Implications of the Impossible

As Earth Week winds down, we need to carefully consider the major environmental impacts of the rapidly rising U.S. population. What would happen if all the citizens of Mexico and Canada crossed into the United States tomorrow morning? Sounds impossible, right? Yet if this unlikely event did occur, this is what would happen:

• US population would sky-rocket by over 130 million people.
• Expanded population would mean less land for farming and grain production as well as an increase in deforestation and water shortages.
• Wages for Americans, especially those with fewer skills, would plummet as excess service labor swamped the market.
• The expansion of human activity and associated loss of habitat, the leading causes of the unprecedented extinctions of plant and animal species, would disrupt our ecosystems.

Unfortunately, this is not impossible – it is virtually assured. If we keep on our current course, by the year 2050, just as a child born today reaches middle-age, the US population will reach 438 million, the equivalent of adding all the current citizens of Mexico and Canada.

How and why will this happen?

This population bubble will be a direct result of the United States Congress not taking the global and national environmental crises seriously – and therefore failing to take leadership on the relationship between sustainable development and stabilized human population. In May, President Obama plans to propose a model for immigration reform, but will his policies go beyond the current “growth model’ of economic development, where perpetual population growth and resource extraction are necessary, ongoing and ever-escalating?

By sticking to a failed model of unsustainable economic development that depends on the influx of millions of immigrants each year, Congress may be dooming future generations of Americans to live in an over-crowded, ecologically impoverished nation that is dependent on importing its vital resources for survival.

Clinging to these policies sets a terrible example for the rest of the world. The US Congress makes laws for the 3rd most populous nation on the planet and only Nigeria and India will add more people than the U.S. by 2050. By legislating as if our own domestic population doesn’t matter, there is no reason for other nations to accept responsibility for their domestic populations. In this chain of cause and effect, responsibility for the planet’s health is also carelessly kicked along, even as the planet trembles from our ecological abuses.

What impact will population growth have on our environment and resources? Can we sustain an increase in our population? What can we do to promote sustainable population policies in the US? How can we educate people so that they demand Congress get serious about national population, sustainability and economics?