Earth Day

The contemporary "woke" environmentalist establishment -- which is closely allied with the Democratic Party and its progressive goals and narratives -- would be unrecognizable to the activists who founded the green movement a half-century ago.

At the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, activists' top priority was stabilizing U.S. and global population growth. Environmentalists and scientists alike recognized that a constantly growing population would mean more and more consumption and pollution.

Earth Day's founder, liberal U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), spoke out vigorously and frequently against unsustainable population growth until his dying day in 2005. And his concerns were broadly shared by leaders in both parties. President Nixon -- who also created the EPA -- established a bipartisan national Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, chaired by John D. Rockefeller III, which issued its findings in 1972. The commission urged the U.S. government to curb population growth, embrace a stable population, and not increase immigration levels -- which were then running about one-third of what they are today -- all for primarily environmental reasons.

This broad bipartisan consensus on population growth and the environment persisted until about the mid-nineties. A quarter-century ago, inspired by the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development ("Earth Summit") in Rio de Janeiro, President Clinton established a Council on Sustainable Development.

In 1996, that Council's Task Force on Population and Consumption, co-chaired by former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO), concluded that: "reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stabilization and the drive toward sustainability."

A quarter-century on, while Democrats and environmentalists still give lip service to sustainability, they largely ignore or deny that human population growth -- which of course affects the quantity of energy used and carbon emitted -- has anything to do with climate change or America's disappearing open spaces.

Fifty years ago, in 1969 when astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, the world’s population was 3.6 billion; in 2019, it’s 7.7 billion. A half a century ago, the U.S. population stood at 208 million; today, it’s 329 million and growing at the unsustainable rate of one net person every 17 seconds, a total calculated by the sum of births minus deaths, plus net migration.

April 22, 2019, marks the 49th anniversary and 50th observance of Earth Day intended to raise awareness and appreciation for the earth’s natural environment. A massive oil spill off the Santa Barbara, California, coast that generated a slick large enough to encompass Chicago provided the catalyst for the first-ever Earth Day, celebrated in 1970, and currently recognized in 193 countries.

At the time, there was an understanding of the impacts of polluting and overpopulating our planet. While the former continues to be the driving element for environmentalists and climate change activists, such is not the case for overpopulation. But the challenges to achieving U.S. population stabilization remain, and they are daunting, even if unmentionable and not addressed.

To the exclusion of a sustainable country, the U.S. government is committed to endless growth, a policy that congressional leaders have embraced for decades, and is perhaps the most significant roadblock to population stabilization. Nobel laureate Steven Chu of the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute said at a recent forum that “the world needs a new model of how to generate a rising standard of living that’s not dependent on a pyramid scheme,” a reference to increasing immigration.

The former Secretary of Energy under President Obama also referred to the idea of replacing aging persons with younger immigrants as an ecological Ponzi scheme that leaves future generations to deal with the life-altering consequences. Young immigrants will eventually grow old, and true to a Ponzi scheme’s formula, another immigrant wave will be needed to replace the aging migrants, etc. ad infinitum.