Rusty Remedies and Sour Solutions  

by Karen Shragg

Dedicated to the living memory of the ever-wise Dr. Al Bartlett, physics professor University of Colorado Boulder.

Math is exactly what the late great physics professor Al Bartlett tried to warn us about. From a laundry list of things he could have chosen, including our propensity for war, he said that the greatest human failing was our inability to comprehend the exponential function. What he meant was that we as a society, and a world, operate without acknowledging that as human population grows it does so at an accelerating rate. We act as if we grow at a linear rate where the increase is constant. But we grow exponentially. That is how we have added billions to our planet in such a short amount of time.

The global population was only 1.6 billion in 1900 and now at 8.1 billion and still growing. Similarly, the US was just over 76 million in 1900 and is now over 340 million. For reference, when I graduated high school the US population was just over 209 million. US resources of water, open space, energy and all that is needed to support modern human life cannot keep pace with the addition of 141 million people in just over 50 years.

Every country must understand that the most humane thing to do for its own people is to grasp the ramifications of the exponential function. In the U.S., we can do it legally and fairly and for the right reasons. Proposals currently on the doorsteps of our legislators could do just that for most developed nations are growing by immigration, not because of birthrates. Instead of demonizing anything that controls mass immigration as unfair, we need to reframe that story into one of sustainability and fairness to current citizens and their quality of life. Two bills before Congress now include the following:

• H.R. 251 would crack down on illegal hiring by mandating E-Verify, the free online system that certifies the work authorization of new hires. Nearly a billion adults worldwide want to move to the United States. Many of them will try illegally as long as they think the U.S. turns a blind eye to illegal hiring.
• H.R. 1241 would end the visa lottery, a program that grants over 50,000 green cards every year by a random, computerized lottery.

These two modest reforms are popular and were among the recommendations of the last bipartisan U.S. commission on immigration reform. Passing them alone would not achieve sustainable immigration levels, but they would give us a good start. Our dialogue about growth must include sensible legislation so that we may be on a path to real solutions.

As Bartlett would have asked in his sarcastic way, “Can you think of a resource we need as top predators need, that has kept up with our exponential rise in numbers?” Well, we have seen an exponential rise in more gadgets headed for our landfills, but we can live without those, we just haven’t figured out a way to live without water, food or shelter or find a way to have them grow exponentially along with us.

Read Karen’s full blog at movingupstream.com.