as harming the non-American portion, which excluded fishing vessels might be "forced" to over-exploit even further.

In contrast, one could easily see the nationalist and internationalist ethic at work in 1970 when the Sierra Club and other environmental groups jointly endorsed a resolution that committed them to "bring about the stabilization of the population first of the United States and then of the world." Solving the population problem in one’s own country and becoming a model for other nations to emulate was seen as the most responsible first step in responding to the international problem. And after all, went the reasoning of the time, the only place a given nation could really exercise full control to make things better was within its own borders.

By the mid-1990s, Sierra leaders had turned around 180 degrees. Rather than endorsing "stabilization first in the United States and then of the world," they now called for, in effect, "stabilization first of the world, and then maybe the United States."

Under the more globalist ethic of 1990s Sierra leaders (and the leaders of many other environmental organizations who publicly or privately supported them), it was seen as both selfish and futile for the United States to stabilize its own population before the rest of the world does. In fact, some leaders suggested that if some countries remain poor, Congress should not reduce immigration and U.S. population growth even when the rest of the world’s population does stabilize. Only when socioeconomic conditions in the rest of the world are high enough that foreign workers no longer want to move to the United States should this country be allowed to stabilize its population, they indicated. The problem for the United States, and particularly California, is that they may reach extraordinary population densities — and concomitant environmental and quality of life pressures — before this ever occurs.¹⁹²

One of the most direct examples of this globalism was in ZPG’s official explanation for abandoning zero population growth goals in the United States: "It is ZPG’s view that immigration pressures on the U.S. population are best relieved by addressing factors which compel people to leave their homes and families and emigrate to the United States. Foremost among these are population growth, economic stagnation, environmental degradation, poverty and political repression. ZPG believes unless these problems are successfully addressed in the developing nations of the world, no forcible exclusion policy will successfully prevent people from seeking to relocate into the United States. ZPG, therefore, calls on the United States to focus its foreign aid on population, environmental, social, education and sustainable development programs. Changing political conditions present opportunities to work cooperatively with other nations to address the root causes of international migration. Studies show that of the people who emigrate to the United States, the majority would have stayed in their home countries had there been economic opportunities or democratic institutions."¹⁹³

That essentially was the plan touted by Sierra leaders and which 60 percent of Sierran voters approved in their 1998 ballot (in which turnout was about 15 percent, the highest in a decade).¹⁹⁴

It is difficult to know if those positions were taken because of a full belief in the globalist ideology that seems to undergird them or simply because of an attraction to globalist rhetoric. There is little sign that the leaders of those groups or their members did any calculations as to what it would take to achieve such grandiose goals of eliminating global poverty — or whether there was any practicality at all in the thought of raising the living standards of more than 4 billion (going to 8 billion) impoverished third world citizens high enough that they would not want to immigrate to the United States.

Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael (something of a cult favorite among environmentalists) observed: "We have encouraged people to think that all we have to do to end our population expansion is to end economic and social injustice all over the world. This is a will-of-the-wisp because these are things that people have been striving to do for thousands of years without doing them. And why we think that this will be doable in the next few years is quite bizarre to me. They don’t recognize any of the biological realities involved."¹⁹⁵ According to elder geopolitical statesman George F. Kennan, the most likely scenario for the current quadrupled immigration levels declining of their own volition is if the "levels of overpopulation and poverty in the United States are equal to those of the countries from which these people are now anxious to escape."¹⁹⁶

Unless U.S. living standards collapse toward the average level of the third world (which is only around one-twelfth that of U.S. standards as gauged by GDP per capita), it appears highly unlikely that immigration of the current million level would ever go down without government-imposed limits.¹⁹⁷

Thus, if the U.S. government adopted the ZPG and Sierra policies of never legislating lower immigration levels and waiting for the numbers to decline naturally, the United States would be assured of growing to a population of a half-billion or more during the 21st century and a billion or more in the next.

It is difficult to believe that any environmental leaders would intentionally choose such a future for the American environment. Yet, not one major U.S. environmental organization has seriously studied whether their globalist solution has any possibility of creating something other than that China-like population density. Perhaps because the solution is impossible, not one environmental group has proposed any specific U.S. federal legislation that is designed to help end world poverty so as to naturally lower immigration flows.

Perhaps with the passage of time, historians will be better able to ascertain if the environmental leaders were truly serious about their global prescription and why they have had so little inquisitiveness about whether their utopian scheme could work.
 

Fear of Demographic Trends

Still another reason environmental groups didn’t want to tackle immigration numbers to slow U.S. population growth may have been their fear of changing demographics. As the population of foreign-born Americans and their children rose ever higher, they became an increasingly powerful political bloc whom many environmental leaders feared could thwart environmentalist initiatives and legislation if they perceived environmental groups to be hostile to immigration.

In 1970, immigrants comprised about 5 percent of the American population. By the late 1990s, that figure had risen to almost 10 percent and was still climbing rapidly with no sign of cresting — a predictable consequence of the four-fold increase in immigration levels over the past four decades.¹⁹⁸ In certain key states — particularly California (25 percent), New York (18 percent), and Florida (15 percent) — and a number of influential cities, the percentage of foreign-born in the population was much higher still and was large enough to be the balance of power in some elections.¹⁹⁹

The bloc of foreign-born Americans and their children in the late 1990s already was far larger than the bloc of black Americans. The Census Bureau showed that if Congress did not change immigration policy, the bloc of recent immigrants and their descendants would be more than a third of all Americans by the year 2050.

A number of interests, ranging from private businesses to political parties to environmental groups, assumed that Congress will not change immigration policy and that this revolutionary demographic shift is virtually inevitable, a fait accompli. All positioned themselves to take advantage of the shift as best they could and to keep the shift from hurting them.

In the case of businesses, this could mean reaching new rapidly growing markets by advertising in a foreign language. In the case of political parties, it meant nurturing immigrants as a source of donations, votes, and political power.^{200 201} And in the case of environmental groups, it could mean trying to avoid any issues that might cause this developing power in American politics to oppose environmentalist political goals.

Particularly in California where the foreign born and their children already comprised more than a third of the population, Sierra leaders worried aloud not only that advocating U.S. population stabilization might lose immigrants, their friends, and family as supporters, but that sensitive political alliances with ethnic politicians could be jeopardized as well.

Sam Shuchat, the executive director of the California League of Conservation Voters — an organization immersed in state politics — pleaded with the Sierra Club not to "...commit suicide over the immigration issue. This is something the environmental community cannot afford."²⁰²

In this fearful way of thinking, advocacy of immigration reduction to stabilize the population and protect the environment could only be seen by immigrants already here as an attempt to prevent them from becoming a majority of the population in California during the next few years — and of the country later in the next century. Having their future power thus threatened by environmentalists, immigrants would insist that their elected officials vote against environmental protection measures, according to the demographic-fear scenario.

Former ZPG president Judy Kunofsky, who also chaired the Sierra Club’s Population Committee in the late 1980s (in addition to having served as executive director of the Yosemite Restoration Trust), has logged a quarter-century of service and leadership within the environmental and population movements. Kunofsky recalled that some years back, a staffer for a Hispanic member of Congress from Southern California told a Sierra Club representative that the Congressman was outraged that the Club wanted to limit immigration. Later, various Latino citizen’s groups in Los Angeles threatened not to cooperate with the Club on air pollution issues if it were to actively oppose immigration. "When you have ethnic spokesmen saying to environmentalists that ‘we won’t work with you on clean air if you support immigration restriction,’ that is an admission that increasing their own numbers takes precedence over all other considerations and that environmental concerns are secondary."²⁰³

Whether the commitment of immigrants toward the environment was that shallow or whether their desire — or ability — to be some sort of monolithic voting bloc was that strong remains undetermined. Public opinion polls would suggest that immigrants were not especially wedded to current immigration numbers and would not react as an angry group if the numbers were reduced back toward a more traditional American level. For years, polls showed immigrants generally agreeing with native-born Americans about reducing future immigration.²⁰⁴

UCLA astronomy professor and environmental activist Ben Zuckerman was among those in 1998 who dismissed the suggestion that immigrants would retaliate against immigration reduction by insisting that the natural environment of their new country be despoiled. He wrote that if the Sierra Club renewed its proscriptive commitment to U.S. population stabilization, "Political allies will continue to vote for sound environmental legislation when it is in the interests of their constituents — which is what they do now."²⁰⁵ Yet even Zuckerman conceded that: "Politically, excessive immigration is very difficult to deal with because, in states with large immigrant populations, politicians are afraid to appear anti-immigrant, and in states with few immigrants, the national level of immigration is not a political issue."²⁰⁶

Whether the fear of immigrant retaliation was justified or not, if believed by environmental leaders, it could have greatly affected their decisions about pursuing U.S. population stabilization. Certainly there were some reasons for the environmental leaders to have adopted such a belief during the Sierra Club’s referendum campaign. They heard from some self-appointed immigrant spokespersons who made the threat of retaliation. And Sierra leaders may have drawn similar conclusions from a contingent of California Democratic state-level politicians, many of them Latinos, who directly challenged the Club to defeat the immigration-reduction referendum. "A position by the club to further limit immigration would be considered immigrant bashing by many elected officials of color with near-perfect environmental records," Santos Gomez (an appointed member of the Club’s National Population Committee) wrote in a newspaper op-ed piece.²⁰⁷ Pete Carrillo, president of the Mexican Heritage Corp. of Santa Clara County, Calif., told a reporter that if the Sierra Club returned to its policy calling for immigration reductions it would produce "a gap as wide as the Pacific Ocean between the Sierra Club and the Mexican American Community."²⁰⁸

Thus, intimidated environmental leaders may have chosen the logic of the executive director of California League of Conservation Voters: If immigrants did retaliate, that would be something "the environmental community cannot afford." It would not be a question of whether the environment could afford another doubling of the U.S. population but whether the environmental community could afford immigrant retaliation if environmentalists tried to stop the doubling. Protection of the environmental institutions may have been placed ahead of protection of the environment. Professor Zuckerman, a member of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and one of the initiators of the Sierra Club immigration vote, observed in an op-ed column, "most leading environmental organizations are merely environmental-ish," that is, they "give plenty of lip service to the environment...but when push comes to shove, the environment takes a back seat."²⁰⁹ Another population activist in Oregon commented: "...population is a very tough and divisive issue. Most people with environmental concerns have taken the path of least resistance."²¹⁰

It may well represent a politically shrewd or realistic decision on the part of environmental organization leaders to have taken the path of least resistance — at least in the short term. In assessing the environmental movement’s collective strengths and weaknesses, and in analyzing their own groups’ missions and finite resources, many may have reasoned that taking on such a "divisive" issue was in essence, "tilting at windmills" — a course that both fiduciary duty and common sense argued against. It was one thing to tackle the likes of corporate polluters, "Big Oil," logging companies, the U.S. Forest Service, malodorous pulp mills, multinational mining companies, immense petrochemical corporations, the nuclear power industry, and the Defense Department. The very salience and size of these institutions — and their all too manifest impact on the environment while delivering goods and services to the American public — readily allowed them to be cast as Goliaths and environmentalists as Davids in a Biblical struggle between good and evil. Much of the time, the media and the public seemed to buy into this simplistic story line and its cliched characters — environmental villains vs. idealistic, selfless defenders. Thus, in the typical environmental scenario, the disadvantage of economically and politically powerful adversaries was counteracted by the advantage of perceived moral superiority.

In contrast, tackling immigration meant confronting disadvantages on both fronts. An individual environmentalist or environmental group doing so virtually always paid a high price in the prestige and respect they enjoyed from the media and other elites. It was all too easy for such environmentalists to be condemned by mass immigration advocates and an uncritical news media as parochial, selfish "know-nothings" unwilling to share the fruits of American society with a less fortunate world, or even as closet hate-mongers for whom the environment was just a front. At the same time, very powerful economic and political special interests backed high immigration levels.

Thus, abdicating the Foundational Formula may indeed have been an expedient strategy, but perhaps also an indication of the essentially weak political position of the environmental movement in American society, and its shallow support, at the close of the 20th century. As long as "enviros" played by the unwritten rules and didn’t oppose the perpetual growth ethos at the very center of contemporary American society (as physicist Albert Bartlett has observed trenchantly, our de facto national motto is no longer "In God We Trust," but "In Growth We Trust") they could be "team players" who got enough support to stay in the game and who won enough small victories and compromises to keep them contented. Yet in forsaking U.S. population stabilization, environmental group leaders may have made a Faustian bargain. In the short run they enjoyed less political risk, more prestige, and more power. But over the long run they paid with their souls, for they were condemning the American environment they supposedly cared about to carry an ever-greater burden.
 

The Power of Money

We have saved until last the factor that journalists tend to consider first: the money. There are many observers — and players — n the 1990s who suggest that the shifts in population emphasis have more to do with the funding of environmental groups than any other factor. Certainly, there is evidence suggesting that money has been at least a significant factor. Of course, many of the other factors mentioned previously may have had a role in causing donors to act as they did.

By way of introduction, Professor T. Michael Maher, in his 1990s research on why journalists avoided the population angle in their environmental reporting, noted that others have commented on the inherent bias of the news media in favor of population growth: "Molotch (1976) even suggested that cities can best be understood as entitities competing for population growth, with the city newspaper as chief cheerleader."²¹¹

In a very real sense, the entire environmental protection and natural resource conservation enterprise has been "sold" to the American public, 1) as a necessary response to the unintended, adverse environmental consequences of this century’s unparalleled growth in consumption and population, but also, 2) in a great paradox, as an indispensable basis for still more growth in consumption and population, which (it is argued) depends on a healthy environment and abundant resources. In the last thirty years, the environmental sector of the nation’s economy has boomed in tandem with new environmental protection laws reflecting both increased pressures on the environment and greater environmental awareness on the part of the public. To the ranks of foresters, fish and game biologists, geologists, agronomists, and park rangers — resource management professions which have existed for much of the 20th century — were added tens of thousands of pollution control engineers, environmental lawyers, landscape architects, outdoor recreation specialists, environmental planners, wildlife biologists, environmental scientists (e.g. climatologists, geochemists, ecologists, zoologists, conservation biologists, oceanographers), government regulators, and last but not least, professional or career environmental advocates.

To the extent that increasing population signifies increasing pressures on environmental resources, the demand for environmental professionals to manage and mitigate the negative effects of this growth will also increase. (There are caveats: American society must be affluent enough and motivated enough to pay for such services, and the resources can’t have been exhausted or ruined beyond the point of no return; once a species goes extinct so do the jobs of those who tried to save it.) Thus, paradoxically, continued population growth — at least to a point and for awhile — creates more demand for the skills and expertise (and thus better job prospects) of those in the environmental conservation field. This can be seen in a pair of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publications, one of which states: "Although fish and wildlife in America represent tremendous environmental, creational and economic assets, these resources are increasingly threatened. The mission of the U.S. Fish Wildlife Service grows more complex and critical as a result of these threats."²¹² And why are fish and wildlife increasingly threatened? Another Fish and Wildlife Service document spells it out: "Because of the changes that accompany development and population growth."²¹³ The solution? It should come as no surprise that a federal agency in the 1990s does not mention stabilizing U.S. population as one essential part of the solution. Instead, this agency concludes that "wildlife and wildlands need to be protected and managed."²¹⁴ In effect, these observations from one branch of the environmental profession serve to justify its own increasing importance to American society.

In theory, the same case can be made about the full-time, career environmentalists who head up and staff national environmental organizations. Membership and support for those organizations tend to grow in direct proportion with the real or perceived threat to the environment, as during the early 1980s under the Reagan administration. U.S. population growth increases the real threat to the American environment; ergo, until or unless that growth damages the environment beyond salvation, it is a backdoor boon for these groups’ membership appeals and donation solicitations. The recent sprawl campaigns of various organizations — which attempt to spell "sprawl" without the ‘p’ representing population (as Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization cleverly put it) — are a prime example of a greater loyalty to organizational well-being than the environment’s well-being.

In 1970, environmentalists on the whole were younger and more radical, even "subversive," than they are today.²¹⁵ The environmental movement was "alternative." Over the ensuing years, the movement matured or "grayed" and joined the ranks of the very "establishment" it once mistrusted and blamed for environmental problems. Many would see this as a mark of maturity and a sign of success, an indication that mainstream society had internalized ideas and values that were once on the fringe. And without a doubt, institutions and popular culture today do reflect greater concern for the environment and nature than they did three decades ago. However, since American society continues marching stubbornly on a highly unsustainable path, of which unending, unsustainable population growth is a major part, it is questionable whether environmentalism has truly penetrated the American ethos. Without a doubt, the vision of American society remains fixated on short-term, not long-term, material prosperity and socioeconomic well-being, or "instant gratification," and as philosophically committed to limitless growth in consumption and population as ever, as long as the consequences will be felt by unborn generations of tomorrow rather than voters and consumers alive today.

Rather than the deeper lessons and values of ecology and environmentalism having been absorbed by American society in a form of "paradigm shift," thereby moving it toward a sustainable path, a more plausible view is that environmentalism itself has been co-opted by mainstream American society. As the elites of the environmental establishment have become more politically connected and powerful, and better compensated, they became more comfortable, complacent, and status-conscious; in essence, they may have been bought off by the system they sought to change. They’re not about to rock the boat or bite the hand that feeds them. And challenging excessive immigration levels and the perpetual population growth these levels effect does just that.

On the more specific question of the direct influence of money on the retreat of environmental groups from U.S. population stabilization, historians will need to be investigative reporters to get a clear picture. Here are some of the questions we would like to see answered

Question:

Did the "business" of environmentalism make population stabilization programs unattractive? Is it possible that organizations looked first not at what ultimately would allow them to achieve their environmental goals but at defining themselves for the best financial support from their members and their foundation or corporate benefactors – and stabilization didn’t meet that criterion?

Organizational survival and financial maintenance is not a trivial matter. Taking on "environmentally pure" issues won’t do much good for the environment if in the process the organization loses the financial ability to stay in business.

With scores of environmental groups competing with each other for members and donors, each needs special programs and actions to distinguish itself. They also need programs that can yield short-term victories that they can tout to their funders. Even under very favorable circumstances, a campaign for U.S. population stabilization cannot achieve its goal for several decades. And the benefits are not easily seen at first. In contrast, many other environmental crusades bring about faster, more tangible results. To refer to an earlier example, the Chesapeake Bay today is healthier or at least holding its own in measurable ways (e.g. improved water quality; increased submerged aquatic vegetation; stabilized or increasing fish, shellfish, and waterfowl populations) directly as a result of a number of environmental initiatives.

Stabilizing population, on the other hand, doesn’t improve the environment; rather, it keeps environmental conditions from growing worse. You can’t photograph the bad things that you prevented — because they didn’t happen. Which direct mail package is likely to raise more money: Newspaper clippings about forcing the removal of a dam, cleaning up smog and establishing a park...or a headline stating that the rate of population growth declined incrementally from the previous year?

In 1990, after Congress approved an immigration policy that would force U.S. population growth of tens of millions over the next several decades, one of the authors surveyed the Washington, D.C., offices of national environmental groups. They were asked to name their organization’s top five issues facing America. None named population growth. (This may account for why not one of the big groups testified or lobbied against the 1990 forced-growth legislation.²¹⁶) When reminded about population, most of the environmental spokespersons quickly said that, of course, population growth was a very important environmental threat. But it was a long-term problem, while their organization had to focus on crises that needed immediate attention — like keeping a shopping mall from wiping out a wetland or saving a virgin forest from being clear-cut. The benefits from population stabilization were too indirect and diffuse to make it a brochure issue; and the damage from growth was too incremental to say that it had to be attacked immediately.

John Bermingham, a former Colorado legislator, ZPG board member, and one of the nation’s pioneers and long-term stalwarts for stabilization, told the story of approaching a large environmental group to "put some muscle" behind the strong population policy it had on paper. The president told him the group couldn’t work on the issue and noted: "That is not to say that population issues do not have a direct effect on what we do, particularly in the area of promoting sustainability. Population is just not our forte and we cannot afford to divert our limited resources to it."²¹⁷

Population analyst and observer Lindsey Grant concluded that major non-profit environmental organizations know that population growth hinders the pursuit of environmental goals, but that most "stayed away from the U.S. population issue out of concern that it would be controversial and lose support for their programs."²¹⁸

The farther the environmental groups got from Earth Day 1970, the less business sense it may have made to spend organizational resources on stabilization efforts.

The 1998 edition of the catalogue Environmental Grant-Making Foundations (Rochester, N.Y.: Resources for Global Sustainability, Inc.) lists 180 foundations that specify population as an area of environmental gift-giving. In recent years, billionaires Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett in addition to well-endowed foundations like Hewlett and Packard have all identified overpopulation as a major concern and focus of gift-giving. Yet these and most other foundations interested in underwriting population programs have a distinctly global perspective and are focused on family planning, women’s empowerment, and reproductive health issues, not population policy, especially a U.S. population-stabilization policy.

The experience of the 1990s has shown that there are fewer than 10 foundations in the entire country willing and able to significantly fund non-profit groups with a clear U.S. population stabilization agenda. Most of these are relatively small in size, and thus limited in the size of their grants.

Even a respected, well-established group like the National Audubon Society has had to struggle to obtain support for its wildlife habitat-related population program. For at least the last three decades of the 20th century, Audubon has had the most active population education program of any major environmental group, encouraged by the early support of its former president Russell Peterson. It included widely respected research and education about the effects of population growth on natural habitats throughout the United States and the world. But when it came to advocating policies to stop or slow the growth, Audubon pled the fifth. U.S. population stabilization depends on reductions in immigration, and few foundations want to be associated with that. Audubon members asking about the issue were told in 1998 that, "Audubon does not now, nor never has, taken a position on immigration reform." Yet in one of the many ironies surrounding the immigration/population question, famed ornithologist and bird artist Roger Tory Peterson, a major conservation figure who inaugurated the popular field guide series and certainly had the admiration of many in the Audubon Society, was himself on the board of advisors of the Federation of American Immigration Reform for many years before his death.

Question:

How significant was the threat of foundations and major individual donors to withdraw funding if an environmental or population group tackled immigration?

In his book Living Within Limits, Garrett Hardin asserted that the corporate and philanthropic foundations who funded the 20th anniversary Earth Day in 1990 let it be known that they would not look kindly on the event having a population emphasis.²¹⁹ So in contrast to Earth Day 1970, there was none.

By 1998, the situation was no better, prompting one Oregon population activist to decry "McEarth Day 98" as a "Corporate Snowjob." According to a flier of the grassroots group "Too Many People...Too Little Earth!": "You’d think [overpopulation] would be number one in the environmental community. Tragically, it’s hardly on the back burner!... Why the head in the sand approach? The reasons are many; I’ll list a few. Fund raising becomes very difficult when population enters the picture. What corporation really wants to solve this problem? They thrive on unsustainable growth."²²⁰

During the Sierra Club battle over population policy in 1998, Sierra leaders warned that foundations and major individual donors had said that they would withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously pledged grants if the members of the Club took a stand in favor of reducing immigration.²²¹

According to a ZPG official at the time, the ZPG executive director indicated that at ZPG’s gala event in 1997 honoring Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, both major ZPG supporters, Fonda had informed him how happy she was that ZPG had not taken a stand on immigration.²²²

To what extent did large funders help keep population/immigration issues off the agendas of environmental organizations? There are certainly enough clues and circumstantial evidence to indicate that they played an important role.

Question:

How was the desire of many corporate and business interests for continued U.S. population growth reflected in their grants to environmental groups and through the foundations they set up or the foundations on the boards of which their leaders served?

It may be that the greatest fear that corporations had of environmental groups was not the ostensible environmental regulations they advocated but a cutoff of U.S. population growth to fuel ever-expanding consumer markets, land development, and construction. In addition, those same forces had an intense self-interest in a growing labor pool to keep the cost of labor down.

One Californian observed that to remain so large, environmental groups "depend on huge transfers of money from foundations. These foundations have lots of connections with the national corporate community, which remains unconvinced that U.S. population stabilization is a good thing. Never-ending growth remains a goal of the national corporate community."²²³

For more than a quarter-century the total fertility rate of native-born Americans has been below the replacement level of 2.1. The inevitable demographic consequence of this reproductive behavior is a native population stock whose growth has been tapering off, and is well on the way to stabilization and even gradual shrinkage in the coming century — without infusions of foreign workers and their families. Organized business and corporate interests in the United States fear that a tighter labor supply and a "stagnant" number of consumers will choke off America’s miracle of perpetual economic growth and prosperity.

"As baby boomers age and domestic birthrates stagnate, only foreign-born workers will keep the labor pool growing....Economic dynamism, in other words, will depend on a continuing stream of foreign-born workers," opined an article in Business Week.²²⁴ At a "dull" meeting between the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a group of trade association executives in December 1997, "suddenly the room jumped to life" when Bruce Josten of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce predicted a severe labor shortage within the next decade. "...We’re going to have to bring in more people simply to maintain the economy’s growth rate. I’m talking about more legal immigrants at all skill levels," said Josten.²²⁵ The Chamber’s Vice President and Chief Economist echoed this view in a letter published under the headline "Immigrants Wanted" in The New York Times: "Rather than worrying about the welfare costs of our current rate of immigration, we should be concerned about the lost opportunity owing to the worker shortage of the future."²²⁶

The concern of some economists and business interests over an alleged emerging worker shortage is matched by the concern of many analysts, politicians, and rank-and-file Americans that early in the next century the Social Security system will be strained to the breaking point as too many retiring Baby Boomers burden too few workers. Dell Erickson and others have used the metaphor of a large lump of food passing through a snake to depict the pronounced, but temporary, demographic distortions caused by the Boomers.²²⁷ (As a population gradually stops growing, its age structure will indeed change, with the median age shifting upward for a time to a new, higher point.) This issue was addressed on the Sierra Club’s on-line Population Forum, with forum manager Nan Hildreth asking participants: "Someone mentioned that US population growth is good for the continued solvency of Social Security. Comments?"²²⁸ Dell Erickson commented that, "Over the years, the legislation to open a floodgate of immigration became an unseen and little known Congressional attempt to remedy the approaching funding dilemma by rapidly increasing numbers at the bottom of the worker pyramid."²²⁹ Demographer David Simcox also delivered a scathing critique of this rationale for increasing immigration: "Relying on Ponzi-like schemes to populate our way out of the dilemma through increased immigration and pronatalist incentives would be destructive and self-defeating. The consequence would be disruptive and environmentally devastating population growth, which would merely delay, not solve, the problem of too few workers supporting too many retirees."²³⁰ It should be obvious that reliance upon a pyramid scheme of an ever-expanding base of workers to keep our economy healthy and our retirees robust is an environmentally unsustainable strategy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t powerful forces pushing precisely for this.

Whatever the unspoken basis for its unwillingness to confront population growth, the Sierra Club national board found itself in the previously unheard-of position of being endorsed by the Home Builders Association of Northern California during the 1998 referendum campaign. The development group applauded the position of the Sierra Club board to accept the current immigration level, which is projected to force California’s home-needing population to 50 million by 2025. But the developers criticized the Sierra Club for helping prevent the use of urban and near-urban open spaces to build houses for the population growth brought about by immigration.²³¹

Many foundations have a mix of directors that include politically left-leaning globalists and right-leaning representatives of multi-national corporations. As discussed earlier, for separate (even disparate) reasons, both types are strongly inclined toward high immigration levels. Historians will be able to quantify some of the ideological leanings of the foundations by looking at the modest level of funding for U.S. population stabilization efforts compared to the millions of dollars a year funneled to organizations working for policies that force massive U.S. population growth.

Of particular interest may be determining the role of foundations during the mid-1990s when Congress almost approved immigration reductions that would have started the United States on the path toward a stable population. That was a time when the American public was clamoring for immigration reductions; liberal labor advocates pressed for cuts that were endorsed by President Clinton; the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate immigration subcommittees presented bills to bring about the cuts recommended by former Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s bipartisan national commission. But the reductions did not occur. News accounts credit a massive mobilization and lobbying effort by corporate America for defeating all immigration cuts. Corporate, ethnic, and human rights leaders worked in a diverse coalition to begin undercutting the residual interest for making cuts in upcoming sessions of Congress.

Of special concern to growth advocates was the possibility that environmental groups might join forces with those desiring cuts for the sake of low-skill workers. Several Democratic pro-cut House floor leaders (most prominently Anthony Beilenson of California and John Bryant of Texas) had especially emphasized the need to slow U.S. population growth and relieve pressures on the environment. Around that time, certain foundations supported programs to bring human rights and environmental groups together to discuss population issues. 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. Did those programs influence the decisions of ZPG and the Sierra Club to change their U.S. population stabilization policies and of groups like Audubon firming up their policies to refrain from discussing immigration issues?

Three well-endowed foundations — Pew, Turner, and Rockefeller — gave grants in support of a book whose very title, Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment²³² — revealed a shift away from sheer numbers of people as the primary concern. And in November 1995 in Washington, D.C., the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative co-sponsored a one-day "Roundtable Discussion on Global Migration, Population, and the Environment." Pew’s partner in the event was the National Immigration Forum, the nation’s main coalition lobbying for continued high immigration. According to Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, who was present, this meeting was "clearly an attempt to keep environmental groups from going off the reservation and supporting immigration cuts then being debated in Congress."²³³

To whatever extent foundations and corporations did or did not attempt to neutralize environmental groups in their population policies, historians are likely to find that the policy changes also came as a result of the many other factors listed in this monograph.

End Notes

¹²³ Rhonda Bodfield. 1998. "Sierra Club Split: Factions in Environmental Group at Odds Over Immigration Limits." The Arizona Daily Star. April 12.

¹²⁴ Supra, note 112. Lytwak calculates that immigration accounted for 1 percent of U.S. population growth in 1950, 5 percent in 1960, 13 percent in 1970, 38 percent in 1980, 58 percent in 1990, and 61 percent in 1996.

¹²⁵ Roy Beck. 1996. The Case Against Immigration. New York and London: W.W. Norton.

¹²⁶ Supra, note 114.

¹²⁷ This incident occurred to Leon Kolankiewicz and Richard Koris in front of the executive committee of the Great Falls Group of the Old Dominion Chapter of the Club, and was reported in the Washington Post article (cited below) by William Branigin on March 7.

¹²⁸ E-mail to the authors from Ben Zuckerman, May 26, 1999.

¹²⁹ William Branigin. 1998. "Immigration Policy Dispute Rocks Sierra Club." The Washington Post. March 7.

¹³⁰ U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. 1994. U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility. Quote from Executive Summary. Barbara Jordan also delivered these remarks in testimony before a congressional hearing.

¹³¹ The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (or Jordan Commission) issued a number of reports from 1994-98. They are on line at http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/uscir/.

¹³² James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston (eds.). 1997. The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration. Panel on the Demographic and Economic Impacts of Immigration, Committee on Population and Committee on National Statistics, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

¹³³ Emil Guillermo. 1997. "The Sierra Club’s Nativist Faction." San Francisco Examiner. December 17.

¹³⁴ Robert Reich. 1991. The Work of Nations: A Blueprint for the Future. New York and London: Simon & Schuster.

¹³⁵ Katherine Betts. 1999. The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove. Quotes from p. 5 and p. 29, respectively.

¹³⁶ Supra, note 95.

¹³⁷ George Sessions. 1998. "Will the Real Sierra Club Please Stand Up?" Focus, Vol. 8, No. 1. Washington, D.C: Carrying Capacity Network.

¹³⁸ Supra, note 95.

¹³⁹ Fred Elbel. 1999. E-mail to authors. May 14.

¹⁴⁰ This incident was personally observed by Leon Kolankiewicz in 1989.

¹⁴¹ Frank Clifford. 1998. "Immigration Vote Divides Sierra Club." Los Angeles Times, March 16.

¹⁴² Al Martinez. 1997. "Listen to the Wind..." Los Angeles Times. October 7.

¹⁴³ Carl Pope. 1997. On-line post to Sierra members.

¹⁴⁴ Sierra Club population activist Fred Elbel points out that at the Sierra Club as well as other organizations, "everything is now seen through the filter of ‘political correctness.’ It is not politically correct to address population stabilization and immigration reduction in any form if it means harming the interests of immigrant minorities" (written correspondence to authors, May 14, 1999).

¹⁴⁵ Al Knight. 1998. "It’s Not Easy Being Green: Sierra Club Faces New Identity Crisis." Denver Post. February 15.

¹⁴⁶ Three of the initiative’s most famous original supporters — David Brower, Paul Ehrlich, and Anne Ehrlich — all dropped their public support in late 1997, before their names were printed on the official ballots. Brower and Anne Ehrlich were board members, and might well have felt pressured by the rest of the board to toe the "party line." Paul Ehrlich presumably dropped off in support of his wife, with whom he works very closely. (In Ehrlich’s case, the record over the years indicates considerable ambiguity and ambivalence on the subject of an environmentally-appropriate stance toward immigration levels.)

¹⁴⁷ Supra, note 85.

¹⁴⁸ Personal communication from individual present at the conference. 1999.

¹⁴⁹ Georgia C. DuBose. 1998. "ZPG official says law, local action can cut population." The Journal (Martinsburg, W.Va.). March 29.

¹⁵⁰ Peter Kostmayer. 1998. Letter to ZPG member. March 30.

¹⁵¹ Dr. Kendall subsequently indicated to Leon Kolankiewicz that his name could be used privately — and that he as a private individual strongly supported the measure — but that his name could not be placed on any publicly distributed lists because of the strong linkage in the public’s mind between him and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Ironically, a certain senior UCS staff member did publicly support the opposition. When Kolankiewicz asked Kendall if this wasn’t an inconsistency, Kendall replied that it was this staffer’s prerogative to do as he pleased, and that UCS executive director Howard Ris’ admonition specifically referred to Kendall himself and to siding with the pro-reduction Sierra Clubbers. Once again, it was apparently seen as riskier to explicitly endorse immigration reduction rather than to endorse ostensible "neutrality" (a neutrality that was an implicit endorsement of the high-immigration status quo).

¹⁵² Documented in private e-mails of members of Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization 1998. Werbach was widely known to be extremely hostile to the immigration reduction measure, which in a July, 1998 Outside magazine article he was quoted as saying was "horrendous." The same article, and other sources, recounted his pledge to have resigned from office if the measure were to have passed.

¹⁵³ Watson case documented in January, 1998 e-mail by Ben Zuckerman. According to notes taken by Zuckerman referencing a conversation with Watson immediately after this incident, Werbach was enraged that Watson would sign such a "racist" measure. Brown case documented in personal communication to Leon Kolankiewicz, 1998. After SUSPS members learned that Werbach was himself phoning SUSPS signatories in an effort to dislodge them from the list of supporters, Kolankiewicz was requested to make contact with Brown to ensure that he was still "on board." Brown informed Kolankiewicz that he had already been phoned by Werbach, but had declined to withdraw his name in response to Werbach’s direct request.

¹⁵⁴ Supra, note 118; Dianne Dillon-Ridgley, president of ZPG was the task force co-chair; other members included Michele Perrault, then International Vice President of the Sierra Club (as well as a former president and later, a board member), John Adams, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Fred Krupp, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund. The task force was assisted by Judith Jacobsen, who later became president of ZPG. Of interest is the fact that Perrault’s Sierra affiliation was not listed in the task force report, reportedly because the Club had just adopted its "neutrality" stance, and would not associate its name with any document advocating reduced immigration.

¹⁵⁵ A prime example of this global view is Al Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance (1992, Houghton Mifflin). In 1998 Vice-President Gore again explicitly linked population growth to global issues when he touted increased family planning support as one means of combating global warming. The Washington-based non-profit Population Action International (formerly the Population Crisis Committee) also released a report in 1998 linking global climate and population futures (Robert Engelman. 1998. Profiles in Carbon: An Update on Population, Consumption and Carbon Dioxide Emissions. Washington, D.C.: Population Action International).

¹⁵⁶ Garrett Hardin. 1999. The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia. New York: Oxford University Press.

¹⁵⁷ Carl Pope. 1997. Post to on-line Sierra Club population forum. December 16.

¹⁵⁸ Network Bulletin. 1998. Vol. 8, No. 2. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network; Tom Turner. 1991. Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature. New York: Harry N. Abrams. The Sierra Club also published a book entitled This Is The American Earth with text by Nancy Newhall and photos by Ansel Adams in 1960.

¹⁵⁹ Jason DinAlt. 1994. "The Environmental Impact of Immigration Into the United States." Focus, Vol. 4, No. 2. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network.

¹⁶⁰ Supra, note 8.

¹⁶¹ World Resources Institute. 1996. World Resources, 1996-97. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

¹⁶² Ibid.

¹⁶³ Geoffrey Bernard. 1998. Colorado Plateau Advocate. Winter.

¹⁶⁴ Brock Evans. 1998. "The Sierra Club Ballot Referendum on Immigration, Population and the Environment." Focus, Vol. 8, No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network. Evans is the Executive Director of the Endangered Species Coalition, and a former Vice-President for National Issues of the National Audubon Society, Associate Executive Director of the Sierra Club, 1981 recipient of the Club’s highest honor (the John Muir Award), and 1984 candidate for Congress from the state of Washington.

¹⁶⁵ Carl Pope. 1998. "Think Globally, Act Sensibly – Immigration is not the problem." Asian Week (San Francisco, CA). April 2. Pope used the same comparison in a February 25, 1998 debate on (Santa Monica, California-based) NPR affiliate KCRW’s (Santa Monica, California) program "Which Way L.A.?" and on other occasions. The irony of using the Titanic analogy to represent overpopulation and immigration is that if the RMS Titanic’s bulkheads had been sealed and reached all the way up (a standard feature in ships nowadays) instead of just part-way, the ship might have been saved from sinking because inrushing ocean water would have been confined to several compartments instead of spilling over the top of each bulkhead into subsequent ones. (The Titanic could flood four compartments and still float. It breached five.) Thus, another conclusion that can be drawn from this maritime tragedy is that barriers between distinct nation-states may well be essential to preventing one country’s failure to address overpopulation from becoming the whole world’s failure. Economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding (author of "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth"), in another of his insightful essays, wrote that what really disturbed him was the possibility of converting the world from a place of many experiments into one giant, global experiment where failure somewhere would become failure everywhere.

¹⁶⁶ Ben Zuckerman. 1999. E-mail to the authors, May 26.

¹⁶⁷ Carl Pope. 1999. "Corporate Crime: The consequences of letting polluters police themselves." Sierra, July/August.

¹⁶⁸ From "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth; Program 1: The Hero’s Adventure." 1988. Mystic Fire Viceo, Inc./Parabola Magazine.

¹⁶⁹ See, for example: Jonathan Schell. 1982. The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf) as well as many articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

¹⁷⁰ Michael Hanauer. 1999. "Why Domestic Environmental Organizations Won’t Visibly Advocate Domestic Population Stabilization." Draft unpublished manuscript.

¹⁷¹ Article 13 states: "1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. 2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country." Article 14 reads in part: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available on the Internet website of the Geneva-based United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm.

¹⁷² One of them, Cathi Tactaquin, was the Executive Director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Another, Santos Gomez, was a board member of the Political Ecology Group, which vigorously attacked any and all organizations promoting U.S. population stabilization as "hate" groups. Still another, Karen Kalla, the Club’s former population staff person, stated at a 1997 Population Committee meeting in Colorado that it was her personal belief that the U.S. should not adopt a national population policy (Fred Elbel. 1998. "Open Letter to Sierra Club Board of Directors." Focus. Vol. 8, No. 1).

¹⁷³ The animus of many of these individuals to the population stabilization message is revealed by the following anecdote from the July 1997 Population Committee meeting in Boulder, Colo.: "Dinner Saturday night was held to honor world-renowned scientist and environmentalist, Dr. Al Bartlett, who organized committee use of University of Colorado facilities over the weekend. Prof. Bartlett had offered to present his famous after-dinner talk on the consequences of exponential growth. Over half the Committee boycotted the dinner with the result that the talk was never presented to the Committee (Fred Elbel. 1998. "Open Letter to Sierra Club Board of Directors." Focus. Vol. 8, No. 1). [This lecture — "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis" — has been presented over 1,100 times to audiences in 49 states, several countries, and the U.S. Congress.]

¹⁷⁴ Supra, note 102.

¹⁷⁵ Fred Elbel. 1999. E-mail to authors. May 14. Elbel, a long-time Sierra member and population activist, observes that human rights and social justice activists tend, 1) not to consider the long-term consequences of present actions, 2) not to be well-versed in general systems thinking, and 3) not to be "numerate" (able to grasp the significance of numbers). Like most members of society at large, they do not understand the treacherous nature of exponential growth. In a word, they tend to lack "ecolacy," a term coined in 1970 by human ecologist Garrett Hardin to describe the filter through which ecologists view, understand, and predict natural phenomena. As Hardin put it: "The key question of ecolate analysis is this: ‘And then what?’" (Garrett Hardin. 1985. Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent. New York: Viking).

¹⁷⁶ Supra, note 170.

¹⁷⁷ Charles Frankel. 1955. The Case for Modern Man. New York: Harper.

¹⁷⁸ Alan Kuper. 1999. E-mail to list. May 12.

¹⁷⁹ Roy Beck. 1997. "Sorting Through Humanitarian Clashes in Immigration Policy." Paper presented at the Annual National Conference on Applied Ethics at California State University at Long Beach.

¹⁸⁰ For more detailed descriptions and critiques of corporate globalism, see: Sir James Goldsmith. 1995. "Global Free Trade and GATT." Focus, Vol. 5, No. 1.; Excerpted from his book Le Piege. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network; Herman E. Daly. 1995. "Against Free Trade and Economic Orthodoxy." The Oxford International Review, summer; Herman E. Daly. 1999. "Globalism, Internationalism, and National Defense." Focus, Vol. 9, No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network; and David Korten. 1995. When Corporations Rule the World. West Hartford, Conn., and San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers & Kumarian Press.

¹⁸¹ Peter Beinart. 1998. "Greens Flip over Turtles." Time. April 27.

¹⁸² John Heilemann. 1996. "Do You Know the Way to Ban Jose?" Wired. August; John J. Miller. 1998. "The Politics of Permanent Immigration." Reason. October; numerous articles in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times from 1996 to 1998 described the potent efforts of groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Information Technology Association of America to maintain or even increase immigration levels.

¹⁸³ Ibid.

¹⁸⁴ Supra, note 132.

¹⁸⁵ Supra, note 141.

¹⁸⁶ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 1999a. Undated direct mail letter for NRDC.

¹⁸⁷ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 1999b. Undated direct mail letter for NRDC.

¹⁸⁸ John H. Adams. 1999. Undated direct mail letter for NRDC.

¹⁸⁹ Ibid.

¹⁹⁰ In a 1998 post to the on-line Sierra Club population forum, Executive Director Carl Pope cited a hypothetical example of 100,000 peasants moving from the Guatemalan highlands to the Peten rainforest (also in Guatelmala) versus their moving to Los Angeles, and concluded that the former was worse for the global environment. Similarly, environmental filmmaker and author Michael Tobias (World War III: Population and the Biosphere at the Millennium. 1993. Santa Fe: Bear & Co.), when questioned after a 1994 Los Angeles speech on overpopulation, said he would favor relocating people from rapidly-growing tropical countries with high and threatened biodiversity to countries like the United States with less biodiversity, although he admitted this notion was "quirky." (Aside from political considerations, it is problematic for two reasons: 1) because the consumption of a number of products ranging from tropical hardwoods to hamburgers in the rich countries contributes to the demise of biodiversity in the tropics, and with larger populations the rich countries will consume more; and 2) because alleviating population pressures through such "safety-valve" schemes would only act as a temporary expedient unless the more fundamental problem of growth was also addressed. Airlifting colonizers from the Peten to Los Angeles would simply open up that frontier to still more migrants from the rapidly growing Guatemalan highlands unless, simultaneously, birth rates there were reduced and economic opportunities increased.)

¹⁹¹ Todd Lewan. 1999. "Guarding the Frigid, Perilous Bering Sea." Daytona Beach Sunday News-Journal, May 2.

¹⁹² Ben Zuckerman estimates that California would have to reach a population of perhaps one billion, that is, almost four times the present population of the entire U.S. and over 30 times the current state population — or five times the current density of our most densely-populated state (New Jersey) — before it loses its allure to prospective migrants from the more desperate reaches of the third world. Of course, the impacts of such an increase on the environment and quality of life are so staggering as to be almost unimaginable. But surely they would render the state virtually unrecognizable — much of it an environmental wasteland — with what is left of nature confined to postage-stamp sized, weed-infested plots.

¹⁹³ ZPG Reporter, February, 1998.

¹⁹⁴ William Branigin. 1998. "Sierra Club Votes for Neutrality on Immigration: Population Issue ‘Intensely Debated.’" The Washington Post. April 26; John H. Cushman, Jr. 1998. "Sierra Club Rejects Move to Oppose Immigration." The New York Times. April 26; election results provided by Marvin Baker, Acting Chief Inspector of Election for the Inspectors, and posted on Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS) website on April 24, 1998. http://www.sni.net/ecofuture/susps/info/votes_980425.html.

¹⁹⁵ Daniel Quinn and Alan D. Thornhill. 1998. "Food Production and Population Growth." Video documentary supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Theology. Houston: New Tribal Ventures.

¹⁹⁶ George F. Kennan. 1993. Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton.

¹⁹⁷ Roy Beck. 1994. Re-Charting America’s Future. Petoskey, MI: Social Contract Press.

¹⁹⁸ U.S. Census Bureau. 1998. "Foreign-Born Population in the United States: March 1997 (update)," Current Population Reports, P20-507. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

¹⁹⁹ U.S. Census Bureau. 1997. "Foreign-Born Population: 1996." Current Population Reports, P20-494. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

²⁰⁰ Michael A. Fletcher and Ceci Connolly. 1999. "Gore Chases Hispanic Vote On Bush Turf." The Washington Post. July 29, p. 1, 12. "The battle for the Latino vote is crucial to both parties because Latinos have been showing signs of coalescing into a political force. Jolted by a wave of GOP-led proposals across the country to limit immigration, impose English-only provisions, and deny social service benefits to illegal immigrants, the Latino electorate grew by 29 percent between 1992 and 1996." The same article noted that Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain of Arizona, addressing a conference of Hispanic leaders, decried the "divisive" efforts to eliminate bilingual education.

²⁰¹ Ronald Brownstein. 1999. "Latino Clout, Improved Economy Soften GOP Stance on Immigration." Los Angeles Times. July 19, A5.

²⁰² John H. Cushman, Jr. 1998. "An Uncomfortable Debate Fuels a Sierra Club Election." The New York Times, April 5.

²⁰³ Diana Hull. 1999. "Cry, the Overcrowded County: A Post-Earth Day Requiem." The Social Contract, Summer.

²⁰⁴ In a February 1996 Roper poll, 73 percent of blacks and 52 percent of Hispanics favored reducing immigration to 300,000 or fewer annually. The 1993 Latino National Political Survey, largest ever done of this ethnic group in the United States, found that 7 in 10 respondents thought there were too many immigrants (higher than the percentage of non-Hispanic whites or "Anglos" who did). A Hispanic USA Research Group poll (1993) found that three-quarters of Hispanics believed fewer immigrants should be admitted.

²⁰⁵ Ben Zuckerman. 1998. "Will the Sierra Club Be Hurt If the Ballot Question Passes?" Supra, note 121.

²⁰⁶ Supra, note 40.

²⁰⁷ Santos Gomez. 1997. Op-ed in San Francisco Chronicle. November 17.

²⁰⁸ Home Builders Association of Northern California. 1998. "Behind the Sierra Club Vote on Curbing Immigration: Do environmentalists risk alienating the fastest-growing ethnic group in California?" HBA News, Vol. 21, No. 1, February.

²⁰⁹ Ben Zuckerman. 1998. "Cut Immigration, Save the Environment." Los Angeles Times, March 15.

²¹⁰ Bill Isbister. 1998. "McEarth Day 98: Corporate Snowjob!" News release circulated by the grassroots group "Too Many People...Too Little Earth!"

²¹¹ Supra, note 34.

²¹² Jamie Rappaport Clark and John Rogers. 1997. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: 1997. Strategic Plan, September 30, 1997 – September 30, 2002. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. p. 1. Clark and Rogers are the Director and Assistant Director of this federal agency, respectively.

²¹³ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. undated. DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge Concept Plan. p. 17.

²¹⁴ Ibid.

²¹⁵ One anthology edited by Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley was entitled The Subversive Science: Toward an Ecology of Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1969). The journal Bioscience published an influential essay by Paul Sears entitled "Ecology – A Subversive Subject," (14(7):11, 1964).

²¹⁶ Lindsey Grant. 1994. "The Timid Crusade." NPG Forum Series. Washington, D.C.: Negative Population Growth.

²¹⁷ John Bermingham. 1998. Personal communication.

²¹⁸ Supra, note 62.

²¹⁹ Garrett Hardin. 1993. Living Within Limits. New York: Oxford University Press.

²²⁰ Supra, note 210.

²²¹ Alan Kuper. 1998. Personal communication based on meeting with Sierra Club executive director.

²²² Ibid.

²²³ William E. Murray. 1998. E-mail to Roy Beck. December 8.

²²⁴ Howard Gleckman. 1998. "A Rich Stew in the Melting Pot." Business Week, August 31.

²²⁵ Supra, note 182; Miller article.

²²⁶ Martin Regalia. 1999. "Immigrants Wanted" (Letter to the Editor). The New York Times, April 8.

²²⁷ Dell Erickson. 1999. E-mail to the authors, June 1. Excerpts from a 1995 paper entitled "Social Security: The American Tragedy."

²²⁸ Nan Hildreth. 1998. Post to Sierra Club Population Forum <cons-spst-population@lists. sierraclub.org> June 17.

²²⁹ Dell Erickson. 1998. Post to Sierra Club Population Forum <cons-spst-population@lists. sierraclub.org> July 3.

²³⁰ David Simcox. 1998. "Social Security: The Ponzi Path to Dystopia." NPG Forum Series, October. Washington, D.C.: Negative Population Growth.

²³¹ Supra, note 208.

²³² Laurie Ann Mazur (ed.). 1994. Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

²³³ Mark Krikorian. 1999. Personal communication.