Center Paper 18, March 2001

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Let us look at the developments between 1970 and 1998 that led the leadership of environmental groups to abandon the issue of population stabilization.

Development 1: U.S. Fertility Dropped Below Replacement-Level Rate in 1972 
Development 2: Abortion and Contraceptive Politics Created Organized Opposition
Development 3: Emergence of Women’s Issues as Priority Concern of Population Groups
Development 4: Schism between the Conservationist and New-Left Roots of the Movement
Development 5: Immigration Became the Chief Cause of U.S. Growth

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

In 1972, the U.S. Total Fertility Rate fell below the 2.1 births per woman that marks the replacement- level fertility rate. By 1976, fertility had hit an all-time low of 1.7 and hovered just above that for years.

A common remembrance of aging population activists is their memory of the night in 1973 when TV broadcasters announced that the 1972 U.S. fertility rate had reached zero population growth. The American people apparently were profoundly confused by this announcement, with many believing the U.S. population problem had been solved. (In fact, because of what demographers call "population momentum," it takes a country up to 70 years after the replacement-level fertility rate is reached to actually stop growing. But by 1972, the fertility rate had indeed declined to a level low enough to eventually produce zero population growth, as long as immigration remained reasonably low.)

With zero population growth supposedly achieved (or at least approached), many people in the population movement may have felt their activism was no longer needed. Americans had reduced the size of the average family as far as was necessary. On average they were living up to the battle cry of "stop at two." Many activists shifted their former population energies into feminism, other aspects of conservation and environmentalism, or moved on to other pursuits altogether. "Full-Formula" environmentalism that dealt with both Individual Impact and Population Size factors shrank to a small core constituency as quickly as it had burst into a mass popular movement. The population committees of environmental groups lost popularity and significance or disbanded altogether.

The change to "half-Formula" (or "Individual Impact-only") environmentalism would have made sense if indeed the U.S. population no longer was growing, or if overall environmental quality goals had been achieved. Neither was the case in the 1970s, however.

The neglect of the population issue within organizations surely influenced new employees as they came on board during this period. Many of them probably never heard of the "full-Formula" environmental approach. They worked only on the Individual Impact side of the Formula. Many had little background in the natural sciences, resource conservation, or analytical/quantitative fields. To them, population advocacy may have looked like an external issue that could easily be left to external groups to handle.

Some population groups which had been reluctant to expand their worldwide focus to include the much-more-controversial domestic U.S. population issues may have felt they had been let off the hook by the U.S. fertility news. That left the work of keeping the flame of the movement alive to ZPG and to smaller environment-oriented population groups: Negative Population Growth and the Environmental Fund (now called Population-Environment Balance). ZPG lost a large part of its "Johnny-Carson-era" membership. Still, its leaders knew well that fertility could easily rise above replacement-level fertility again and that there was another source of population growth (immigration) in addition to fertility that also needed attention.

Fertility as a Racial Issue. Perhaps another factor was at work as well. The overwhelmingly non-Hispanic, white leadership of the environmental movement may have felt it was defensible to address population growth as long as the great bulk of this growth came from non-Hispanic whites, which it did during the Baby Boom. ("We have met the enemy, and he is us!" from the Walt Kelly Pogo cartoon was a favorite quote of population activists in this era.) But the situation changed dramatically after 1972. From that year forward, the fertility of non-Hispanic whites was below the replacement rate while that of black Americans and Latinos remained well above the replacement rate.⁴² To talk of fertility reductions after 1972 was to draw disproportionate attention to non-whites.

Certain ethnic minorities and their spokespersons — with vivid collective memories of disgraceful treatment at the hands of the white majority and acutely aware of their comparative powerlessness in American society — were deeply suspicious of possible hidden agendas in the population stabilization movement. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the Rockefeller Commission in 1971: "...[any] group that has been subjected to as much harassment as our community has is suspect of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or leveling off our population growth. Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce."⁴³ Dr. Eugene S. Callender, president of the New York Urban Coalition added: "Within this country, Blacks, Indians, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Orientals feel that such [population] control is solely to the advantage of the majority population. Minority groups at this point in history do not feel that they can afford to trust that the ‘nobler instincts’ of the white majority will prohibit the resurgence of subtle and overt forms of racism."⁴⁴ And Manuel Aragon, speaking in Spanish, declared to the Commission: "...what we must do is to encourage large Mexican American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed."⁴⁵

During the 26 years after 1972, the non-Hispanic white share of population growth declined significantly from the 1970 era.⁴⁶ Thus, by the 1990s, a majority of the nation’s growth stemmed from sources other than non-Hispanic whites (especially Latin American and Asian immigrants and their offspring). Environmentalist leaders — proud and protective of their claim to moral high ground — may have been reluctant to jeopardize this by venturing into the political minefield of the nation’s volatile racial/ethnic relations through appearing to point fingers at "outsiders," "others," or "people of color" as responsible for America’s ongoing problem with population growth.

Yet by opting out of this risk, environmentalists effectively abandoned the American environment to the mercy of endless population growth — which will have multiple, adverse, and growing environmental impacts regardless of its source. William Hollingsworth’s book Ending the Explosion contains a hypothetical debate in the U.S. Senate on the global population growth issue that is also germane to U.S. domestic population growth:

Senator See now breaks her silence. "....I can easily see why you object to ‘the population explosion’: the populations that are still growing so fast are those of people of color. What some of your ilk call ‘zero population growth’ is but one more example of Western white racism and neocolonialism."

An upset Senator Sane responds. "Senator See, the sense and sanity I value are woven from all colors. The population explosion would be no less alarming to me were it wholly composed of folks with white skin and pink elbows. But I fear there is no way I can convince you of that, given my race’s shameful record of racism. Perhaps we whites of the North countries should say nothing about population growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America."

"But," begins Senator Straight, "such a cowardly silence would place not seeming to be racist ahead of not being racist. One of the most condescending things, and thus one of the most racist things, that can be done to the nations of the South is this: ask of them something less than their critical share of responsibility for building a humane global future."⁴⁷

Development 2
Abortion and Contraceptive Politics Created Organized Opposition

In June of 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved oral contraceptives for sale. By the late 1960s, the Vatican and American Catholic leadership were engaged in a major counterattack to the growing use of contraceptives in the United States. They focused a considerable amount of their ire on groups advocating population control. Their focus made a certain sense from their point of view. Most population and environmental groups which called for stabilization also made explicit calls, not for abstinence or celibacy, but rather for more availability of reliable, safe contraceptives and sex education. Many of them also called for the legalization of abortion.

Then in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion. That set off a much more intense campaign by the Catholic Church — and increasingly by conservative Protestants — against the whole of the population movement.

Abortion had been something of a minor issue within the population stabilization movement but was included because of the thought that fertility might not be brought to replacement level without the availability of abortion. As it turned out, legalized abortion was not a necessary component to reach replacement-level fertility. America reached its stabilization fertility goal the year before the Supreme Court legalized abortion.

But to the Catholic hierarchy and the pro-life movement, the legalized abortion and population stabilization causes have been inextricably linked. In the 1990s, it was still difficult for a pro-stabilization person or group to get a hearing among many Catholic and pro-life groups without being automatically considered an abortion apologist.

A number of leaders of philanthropic foundations and politicians involved with population efforts in the 1970s have said that active measures by Catholic bishops and the Vatican were the greatest barrier to moving population measures and in setting a national population policy. Congressman James Scheuer was a member of the 1972 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. In 1992, he wrote that "the Vatican and others blocked any reasonable discussion of population problems."⁴⁸ This opposition applied both nationally and internationally. In a 1993 interview, Milton P. Siegel, Assistant Director General of the World Health Organization from 1946 to 1970, indicated that, "one way or another, sometimes surreptitiously, the Catholic church used its influence to defeat, if you will, any movement toward family planning or birth control."⁴⁹

As population activists reported on the Catholic activism and criticized it, the population movement began to be tarred as anti-Catholic. Environmental groups seeking membership, funds, and support from a wide spectrum of Americans had good reason to stay out of population issues altogether, rather than risk offending their own current and potential members who also were members of the largest religious denomination in America. Environmental groups with Catholic board members were known to use them as reasons for not being more involved in population issues.

Roman Catholic opposition, both from the Vatican itself and from American Catholics, apparently played a key role in pressuring government policy-makers as well. On May 5, 1972, gearing up for his re-election campaign, President Nixon publicly disavowed the recommendations of his own Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, which U.S. Catholic bishops had blasted for its permissive attitude toward contraception and abortion.⁵⁰ Evidently still concerned about overpopulation, however, Nixon ordered a study in April 1974 of the national security implications of population growth.⁵¹ When released in 1975, President Gerald Ford endorsed the findings of National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200). The report strongly stated that exploding populations in the third world would threaten the security of the United States. These threats would come from the destabilization of those countries’ economic, political, and ecological systems. Besides recommending helping those nations curb their population growth, NSSM 200 called on the U.S. to provide world leadership in population control by seeking to attain stabilization of its own population by the year 2000.⁵²

Although President Ford endorsed the NSSM 200, nothing ever came of it. Historians should carefully sort through the evidence that NSSM 200 was never implemented because of intense pressure applied by the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Bishops (and that U.S. government officials of Roman Catholic background were particularly susceptible to such pressure). "American policy [toward support of international family planning programs] was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy," President Reagan’s ambassador to the Vatican told Time magazine.⁵³ How much pressure was actually exerted is an important question to resolve. With the U.S. fertility rate at such a low level anyway, it was easier for government officials to ignore the recommendations of NSSM 200, the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, the Global 2000 Report to the President, and numerous scientists and population activists that the United States move forthwith to stabilize its population.

Active efforts within Catholic circles arose to disprove that rising population size had anything to do with deterioration of natural or human environments or the ability of poor countries with rapidly-growing populations to develop economically.⁵⁴ The worldwide — as opposed to the U.S. — population stabilization movement now had major organized opposition that was gladly encouraged and touted by economic and class interests which saw their wealth and power threatened by a slowing of population growth. This counter-movement had its intellectual underpinnings as well. Certain influential writers, scholars, and well-endowed think-tanks actually went as far as arguing not just that population growth was benign, but that it was good, even essential to continued economic and technological progress.⁵⁵ The best-known advocate of the "growth is good" school was the late Julian L. Simon, who argued that the human mind was "the ultimate resource," and that the more of those minds there were, the more collective human ingenuity there would be to solve problems, create new resources, and forge a better future.⁵⁶ Simon’s best known and most criticized claim was that "we have in our hands now — actually in our libraries — the technology to feed, clothe and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years."⁵⁷

Historians, however, will want to be careful in ascribing to the whole of the Catholic Church aggressive support for never-ending population growth. The voices from within the hierarchy have been decidedly mixed. The U.S. Catholic bishops in 1991 spoke glowingly of education, good nutrition, and health care for women and children that, "promise to improve family welfare and contribute to stabilizing population....Even though it is possible to feed a growing population, the ecological costs of doing so ought to be taken into account."⁵⁸ And just before the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the Italian Bishops’ Conference released a study by the Papal Academy of Science entitled "Too Many Births?" It argued that birth control is necessary, "to prevent the emergence of insoluble problems." It suggested that the birth rate must not "notably exceed the level of two children per couple."⁵⁹
 

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

Another reason environmental groups did not fully engage U.S. population issues in the 1980s and 1990s was that the groups that specialized in population issues drifted away from population stabilization and environmental protection as primary reasons for being. Those groups had played key roles in the 1970 era by prodding the environmental groups to join them and by doing the bulk of the research that was used by the environmentalists. Except for the small groups Negative Population Growth, Population Environment Balance, and Carrying Capacity Network (founded in 1989), however, that role ended by the 1990s.

By the 1990s, for example, Planned Parenthood no longer played a significant role in advocating for U.S. population stabilization to protect the environment. Its focus had narrowed to making sure that women had full access to the whole range of options concerning fertility and births. That had always been a primary mission of Planned Parenthood, but one of the major purposes of empowering women had once been to reduce U.S. population growth.

Another prime example was Zero Population Growth, which did not totally abandon interest in population size, but nevertheless excised "stabilization" from its mission for the United States in the 1990s, as it promoted an agenda focused on women’s issues and international access to birth control.

To understand these shifts, historians will need to look at the differing roots of the 1970-era population movement. While one root included people with high environmental consciousness, several roots did not. Many of the early population leaders were primarily concerned about health issues, others about development issues. Still others were predecessors of the modern feminist movement. The environmentalist angle tended to be pushed out front during the late 1960s as environmentalism reached mass popularity. But as environmentalists abandoned population issues in the 1970s, the population groups more and more de-emphasized their environmental motives as they increased their attention to women’s issues. By the 1990s, some of the groups actually opposed helping the environment through population stabilization or reduction efforts. Christian Science Monitor correspondent George Moffett observed: "Women’s groups complain that overstating the consequences of rapid population growth has created a crisis atmosphere in some countries, which has led to human rights violations in the name of controlling fertility."⁶⁰

For population groups to focus on women’s empowerment did not necessarily work against stabilization efforts. But there were already women’s emphasis groups, and the shift of focus of population groups left the country with virtually no major voices explicitly calling for stabilization.

The most striking evidence of population groups’ declining emphasis on numerical goals occurred at the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt. As Catholic lay theologian George Wiegel observed, "Over the long haul...the most significant development at the Cairo Conference may have been a shift in controlling paradigms: from ‘population control’ to ‘the empowerment of women.’"⁶¹ Previous U.N. population conferences in 1974 and 1984, although not without controversy, had focused on population growth itself and the need and means to tame it. At Cairo, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from the United States, dominated by feminists like former New York congresswoman Bella Abzug, were part of a lobby that prevented the Cairo conference from setting any numerical targets or even stating that population growth should be stopped.⁶² One NGO, called the International Women’s Health Coalition, circulated a declaration at Cairo stating that a woman had the absolute right to have the number of children she wanted.⁶³ "The Cairo Programme contains hundreds of recommendations about women’s rights and other social issues but almost none about population," wrote Lindsey Grant, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Population Affairs.⁶⁴

The conferees thus gave short shrift to the concerns of eminent scientists and environmentalists, like Nobel Prize laureate and MIT physics professor Henry W. Kendall, the legendary oceanographer and documentary filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Academy, and the more than 1,600 prominent scientists who signed the "World Scientists Warning to Humanity." All of them had advised on the urgency of stopping population growth. Yet these appeals fell largely on deaf ears. One observer identified five interest groups represented at Cairo: the population concerned community, the market preference community, the distribution community, the women’s initiatives community, and the Vatican. Of these, only one (the population concerned community) even wanted to draw attention to the problems of population growth.⁶⁵

Now centered in a feminist rather than environmental mission, many population, family planning, and women’s groups would support no talk of stopping growth or reducing average family size because that implied restrictions on what they considered a universal right of women to choose their number of children entirely free of the merest hint of official or informal pressure. Women’s-issues advocates ensured that the results of the conference were primarily about the empowerment and well-being of women, not the size of populations around the world. The stance was this: If there was a problem with population size or growth rates, it would be resolved by giving women more education, health care, legal rights, employment opportunities and readier access to contraceptives. Women should be left alone to decide on the size of their families, without any national or international direction as to what size would be best for society.

Liberty or Limits? Lindsey Grant has observed the transformation of population groups for decades. He says the Cairo fight exposed an old fault line between those primarily interested in making contraceptives available to help people limit their contribution to population growth and those wanting to make them available to give women more liberty and power. The two goals are not mutually exclusive. As homemakers and housewives, women in particular bear the brunt of large families.⁶⁶ Furthermore, commentators add, reducing population growth nearly always should improve the quality of life for society as a whole by freeing up scarce time, labor, capital, and resources. The surplus can then be re-directed into capital formation, education, resource conservation, infrastructure, and the like.⁶⁷ Stabilization advocates often cite the fact that no nation has moved out of its poverty without many years of declining population growth.⁶⁸ Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Singapore, and China are prime examples. On the other side, empowering women (especially through enhanced economic opportunities) usually helps them avoid unwanted pregnancies and to desire smaller families.⁶⁹ Experience shows, however, that without strong societal education and encouragement, the desired smaller families are often more than two children — sometimes substantially more — in which case population growth does not cease. Stabilization advocates at Cairo demanded that women’s empowerment include strong recommendations that they limit their family size to two children.

The "liberty" side of the movement triumphed over the "limits" advocates, Grant concluded. In the final international agreement for action, nowhere was it said that population growth should stop. Nowhere were growing countries urged to give a higher priority to slowing or stopping population growth. Governmental incentives for reducing fertility were rejected as too coercive toward women.⁷⁰ While the Vatican received the most media publicity for its efforts to keep the Cairo conference from establishing population goals, the feminist groups ended up working hand-in-glove with the Vatican to ensure that result.⁷¹ The feminist groups defeated the Vatican, however, on the issue of making contraceptives more widely available. Even then, they changed funding recommendations to put less emphasis on contraceptives than had been requested by international experts. Those experts had told the conference that $17 billion a year was needed just to provide contraceptives to more than 100 million women who wanted them but could not afford them. The final Cairo decision was to put only $6 billion of that into contraceptives and the rest into other health projects.⁷² An Indonesian delegate summarized the shift in dominant perspectives: "We have stopped calling women the receptors of contraceptives. We now call them agents of change."⁷³

Perhaps the clearest sign that many population groups had divorced themselves from the environmental movement was that the long international document from Cairo made no mention of the connections between population growth and the environmental ills of countries with growing populations: deforestation, land degradation, flooding, desertification, wild species decline and extinction, water scarcity and pollution, horrendous urban air quality, and chaotic urban growth, among others.

While many in the non-profit population movement effectively de-linked themselves from environmental concerns, many environmental groups adopted those same de-linked population goals. By way of example, the population program at one of the nation’s largest environmental groups — the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) — became focused largely on promoting the Cairo action plan of advancing women’s rights rather than stopping growth for environmental reasons. An interview with NWF staff convinced one observer that female empowerment had become an end unto itself rather than a means to reduced family size, population stability, and environmental conservation — green images and verbiage on the NWF population program’s Internet web page notwithstanding.⁷⁴

Substituting the Means for the End. What is the problem with this, one might ask, if empowerment of women does in fact lead to reduced fertility? There are three problems with substituting the means for the end on this issue. One is that, given the reality of scarce financial resources, diverting already inadequate funds from contraceptives and into other women’s issues means fewer dollars for birth control in a world where more than 100 million women (according the U.N.’s World Fertility Survey) say they would like to stop having more children but lack the means. Worldwide, 30 years after international family planning programs were launched, 40 percent of married women still do not use contraceptives.⁷⁵ The Washington-based Population Institute stresses that: "Fertility declines in all regions of the world once again prove that economic prosperity is not an essential precursor to population stabilization. Most of the countries that have achieved replacement-level or near-replacement-level fertility in the recent past have been less developed ones. The common denominator among them is increased awareness and use of contraception."76

Second, frequent births, large families, and rapid population growth themselves hinder the emancipation of women toward educational and employment opportunities. By the time women have achieved a social status acceptable to their advocates, populations may well have doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Moreover, as anthropologist Virginia Abernethy points out, higher educational attainment (to cite one favored goal) is not a guarantee of reduced fertility. "In some parts of Africa, even highly educated women who are unemployed or marginally employed continue to bear many children," she writes.⁷⁷ Abernethy also marshals compelling evidence questioning the comfortable assumptions of the popular "benign demographic transition" theory that has dominated professional demography and international development assistance efforts for decades. This theory holds that birth rates will come down of their own accord as societies develop. "Development is the best contraceptive," went the mantra at the first U.N. conference on population in Bucharest in 1974. Abernethy argues that signs of opportunity or prosperity — such as better child survival, land redistribution programs, political revolutions, indiscriminate foreign aid, opportunities to emigrate, and income increases — instead of reducing fertility, actually tend to raise it. America’s own baby boom during the booming post-World War II period is one prominent example of this phenomenon.

A third problem, as Lindsey Grant comments, is that "there is no justification for the assumption that free choice will, unguided, lead to the socially desirable level of fertility [i.e. replacement level or below]. It is myth masquerading as truth."78 Even though fertility in developing nations has been cut in half over the last three years, it still averages 3 children per female,79 50 percent above replacement level, and in some countries the decline may have "stalled." The preferred number of children in most developing regions, especially Africa, far exceeds the replacement level. Given the great variety of cultures in the world, it is simply unrealistic to assume that women everywhere will choose to follow the fertility patterns of European, North American, and some Asian women.

Zero Population Growth. This shift away from an overriding concern with population and environmental limits may be seen most importantly in the group Zero Population Growth (ZPG). In 1968, the Sierra Club published Paul Ehrlich’s sensational book The Population Bomb, which warned tersely of imminent famine and ecological catastrophe unless population growth was halted around the world. Population stabilization was ignited into a national movement and helped awaken most environmental groups and activists to the threat of unchecked population growth. Zero Population Growth was founded that same year to take advantage of the widespread publicity the book generated. Professor Ehrlich appeared on Johnny Carson’s show many times. Each time he appeared, ZPG got phone calls or letters from twenty to thirty thousand people.⁸⁰

Hundreds of ZPG chapters sprang up overnight. ZPG’s first leaders were described as all being pro-environmentalist, pro-choice, and pro-family planning. In the beginning, ZPG had a motto, "Zero Population Growth is our name and our mission." There were several large organizations dealing with population growth in other countries. But ZPG’s primary mission was explicitly to stabilize the U.S. population, according to members of the early ZPG boards of directors.⁸¹ That remained the stated mission through the 1980s.

In the 1970s, ZPG’s population policy recommendations covered every contribution to U.S. population growth. It included stands on contraceptives, sex education for teenagers, equality for women, abortion, opposition to illegal immigration, and proposals to reduce legal immigration from about 400,000 a year to 150,000 a year by 1985 in order to reach zero population growth by 2008.⁸²

ZPG started the modern immigration-reduction movement in the 1970s. After American fertility fell below replacement level, the ZPG board recognized that immigration was rising rapidly and would soon negate all the benefits of lower fertility. Even though immigration seemed separate from the family planning issues that had dominated precursor population organizations, ZPG tackled it squarely because it related to the issue of U.S. population stabilization, which was deemed essential to the health of the American environment. By the late 1970s, the ZPG leaders who were the most interested in immigration issues spun off a new organization called the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Among them was John Tanton, who had also been a member of the Sierra Club’s National Population Committee. Their idea was that FAIR would take no stand on abortion and other controversial family planning issues in order to attract a wider constituency which would work for immigration reform not only for environmental reasons, but for economic relief for the working poor and taxpayers, for social cohesion, and for national security.

The ZPG leaders who left the ZPG board for FAIR also happened to be most of the people with the greatest interest in population as an environmental issue. That meant that those remaining on the board were more inclined toward the type of population movement that was rooted in family planning and women’s issues. While ZPG continued to have policies on U.S. stabilization and the environment — and produce some useful educational materials — these policies and programs got less and less staff and board attention as the 1980s progressed. New staff were hired less on the basis of their environmental expertise and commitment and more because of their commitment to women’s issues. One former board member and local ZPG activist recalled that board members and key staff "have been close to women’s groups for some time, and want to please them."⁸³

By 1996, ZPG was focused overwhelmingly on global population issues from the women’s empowerment perspective. A secondary focus was excessive consumption by Americans.⁸⁴ The board removed the word "stabilize" from much of its literature and its Mission Statement. On October 25, 1997, the ZPG board substituted "slowing" for "stopping" so that it then advanced a goal of merely "slowing" U.S. and world population growth. ZPG’s president Judith Jacobsen wrote in the newsletter ZPG Reporter that the reason ZPG didn’t support creating U.S. policies to reduce domestic population growth was that population problems in third world countries needed to be resolved first. She said that the "Cairo Conference taught us that changing the conditions of women’s lives is the most powerful answer" for population problems. She then gave a long list of ZPG’s essential commitments, none of which were population stabilization or environmental protection.⁸⁵

Thus, just before its 30th anniversary, ZPG had severed its goals from its name and its founding mission — zero population growth. Also abandoned as a central concern was the protection of the American environment which had been at the heart of ZPG’s founding. ZPG had not necessarily turned anti-environment or anti-stabilization, but it had evolved into an organization with different priorities. For many of those associated with the "old ZPG," like former president Judy Kunofsky, former board member Joyce Tarnow, and former member of its citizen’s advisory board Albert A. Bartlett, this change was deeply disappointing.⁸⁶

In a April 22, 1997 letter to the ZPG board (to which she never received a reply), Tarnow called the group’s position on legal immigration levels "terribly inadequate" and urged it to engage in a dialogue with immigration reform organizations. The prospects for this looked dim, however, in view of Executive Director Peter Kostmayer’s recent comments to Floridians that "disparaged the immigration reform movement as basically xenophobic."⁸⁷ Later that year, after 27 years of dedicated membership and service, Tarnow resigned from ZPG, because of its "unwillingness to take a rational position on legal immigration reform." She commented with regret that "The actions of this Board, its officers and executive director, have confirmed for me that the purpose of the organization has been abandoned for reasons unknown."⁸⁸ ZPG board chair Judith Jacobsen responded that:

Feelings run high and intense on the immigration issue, on all sides. The majority of the ZPG board feels that its position is a careful balance among demographic needs, moral constraints, and political realities. We have spent a great deal of time working it out, most recently in a nine-hour discussion at our October meeting. I’m sorry that you don’t share this position.⁸⁹

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

Historians are likely to find other important clues to the environmental movement’s shift by studying the roots of the modern environmental movement. Three of the roots are of special interest here.

Two of the roots go back a century: (1) The wilderness preservation movement was exemplified by John Muir, the National Parks, and later, and National Wilderness Areas. (2) The resource conservation movement was exemplified by President Theodore Roosevelt, his chief forester Gifford Pinchot, and the National Forests.⁹⁰

The preservationists focused on a love of the outdoors and on preservation of natural areas and wildlife for their own intrinsic value as well as for the enjoyment and spiritual nourishment of present and future generations.⁹¹ They included such well-established, non-profit organizations as the Audubon Society, Izaak Walton League, Wilderness Society, and Sierra Club.

The conservationists focused on the prudent stewardship and sustainable utilization of natural resources like timber, water, soils, and minerals, in pursuit of the "greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time," in Pinchot’s memorable phrase.⁹² The conservation movement gave birth to such professions as forestry, agronomy, and game (wildlife) and fisheries management. It was represented by such federal government agencies as the U.S. Forest Service, Soil Conservation Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, and U.S. Geological Service and by state-level counterparts in all fifty states.

Although conservationists and preservationists have often been at bitter odds since the divisive, decade-long struggle over whether to dam Hetch-Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park (which destroyed the friendship of Muir and Pinchot), there is in fact considerable common ground between the goals and leading proponents of the American preservationist and conservationist movements. Aldo Leopold — the founder of modern game management, co-founder of the Wilderness Society, and author of the conservation classic A Sand County Almanac⁹³ — straddled both camps. So did Robert Marshall, chief of recreation for the U.S. Forest Service in the 1930s and a Wilderness Society co-founder as well.

A third root of the modern environmental movement is much younger. It was an outgrowth of what was called New-Left politics with a strong strain of socialism, as espoused by its guru of the 1970 era, Barry Commoner. This root was given its strongest impetus with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by naturalist Rachel Carson.⁹⁴ Although Carson was deeply concerned about the unforeseen effects of pesticides and other man-made poisons being released indiscriminately into the natural environment, this third root of modern environmentalism came to focus more on urban and health issues such as air, water, and toxic contamination, as they affected the human environment. Commoner, in fact, criticized conservationists for putting wildlife ahead of human health. As journalist Mark Dowie writes: "The central concern of the new movement is human health. Its adherents consider wilderness preservation and environmental aesthetics worthy but overemphasized values. They are often derided by anti-toxic activists as bourgeois obsessions."⁹⁵ A staffer for a regional environmental group working with low-income Hispanic residents of New Mexico to protect their groundwater and drinking wells from industrial contamination startled one conservationist by ridiculing the priorities of those working to protect wildlife in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.⁹⁶

Having much in common with the emerging Green parties of Europe (social justice, peace, and ecology), the new "greens" of America joined with the wilderness preservationists and resource conservationists as the modern environmental movement was born in the 1960s. But the New Left greens held opposite views on population from those of most preservationists and conservationists. In his influential 1971 book The Closing Circle and elsewhere, Barry Commoner minimized the role of population as a cause of environmental problems. Commoner said the problems attributed to population growth were actually caused by unfair distribution of resources and by profitable technologies. Environmental degradation could be rectified by changing economic systems.⁹⁷

Like free-market libertarians on the right, and like Marxist theoreticians on the left all over the world, the New Left greens believed that population problems could be solved by choosing the correct economic system. They saw few or no limits to growth, believed excessive consumption (on the part of the rich) rather than excessive population was at the root of environmental degradation, and often decried a concern about overpopulation as "blaming the victims of oppression," at best, or thinly disguised racism at worst.⁹⁸ Left-wing environmentalist and newspaper columnist Alexander Cockburn compared the 1998 Sierra Club referendum on U.S. population stabilization to a Ku Klux Klan rally on the op-ed page of the largest newspaper on the West Coast — concluding that the Sierra vote was the "much more sinister and dangerous..." of the two.⁹⁹

Conservationists and preservationists, in contrast, had always been concerned about some aspects of population growth. As far back as 1939, Wilderness Society co-founder Robert Marshall opposed a plan (never implemented) to settle thousands of European Jewish refugees in Alaska — in spite of the fact that he himself was Jewish — because that federally-sponsored population growth in the country’s last, vast wilderness area "would diminish the opportunity for individualism and self-sufficiency that still flourished in the isolated, unmapped expanse of the north."¹⁰⁰ Conservationists and preservationists became especially alarmed by the Baby Boom impact on the environment. Their decades of experience watching wilderness and other habitats disappear under the constant growth of U.S. population led large numbers of them to confront that growth boldly and directly by the late 1960s. Wilderness advocate and popular Southwestern author Edward Abbey spoke for many when he said that "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."¹⁰¹

It appears that the New Left greens tried to keep population issues off the Earth Day 1970 agenda. They lost. Conservationists and preservationists succeeded in retaining their fundamental tenet that there could be no permanent environmental preservation without limiting human numbers. The college students and young adults who were rushing into the movement at the time may have been more temperamentally inclined toward the anti-war, anti-establishment New Left greens, but the young new environmentalists — armed with millions of dog-eared copies of The Population Bomb — seemed to overwhelmingly accept the old-line conservationists’ assessment of population. Most of the new more-liberal environmental groups that were formed at the time rejected the New Left’s opposition to fighting never-ending population growth and joined with the conservationists on their population stances.

But the New Left wing of environmentalism reversed its losses in the 1990s, according to Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, one of the most publicized and aggressive players in the first 20 years of U.S. environmentalism.¹⁰² He said the New Left wing — which he called "Progressive Cornucopians" — established its anti-stabilization view as the dominant one in the national staffs and boards of many groups, including the Sierra Club. Professor George Sessions, one of the founders of the deep ecology movement, commented on the influence of "postmodernists" (who reject the concept of "objective" truth and believe nature is but a "social construct"). He documented the hostility of postmodernists to much of the nature conservation and population stabilization causes.¹⁰³

On the winning side of the 1990s population policy conflict were people like Brad Erickson, coordinator of the Political Ecology Group, which played a key role in helping the Sierra Club board abandon its proscriptive population stabilization policy in 1996 and then fight off the pro-stabilization Sierra members in 1998.¹⁰⁴ Erickson said the fight was a replay of the one at Earth Day 1970, which the New Left greens lost.¹⁰⁵ He said the plan of the New Left greens in the 1960s had been to use the environmental issue as one of several they hoped would bloom into a full manifestation of a progressive movement far beyond the confines of traditional American economics and culture. But conservationists hi-jacked Earth Day, forced their population issues into it and the movement, and have limited the effectiveness of environmentalism ever since, Erickson explained. This view is shared by author Mark Dowie, who argues that population stabilization and immigration reform have retarded the transformation of conservation-and preservation-oriented environmentalism into a movement for "environmental justice."¹⁰⁶ By abandoning their limits-to-growth population ideology in the 1990s, the environmental groups could at last form coalitions with groups organized around a variety of non-environmental progressive causes, unencumbered by embarrassing population concerns.
 

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

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

Such a choice surely was a shock to many environmental leaders. Left to future historians is a determination of how many made the choice consciously and how many passively chose option "b" simply by refusing to choose.

When most Americans began to focus on U.S. growth in the 1960s, immigration was an almost insignificant fraction of growth. Over the previous half-century, annual legal immigration had averaged less than 200,000 — below the historical average of around 250,000 a year.¹⁰⁷

Modifications in immigration law in 1965 inadvertently started a chain migration through extended family members that began to snowball during the 1970s. Every aspect of population growth in the United States changed, according to voluminous government reports from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Census Bureau, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

At the very time that American fertility fell to a level that would have allowed population stabilization within a matter of decades, immigration levels were rising rapidly. Father Theodore Hesburgh, then president of Notre Dame University, was the chairman of a federal commission that studied immigration policies and issues in the late 1970s.¹⁰⁸ He warned that immigration numbers would continue to rise because of two powerful political interest groups: (1) conservative business interests which pushed for higher immigration to keep American wages down and the consumer market growing, and (2) liberal lobbies intent on increasing the voting power of various ethnic groups. Hesburgh’s conclusions have proved prescient. In the years since, Congress and successive administrations have repeatedly made decisions that caused annual immigration numbers to rise.

By the 1980s, annual immigration had more than doubled over traditional levels and was running above 500,000 a year. By the 1990s, annual average legal immigration had surpassed a million. And that didn’t even include a net addition of 200,000 to 500,000 illegal aliens each year. By the end of the 1990s, immigrants and their offspring were contributing nearly 70 percent of U.S. population growth.¹⁰⁹

Environmental advocates of U.S. population stabilization had to confront this scorecard:

In a developed country like the United States, where mortality rates are low and where they change very slowly, the Population Size factor of the environmental Foundational Formula is influenced overwhelmingly by three sub-factors: (a) fertility of natives; (b) number of immigrants; (c) fertility of immigrants. A country is on the road to stabilization if all three of those are at a replacement-level rate.

In the United States at the end of the 1990s, government statistics reveal, these were the trends:

(a) Native-born Total Fertility Rate: On target for U.S. stabilization. The native-born rate has been well below the replacement level of 2.1 babies per woman since 1972 and has held steady at about 1.9. If the rate continues this low, native-born fertility will stop adding any population growth once the children of Baby Boom women have gone through their child-bearing years.¹¹⁰

(b) Immigrants: On target for driving U.S. population growth for centuries.¹¹¹ The number of immigrants is more than 400 percent above replacement level. (Replacement level is currently estimated to be about 225,000 immigrants a year — equal to the number of emigrants — which is just slightly below the traditional U.S. average for in-migration.)

(c) Immigrant Total Fertility Rate: Far above replacement level and on target to produce ever-larger additions to population growth. Although immigrants are now about 10 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 30 percent of the fertility-related population growth.¹¹²

If immigration and immigrant fertility had been at replacement level rates since 1972 — as has native-born fertility — the United States would never have grown above 250 million.¹¹³ Instead, U.S. population passed 273 million before the turn of the century. And the Census Bureau projects that current immigration and immigrant fertility are powerful enough to contribute to the United States surpassing 400 million soon after the year 2050 — on the way toward a billion or more Americans.

Most environmental groups by the late 1970s simply turned away from these kind of stark trends and didn’t address them. But a few remained true to the "full-Formula" environmentalism of the 1970-era. They responded directly to the new challenge — at least in their official statements.

The most aggressive was Zero Population Growth before it shifted away from being primarily an environmental organization. A 1977 Washington Post story revealed the public way ZPG confronted immigration.¹¹⁴ Under the headline, "Anti-Immigration Campaign Begun," the story began: "The Zero Population Growth foundation is launching a nationwide campaign to generate public support for sharp curbs on both legal and illegal immigration to the United States." It quoted Melanie Wirken, ZPG’s Washington lobbyist, saying the group favored a "drastic reduction in legal immigration" from levels which were then averaging about 400,000 a year. The article reported that ZPG was adding another lobbyist so that Wirken could devote all of her time to immigration issues.

The Sierra Club urged the federal government to conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration policies and their impact on U.S. population trends and how those trends affected the nation’s environmental resources. "All regions of the world must reach a balance between their populations and resources," the Club added.¹¹⁵ Then in 1980, the Sierra Club testified before Father Hesburgh’s Select Committee on Immigration and Refugee Reform: "It is obvious that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate. It is perhaps less well known the extent to which immigration policy, even more than the number of children per family, is the determinant of future numbers of Americans." The Club said it is an "important question how many immigrants the United States wants to accept and the criteria we choose as the basis for answering that question." In 1989, the Sierra Club National Population Committee confirmed that, "immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.," a policy confirmed by the Club’s Conservation Coordinating Committee.¹¹⁶

The immigration-reduction advocacy of the Sierra Club and ZPG beginning in the 1970s was affirmed in the Global 2000 Report to the President in 1981, which stated that the federal government should "develop a U.S. national population policy that includes attention to issues such as population stabilization, and...just, consistent, and workable immigration laws..."¹¹⁷ It was reaffirmed in the 1996 report of the Population and Consumption Task Force of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. The task force concluded: "This is a sensitive issue, but reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stabilization and the drive toward sustainability."¹¹⁸

But even as that governmental recognition was being announced in 1996, ZPG and the Sierra Club were in the final stage of abandoning immigration reduction and, as a practical result, U.S. population stabilization goals.

Over the previous ten years many of the old "full-Formula" environmentalists had gradually been ousted from many of the Sierra Club’s top leadership positions, with the effect of sharply diminishing the priority attached to U.S. population stabilization. It appears that the shift began to be noticeable as early as 1990. Congress that year held hearings about increasing the already doubled level of immigration, a move that led to the Census Bureau raising its projection of U.S. population in 2050 by nearly 100 million. Neither the Sierra Club nor any other large environmental group asked to testify about the environmental consequences of such a dramatic boost in population. After the hearings, however, some of the leaders on the national Sierra Club Population Committee did some personal lobbying against the immigration bill. But they were admonished by others in the Club’s national leadership that they were out of line, even though the official Sierra policy at the time supported their efforts.¹¹⁹

During the early 1990s, the Club considered adopting a more detailed, comprehensive policy on population (including immigration) and consumption. But internal wrangling between pro-stabilization population activists and the emerging "environmental justice" and "immigrants rights" factions led to stalemate.

In February, 1996, the Club’s National Board of Directors declared that no one speaking in the Club’s name at the national or local level could call any longer for immigration reduction to reach U.S. population stabilization; henceforth, the Club would "take no position on immigration levels or on policies governing immigration into the United States." In effect, the board had ceased the Club’s work for U.S. stabilization, which, at a practical level, is all but impossible given current immigration levels. For example, the only way to achieve immediate zero population growth without reducing immigration would be to cut the number of U.S. births in half.¹²⁰ American women on average would have to do away with the two-child family of the last three decades and adapt to a one-child per family scenario — lower than any country in the world. In effect, Americans would be asked to sacrifice their own aspirations to "replace themselves" biologically in the next generation, simply to make way for more immigrants from rapidly-growing countries that had chosen not to make such a sacrifice. Given the patent unfairness of this scenario, and its certain political unpopularity, it is not surprising that not a single environmental or population group — especially those that avoided advocating immigration limits because of their controversy — was willing to seriously propose this as an alternative.

A group of long-time Sierra Club population activists forced a referendum vote by the national membership to return the Club to its full advocacy of population stabilization.¹²¹ To fight the referendum, the Club leadership chose as one of its major spokesmen in the referendum campaign the executive director of ZPG, former congressman Peter Kostmayer. Thus, the two organizations that had been the most outspoken for U.S. stabilization and immigration reduction in the 1970s and 1980s teamed up to defeat those same goals in 1998. The decision not to fully confront U.S. stabilization issues prevailed in a 60 percent-40 percent vote.¹²²

End Notes

⁴² In 1970, the "black and other" Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was 3.0 (National Center for Health Statistics. 1976. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970). By 1997, black fertility had fallen to 2.2, slightly above the general population’s replacement rate of 2.1. Overall Hispanic fertility even in 1997 stood at 3.0, well above replacement level; that of Mexican-born women was 3.3 — actually higher than that of women in Mexico itself (National Center for Health Statistics. 1999. National Vital Statistics Report. Vol. 47, No. 18.

⁴³ Supra, note 29. pp. 72-73. Testimony of Rev. Jesse Jackson in hearings before the Commission, Chicago, Illinois, June 21-22, 1971.

⁴⁴ Supra, note 29. p. 72. Testimony of Dr. Eugene Callender in hearings before the Commission, New York City, September 27-28, 1971.

⁴⁵ Supra, note 29. Testimony of Manuel Aragon in hearings before the Commission, Los Angeles, May 3-4, 1971.

⁴⁶ According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the TFR of non-Hispanic white females was 1.8 in 1997 (compared to 2.1 for replacement level). Using Census Bureau data, it can be calculated that in 1970, non-Hispanic whites comprised 83 percent of the U.S. population and accounted for approximately 78 percent of the births. By 1994, non-Hispanic whites comprised 74 percent of the population and accounted for 60 percent of the births. With immigration included (approximately 90 percent of which originates from non-European sources), the non-Hispanic white share of current population growth drops well below 50 percent. According to medium projections of the Census Bureau and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, non-Hispanic whites will account for 6 percent of the nation’s population growth between 1995 and 2050, blacks for 18 percent, Asians for 20 percent, and Hispanics for 54 percent (James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston, eds. 1997. The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Table 3.7). By 2050, Non-Hispanic whites are projected to have declined to 51 percent of the U.S. population from 87 percent in 1950 (Table 3.10, The New Americans).

⁴⁷ William G. Hollingsworth. 1996. Ending the Explosion: Population Policies and Ethics for a Humane Future. Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press. p. 31.

⁴⁸ James Scheuer. 1992. "A Disappointing Outcome: United States and World Population Trends Since the Rockefeller Commission." The Social Contract. Vol. 2, No. 4. Congressman Scheuer (D-NY) was a member of the 1972 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future and at the time this article was written, was Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Natural Resources and Environment as well as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Education and Health.

⁴⁹ "The Vatican and World Population Policy: An Interview with Milton P. Siegel." The Humanist. March/April 1993.

⁵⁰ David Simcox. 1992. "Twenty Years Later: A Lost Opportunity." The Social Contract, Vol. 2, No. 4.

⁵¹ Stephen D. Mumford. 1996. The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy. Research Triangle Park: Center for Research on Population and Security.

⁵² Joyce Arthur. 1999. "Mortal Sins of the Vatican." Pro-Choice Press (Vancouver, Canada) Summer 1999.

⁵³ Carl Bernstein. 1992. "Holy Alliance: How Reagan and the Pope conspired to assist Poland’s Solidarity movement and hasten the demise of Communism." Time, February 24. A section of the article was called "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control."

⁵⁴ Supra, note 48.

⁵⁵ Ester Boserup. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. London: Allen & Unwin, and 1981. Population and Technology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

⁵⁶ Julian Simon. 1981. The Ultimate Resource. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, and 1986. Theory of Population and Economic Growth. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

⁵⁷ Julian Simon. 1995. "The State of Humanity — Steadily Improving." Cato Policy Report, Vol. 17, No. 5, October. Washington, D.C.: The Cato Institute.

⁵⁸ Roy Beck. 1992. "Religions and the Environment: Commitment High Until U.S. Population Issues Raised." The Social Contract. Vol 3, No. 2.Winter 1992-93

⁵⁹ Anon. The Washington Times. 1994. June 11; Anon. The New York Times. June 16. Cited in Lindsey Grant. 1994. "The Cairo Conference: Feminists vs. the Pope." NPG Forum Series. July

⁶⁰ George D. Moffett. 1994. Critical Masses: The Global Population Challenge. New York: Viking. p. 190.

⁶¹ George Weigel. 1995. "What Really Happened at Cairo, and Why." In Michael Cromartie (ed.) The 9 Lives of Population Control. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center.

⁶² Lindsey Grant. 1994. "The Cairo Conference: Feminists vs. the Pope." NPG Forum Series (Washington, D.C.: Negative Population Growth).

⁶³ Meredith Burke. 1998. E-mail to Roy Beck. December 9. Meredith Burke is an international demographic consultant and past coordinator of Management Information, Family Planning International Assistance.

⁶⁴ Lindsey Grant. 1997. "Multiple Agendas and the Population Taboo." Focus, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network); reprinted from Chapter 16 of Juggernaut: Growth on a Finite Planet. Santa Ana, Calif.: Seven Locks Press. 1996.

⁶⁵ Martha Madison Campbell. 1998. "Schools of Thought: An Analysis of Interest Groups Influential in International Population Policy" Population and Environment. Vol. 19, No. 6.

⁶⁶ Supra, note 60.

⁶⁷ Lester Thurow. 1993. Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America. William Morrow & Co.

⁶⁸ Paul Harrison. The Third Revolution: Population, Environment, and a Sustainable World. 1992, 1993. London and New York: Penguin.

⁶⁹ Virginia D. Abernethy. 1993. Population Politics: The Choices that Shape Our Future. New York: Plenum.

⁷⁰ The shift within the population movement from an emphasis on "limits to growth" toward "personal liberty" has even shaped the choice of language used by activists in the 1990s. In the 1960s and 1970s, those concerned about overpopulation typically referred to the remedy of "population control," in much the same way the terms "birth control" or "pollution control" were used. By the 1990s, this term had been largely phased out in favor of "population stabilization," which is somewhat more precise but, more significantly, also lacks the implication of coercion implicit in "control."

⁷¹ Supra, note 62.

⁷² The Population Institute points out that according to the U.N. Population Fund’s 1998 State of the World Population report, actual family planning assistance has remained well below even these promised amounts, reaching barely at $2 billion in 1997 and 1998 (Population Institute. 1998. "1998 World Population Overview and Outlook 1999." Released December 30, 1998. Washington, D.C.: Population Institute).

⁷³ Barbara Crossette. 1994. "Vatican Drops Fight Against U.N. Population Document." The New York Times, September 10.

⁷⁴ Interview conducted in early 1999 by Leon Kolankiewicz with two NWF senior staffers.

⁷⁵ United Nations Foundation. Undated. "Women & Population: Challenge for the 21st Century." Downloaded May, 1999 from Internet at http://www.unfoundation.org/issues/women/challenge_wp.cfm.

⁷⁶ Population Institute. 1998. "1998 World Population Overview and Outlook 1999." Released December 30, 1998. Downloaded from Internet at http://www.populationinstitute.org/overview98.html.

⁷⁷ Supra, note 69.

⁷⁸ Supra, note 64.

⁷⁹ Supra, note 75.

⁸⁰ Judy Kunofsky. 1997. Post to on-line Sierra Club population forum. Dr. Kunofsky was on the ZPG Board of Directors from 1972-84 and was president from 1977-80.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Celia Evans Miller and Cynthia P. Green. 1976. "A U.S. Population Policy: ZPG’s Recommendations." Zero Population Growth policy paper.

⁸³ Mike Hanauer. 1998. E-mail to Roy Beck. In addition to having served on the ZPG board, Hanauer is past chair of ZPG of Greater Boston and co-chair of the New England Coalition for Sustainable Population.

⁸⁴ Alan Kuper. 1999. "ZPG or ZCG?" E-mail to list. April 10. Kuper, a long-time Sierra member and one of the population activists who spearheaded the 1998 referendum, pointed out that 7 out of 10 questions on ZPG’s 1999 Earth Day quiz related to consumption. "Based on what I have, I’d say ZPG is promoting in classrooms across the US, reduction in consumption more than reduction in numbers."

⁸⁵ Judith Jacobsen. 1998. President’s message. ZPG Reporter, February.

⁸⁶ Judy Kunofsky. 1998. Post to on-line Sierra Club population forum. October 15; Joyce Tarnow. 1998. E-mail to Roy Beck, December 8. Tarnow started the Miami chapter of ZPG in 1970, served on the national board from 1972-74, and is now president of Floridians for a Sustainable Population. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Colorado, wrote on January 10, 1999: "Zero Population Growth no longer advocates zero population growth? They now advocate ‘slow population growth and sustainability.’ These two concepts are totally in conflict with one another….I was on the board of citizen advisors of ZPG for a decade or two, and I knew nothing about this change until I happened to notice it in reading the ZPG paper. It is not known if the Board of Directors consulted with anyone before they made this major and contradictory change in their mission statement."

⁸⁷ Joyce Tarnow. 1997. April 22 letter to Dianne Dillon-Ridgley, president, and ZPG board.

⁸⁸ Joyce Tarnow. 1997. November 25 letter to Dr. Judith Jacobsen, ZPG president.

⁸⁹ Judith E. Jacobsen. 1997. December 8 letter to Joyce Tarnow.

⁹⁰ Samuel P. Hays. 1959, 1969. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920. Harvard University Press/Atheneum.

⁹¹ Roderick Nash. 1967. Wilderness and the American Mind. Revised edition, 1973. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

⁹² Gifford Pinchot. 1947. Breaking New Ground. New York: Harcourt, Brace. p. 320. In Douglas H. Strong. 1971, 1988. Dreamers and Defenders — American Conservationists. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. p. 83.

⁹³ First published in 1949, and since reprinted many times, A Sand County Almanac has been called the finest nature writing since Thoreau. "The Land Ethic" is the most famous of this collection of essays.

⁹⁴ Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964) was a marine biologist and author of widely read books on ecological themes, including Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951) — for which she was awarded the 1952 National Book Award in nonfiction — and The Edge of the Sea (1955). Her prose was praised for its beauty as well as its scientific accuracy. She taught zoology at the University of Maryland from 1931 to 1936. She was also an aquatic biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and its successor, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, from 1936 to 1952.

⁹⁵ Mark Dowie. 1995. Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 127.

⁹⁶ This incident occurred to Leon Kolankiewicz in 1990 with a staff person from the Southwest Information Center.

⁹⁷ Barry Commoner. 1971. The Closing Circle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

⁹⁸ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both lambasted Malthusian theory. Yet once Marxists or Communists actually assume political power in a given country they sometimes have been among the most zealous in pushing population control, as evidenced most clearly in the People’s Republic of China. At the 1996 U.N. Food Conference in Rome, Cuban president Fidel Castro chided the Vatican on population and argued the necessity of stopping population growth if the world was ever to solve the food problem. As ecological economist Herman E. Daly notes in his essay "Marx and Malthus in Northeast Brazil": "The leftists want a growing proletariat to fight for the revolution..." (Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, 1996, Boston: Beacon Press). Once in power, however, they apparently come to see the infeasibility of providing for ever-growing numbers, and they change their tune radically. The conservative Islamic clerics governing Iran since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 seem to have undergone a similar shift, from railing against birth control and family planning to actively promoting it as the social and economic burdens of a rapidly growing population became ever more evident.

⁹⁹ Alexander Cockburn. 1997. "Column Left." Los Angeles Times. October 2.

¹⁰⁰ Tom Kizzia. 1999. "Give Us This Chance; Part 2: As German Jews eagerly await immigration word, U.S. government officials are split on plan to bring new settlers to Alaska." Anchorage Daily News. May 17.

¹⁰¹ James R. Hepworth and Gregory McNamee. 1996. Resist Much Obey Little: Remembering Ed Abbey. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. In John Rohe. 1997. A Bicentennial Malthusian Essay. Traverse City, Michigan: Rhodes & Easton. p. 104.

¹⁰² Dave Foreman. 1998. "Progressive Cornucopianism." Wild Earth, Vol. 7, No. 4.

¹⁰³ George Sessions. 1995. "Postmodernism, Environmental Justice, and the Demise of the Ecology Movement?" Wild Duck Review. No. 5, June/July; George Sessions. 1995. "Political Correctness, Ecological Realities, and the Future of the Ecology Movement." Wild Duck Review, Vol. 1, No. 6, Sept. By way of example, Sessions quotes a book review by Erik Davis in the Village Voice Literary Supplement (February, 1995): "When postmodernists hear Nature, they reach for their revolvers. [Much of] this is motivated in part by the threat hardcore [radical] ecology poses to postmodernism’s most visibly progressive rhetoric: the politics of diversity."

¹⁰⁴ A 1998 fundraising letter from PEG claimed that "Sierra grassroots leaders told us that ‘The Sierra Club would not have won this vote without PEG,’" an assessment that PEG’s adversaries would probably agree is not far off the mark.

¹⁰⁵ Brad Erickson. 1998. Personal interview. May.

¹⁰⁶ Supra, note 95, pp. 160-166.

¹⁰⁷ U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1997. Statistical Abstract of the United States.

¹⁰⁸ Select Commission on Immigration Policy and the National Interest. 1981. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

¹⁰⁹ Steven A. Camarota. 1999. "Immigrants in the United States — 1998: A Snapshot of America’s Foreign-born Population." Backgrounder. Washington, D.C.: Center for Immigration Studies.

¹¹⁰ Lindsey Grant and Leon Bouvier. 1992. How Many Americans?: Population, Immigration and the Environment. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

¹¹¹ Ibid.

¹¹² Ed Lytwak. 1999. "A Tale of Two Futures: Changing Shares of U.S. Population Growth." NPG Forum. March. The National Vital Statistics System in the document "Births: Final Data for 1997," Vol. 47, No. 18, April 29, 1999, lists the U.S. total fertility rate (TFR) for all races in 1997 at 2.03, almost at replacement level. By comparison, the TFR for women of Hispanic origin was 2.99, and those of Mexican origin 3.31, respectively 42 percent and 58 percent above replacement level. According to the Census Bureau ("The Foreign-Born Population: 1996," CPS P20-494), about half (49.6 percent) of all U.S. foreign born came from Mexico (27.2 percent), Central America (7 percent), the Caribbean (10.5 percent), and South America (4.9 percent).

¹¹³ Poster Project for a Sustainable U.S. Environment. 1998. Based on Census Bureau data.

¹¹⁴ Susan Jacoby. 1977. "Anti-Immigration Campaign Begun." The Washington Post. May 8.

¹¹⁵ Sierra Club Board of Directors. 1978. "U.S. Population Policy and Immigration." Adopted May 6-7.

¹¹⁶ Sierra Club Population Report. Spring, 1989.

¹¹⁷ Supra, note 2. p. 11.

¹¹⁸ President’s Council on Sustainable Development. 1996. Population and Consumption Task Force Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Executive Summary, p. iv.

¹¹⁹ Memos to the authors from Population Committee members.

¹²⁰ Albert A. Bartlett and Edward P. Lytwak. 1995. "Zero Growth of the Population of the United States." Population and Environment, Vol. 16, No. 5, May.

¹²¹ "Population and the Sierra Club: A Discussion of Issues About the Upcoming Referendum." January, 1998. 8 pp. discussion paper authored by Alan Kuper, Dick Schneider, and Ben Zuckerman of Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS).

¹²² John H. Cushman, Jr. 1998. "Sierra Club Rejects Move to Oppose Immigration." The New York Times, April 26; Marvin Baker (Acting Chief Inspector of Election for the Inspectors). "Sierra Club 1998 Election for Board of Directors and Ballot Questions." (As posted on the website of Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, April 24, 1998, at http://www.sni.net/ecofuture/susps/info/votes_980425.html).