Protecting America's Environmental Resources By Taming U.S. Population Growth

Scientific backing for environmental necessity to stabilize U.S. population

A succession of scientific and governmental commissions for three decades (from the President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future in 1972 to the President's Council on Sustainable Development in 1996) have come to the same conclusion - that there is a scientific rationale for stabilizing the U.S. population in order to meet environmental goals. While national environmental groups have dramatically changed their stance on U.S. population stabilization, government and scientific bodies have not. Read More

Environmental endorsements of U.S. population stabilization

Notable environmentalists from a wide array of political affiliations have, over the years, endorsed U.S. population stabilzation. Read More

Role of U.S. population stabilization at the beginning of the modern environmental movement

Around 1970, U.S. population and environmental issues were widely and publicly linked. The nation’s best-known population group, Zero Population Growth (ZPG) — founded by biologists concerned about the catastrophic impacts of ever more human beings on the biosphere — was outspokenly also an environmental group. And many of the nation’s largest environmental groups had or were considering "population control" as major planks of their environmental prescriptions for America. The seeming consensus among leaders of the nascent environmental movement was paralleled, and bolstered, by widespread agreement among influential researchers and scholars in the natural sciences. Read More

U.S. population growth may be the cause of half the nation's urban sprawl

A major controversy in the efforts to halt the rural land loss of urban sprawl is whether land-use and consumption decisions are the primary engines of urban sprawl, or whether it is the nation’s continuing population boom providing most of the power driving the expansion. A careful analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data found that the two sprawl factors share equally in the blame:per capita sprawl and population growth. Read More