1970s Determination
Around 1970, U.S. population and environmental issues were widely and publicly linked. The nationwide consensus that population stabilization was a necessary component of environmental protection helped spur Congress and the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations to enact a host of sweeping environmental laws and create a federal bureaucracy to implement and enforce those and others that had been pushed through in the 1960s. Two months after Earth Day, the First National Congress on Optimum Population and Environment convened in Chicago. Religious groups — especially the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church — urged for ethical and moral reasons that the federal government adopt policies that would lead to a stabilized U.S. population.
In an unprecedented 1969 speech, President Nixon addressed the nation about problems it would face if U.S. population growth continued unabated: "One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today."25 On January 1, 1970, Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), often referred to as the nation's "environmental Magna Carta." In Title I of the act, the "Declaration of National Environmental Policy" began: "The Congress, recognizing the profound impact of man's activity on the interrelations of all components of the environment, particularly the profound influences of population growth..." President Nixon and Congress jointly appointed environmental, labor, business, academic, demographic, population, and political representatives to a bipartisan Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, chaired by John D. Rockefeller III. Among its findings in 1972 was that it would be difficult to reach the environmental goals being established at the time unless the United States began stopping its population growth. Rockefeller wrote that "gradual stabilization of our population through voluntary means would contribute significantly to the nation's ability to solve its problems."
Environmental advocates envisioned making the transition to U.S. population stabilization within a generation — by the time the college activists of that period had children of their own in college. The Sierra Club, for example, in 1969 urged "the people of the United States to abandon population growth as a pattern and goal; to commit themselves to limit the total population of the United States in order to achieve a balance between population and resources; and to achieve a stable population no later than the year 1990."
The environmentalists' population emphasis heavily influenced the news media. Discussions of U.S. population problems were featured regularly on the front pages of newspapers, in magazine cover stories, the nightly TV news and even on network entertainment such as the popular Johnny Carson Show. Suddenly after more than 20 years of the Baby Boom, journalists and politicians were treating population growth as something that could and should be tamed rather than as a natural, inevitable force beyond human and humane control.
Printed from www.NumbersUSA.com
Printed from www.NumbersUSA.com