Commentaries

Our members have published the following articles and letters to the editor. These writings do not necessarily reflect the opinion of VSP but they are reflective of our diverse concerns about population growth.

Current Editorials
Read - Shades of Green - By: George Plumb and Tim Murray
Read - Is Vermont Disappearing - By: Brian Wallstin
Read - The "P" Word - By: Marc Powell
Read - The Green Grapevine #28 - By: Daniel Hecht

SHADES OF GREEN
By George Plumb and Tim Murray1
April 17, 2008

 “Environmentalists” come in many shades of green, from light green to dark green.  Environmentalists are colored by both their personal actions and their external actions. 

Internal Actions

Dark green environmentalists live their personal lives in ways that create the most minimal impact on the environment.  They do this by:

  • Replacing them selves only once.  Having children creates the greatest impact of all on the environment.  If a woman of 25 decides to change her lifestyle to live as frugally as possible, giving up her car, not flying, buying local, etc. she will reduce her consumption by 60%.  If she also decides to have a child, having that child will counter her reduction by the same amount over the course of her lifetime and that is assuming that the child lives as frugally as its mother.
  • Living in smaller, energy efficient or alternative energy homes and using as little electricity as possible.
  • Growing much of their food and buying the rest organic and local.  They eat a primarily a vegetarian diet.
  • Not flying unless they have to for business that can’t be conducted otherwise or for family matters.
  • Not taking cruises.
  • Investing some or preferably all of their liquid assets as Socially Responsible Investments.
  • Driving the most fuel efficient vehicle they can afford and walking, bicycling and taking public transportation as much as they can.
  • Consuming as little as possible and reusing and recycling as much as possible.

External Actions

Dark Green environmentalists also live their external lives in ways that support the larger environmental movement.  They do this by:

  • Understanding that the root cause of our environmental problems is population growth and supporting organizations that are working to address this issue.
  • Giving time and financial resources, to the degree they are able, to an environmental/population organization.
  • Supporting several other environmental/population organizations, to the degree they are able, by at least paying a membership fee. By doing so they are adding to their numbers and giving them moral support.  They understand that most traditional environmental organizations are treating the immediate symptoms of the problem and that population organizations are treating the long term root cause of the problems. Both types of organizations need their support.
  • Speaking out on environmental/population issues by talking with family, friends and co-workers. If they have the confidence and skills they also speak out publicly in the media.

YOU ALSO KNOW WHEN YOU ARE A LIGHT GREEN WHEN:

  • You think that population growth plays no role whatsoever in environmental degradation.  Even though America has doubled its population since 1950 and will go from 301 million to 438 million by 2050 if immigration and birth rates are unchanged.

  • You think technological efficiencies and improvements will lessen our ecological footprint.  Trouble is you never heard of the Jevons Paradox or the concept that the additional number of ecological “feet” will wipe out those efficiency gains.

  • You think however many more people there are, all we need to do is consume less.  Live “greener lifestyles” to make room for more people.  Problem here is that you have to be dead or unborn to have a zero footprint.

  • You think that with “smart growth” we can shoe-horn an ever increasing population into this country without ecological impact. Just confine them behind tightly defined urban boundaries in very, very, dense housing developments and all greenbelts, farmland, and wetlands will be safe from human intrusion.  The difficulty here is that “smart growth” has failed in Portland, Oregon and other localities.  And the folks confined in those sheep pens and high rises still consume and still generate wastes and emit GHG.  No matter where they are settled, it is the number, not the distribution of people, that is ecologically decisive.  Smart growth is, however, an important temporary solution until we achieve a sustainable population.

  • You think that by working to set aside nature reserves and parks, wildlife can be conserved alongside economic and population growth.  Wrong again.  There is no sanctuary from growth. Even Yosemite was violated when Congress decided to yield to mining interests.  But if reserves could be guaranteed safety from development and incursion, it would not slow the intensity of the development of lands outside the reserves.  In fact, population growth increases overall loss of biodiversity even as park dedication increases.

  • You think that if population growth does indeed play a role in environmental degradation, it is a subsidiary role, and it plays that role in distant undeveloped countries.  Because you see, overpopulation is a GLOBAL PROBLEM, demanding GLOBAL solutions. Meaning that it is not anything we should do anything about here. Garrett Hardin had two ripostes to those tired clichés.  One was that to say overpopulation was a Global problem demanding a Global solution implies that we have a Global government to apply such a solution.  Since we don’t, we must act locally. Secondly he said that overpopulation was NOT a global problem, but the sum total of 194 national ones.  We solve ours and set an example for the rest of the world.

  • You think there is no limit to how many people this country can sustain, or a certain number of people beyond which healthy biodiversity cannot subsist.  You accuse others of being nativist, racist, or xenophobic, but when challenged, you won’t answer a simple question: “How many people do you ultimately want to see live in this country?”

  • You think the rights of immigrants are more important than the rights of the people and the wildlife who already call this country home.

  • You think that other species survival conflicts with the “cultural” rights of people.  Humans are more important than fauna and flora.

George Plumb is President of Vermonters for a Sustainable Population and a long time environmental leader in Vermont.  Tim Murray is a neo-Malthusian supporter of the steady-state economy concept and an eco-nationalist. He is guided by the writings of Garrett Hardin and Albert Bartlett among others. Along with 2700 other humans he is happy to co-habit a Pacific rainforest island off Vancouver Island with wolves and cougars. Like the late Stephen J. Gould he believes you must love nature to fight for it and keep the human population in its place. Neither George nor Tim claim to be the darkest shade of green but they know others who are a pretty dark shade of green and are striving themselves to move in that direction.

Is Vermont Disappearing? Yes, and a New Study Says There's Only One Solution

Local Matters

By Brian Wallstin [03.05.08]

George Plumb grew up in Massachusetts, but he has been a Vermonter since 1963. Some years ago, after settling in Washington, Vermont, he began wondering: Why did every bucolic place he’d ever lived eventually get so crowded?

The answer was obvious, and in 1990, Plumb, who is now 70, formed the Vermont Earth Institute, which became the Vermont Population Alliance, which became Vermonters for a Sustainable Population [1], which sometime this week will issue a report that, if it doesn’t quite answer the author’s question, could make population growth a topic of civilized conversation again.

Few people will, in fact, be surprised by the information in Plumb’s report, which he titled “Disappearing Vermont.” It ranges from the provocative (the average temperature across the state has risen almost five degrees since 1970); to the obvious (the acres of developed land in Grand Isle County grew from 2900 in 1970 to more than 6000 in 2003); to the promising (more than two dozen advocacy groups have formed around a commitment to sustainable living since 2000).

And then there are the facts Vermonters live with every day:

• The state has added, roughly, a city the size of Burlington to its population each decade since 1970;

• Between 1970 and 2003, more than 100,000 acres of open land in Vermont have been developed, a 42 percent increase;

• The number of registered vehicles in the state has more than doubled, to about 716,000, and the number of miles driven in the state has nearly tripled, to 7.7 billion.

At the same time, the solutions to these clear and present dangers have always been difficult to articulate, as both history and a 30-minute chat with the author of “Disappearing Vermont” attests.

“This is not a politically correct thing to talk about,” Plumb says. “It gets into issues of politics, religion, abortion and birth control.”

Indeed, imagine a nation that makes sex education available through the public school system. Imagine a nation that gives minors access to contraceptives and that has not only de-stigmatized abortion, but requires public and private health insurance plans to cover it. Imagine a nation that makes “improved methods of fertility control” a national research priority.

Those are just a few of the 70 policy recommendations made 36 years ago by the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, which was signed into existence by Richard Nixon. They’re also some of the first solutions that come to George Plumb’s mind when he talks about population growth.

If Nixon hadn’t been busy obstructing justice and being impeached, he might have been able to draw more attention to what he called “one of the most serious challenges to human destiny.” The 312-page report, released in 1972 by the Rockefeller Commission, pointed out that since 1900, the U.S population had grown from 76 million to nearly 205 million. The reasons were elementary: More Americans were being born than were dying, and more people were coming into the country than were leaving. In the first decade of the 20th century, one in every four new Americans came here from someplace else; by 1970, 20 million more people had moved into the U.S. than had moved out.

In its opening pages, the commission pointed out the obvious: “At some point in the future, the finite earth will not satisfactorily accommodate more human beings — nor will the United States . . . [N]ow is the time to confront the question: “Why more people?”

Bill Ryerson, a renowned expert on population from Shelburne, was on his way to the inaugural United Nations World Population Conference, in Bucharest, when Nixon resigned in August 1974. A delegate to the conference and founder and president of the Population Media Center in Shelburne, Ryerson believes that if it wasn’t for Watergate, Nixon might have made a significant contribution to human affairs. Instead, his obsession with political enemies, culminating in the Watergate prosecution, squandered an opportunity for the world’s most prosperous nation to take action on population growth.

“Nixon had bigger concerns,” Ryerson recalls. “He shelved the report and gave it no attention.”

Subsequent administrations, starting with Gerald Ford’s and continuing right up to George W. Bush’s, have found their own reasons for ignoring the commission. “Ford was preoccupied by the pardon,” Ryerson explains. “Carter just wasn’t interested — he ignored it. Reagan bought into the view that population growth should be celebrated, that it stimulated growth and economic development.”

Ryerson has been trying to ease population pressure on the planet for decades now. These days, he spends much of his time in Africa and Asia producing television programs that encourage family planning.

So, it’s been up to grassroots activists like George Plumb to bear, for the rest of us, the painful and politically incorrect reality that America itself must stop growing.

Plumb admits that neither he nor anyone else knows what a “sustainable” population would be in a state as small as Vermont or a country a large as the United States. He only knows that the nation is well beyond that point and, if Vermonters want to avoid the same fate, they might want to connect population growth to issues such as climate change and the global depletion of energy reserves.

That won’t be easy. Two-thirds of the annual U.S. population growth, according to “Disappearing Vermont,” is currently attributable to legal and illegal immigration, which Plumb suspects is driving more and more people to less-urbanized states like Vermont.

The Rockefeller Commission, in fact, predicted the immigration battles of today, and even suggested how they might be avoided. It did not, however, call for a 700-mile wall along the southern border or suggest allowing local police and sheriff’s deputies to round up undocumented men, women and children. Instead, the commission proposed something along the lines of President Bush’s solution to illegal immigration: civil and criminal prosecution of employers.

Plumb has a simpler idea — restricting permanent immigration to the United States to about 250,000 a year, equal to the number of people who leave the country annually. “The U.S. needs a population policy, but it’s not easy talking about what the immigration level should be,” Plumb says. Nor, he continues, is it easy to talk about “sustainable” population without inducing nightmares among evangelicals, Catholics and civil libertarians. “Population control is a bad term,” Plumb emphasizes. “We’re not advocating that at all.”

Plumb is double-checking his facts this week before scheduling a press conference to announce the release of “Disappearing Vermont.” He plans to post the report on the Vermonters for a Sustainable Population’s website, www.vspop.org [2], by March 10.

At one point in the conversation, Plumb takes up a pen and a sheet of paper and writes out, I=PAT, a theorem devised in 1971 by the ecologists John R. Holdren and Paul R. Ehrlich. It states that any population’s impact (I) is the factor of its size (P), its affluence (A), and the technological damage brought on by its patterns of consumption (T).

Plumb is clearly impressed by the equation, which simply means that the quality of life in any environment rises as the number of inhabitants of the environment drops. The theory seems to comfort Plumb, who, like most people, is more at ease talking about the past then he is about our ostensible future.

“In 1963, I moved to Susie Wilson Road. It was the country then,” Plumb recalls. “You could walk and snowmobile. People used to trap. You’d come home in the evening and there would be cows in your garden.

“I remember thinking,” he adds, “‘isn’t that wonderful?’”



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COMMENTARY: The “P” Word
The Environmental Movement’s Many Missteps Include its Stance on Population Issues By: Mark Powell


WORCESTER, VERMONT--It’s a very inconvenient truth: The organized environmental movement has been almost totally ineffective at protecting the environment since the mid 1980s.

Co-founder of the National Resources Defense Council and Yale dean James Gustave Speth says when it comes to environmental action, “we have fallen far short.” © ncseonline.org

Yes, the big groups have been successful at protecting some resources in certain regions—staving off the drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and gaining more wilderness designation in the Green Mountain National Forest are two notable successes—but in terms of protecting the major ecosystems and the general environment, they have largely failed. This is most clearly demonstrated by their failure to energize the public to deal with global warming, which has reached a crisis point. It will now be too late to avoid many of the impacts.

But this is just the tip of the melting iceberg. There are many other environmental crises including loss of species diversity, loss of natural resources like wetlands and forests, and the collapse of ocean fisheries. The list goes on at great length.

As the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, James Gustave Speth, says in Red Sky at Morning, “My generation is a generation, I fear, of great talkers, overly fond of conferences. On action, however, we have fallen far short. As a result, with the notable exception of international efforts to protect the stratospheric ozone layer, the threatening global trends highlighted a quarter century ago continue to this day.”

Many of the newer environmental organizations are doing very good work. Yet they tend to treat the symptoms of environmental degradation instead of the root cause — population growth. The best that can be said about the organized environmental movement since the mid 1980s is that, given the agenda of the right-wing, anti-environmentalism of the past couple of decades, things could have been worse.

Here in Vermont, the worst problem may be sprawl and suburbanization, once limited to our more urban communities, but now affecting nearly every town in Vermont. Life in Vermont feels much more crowded than it did 40 years ago or more.

Our beautiful views and access to recreational land are being lost as shorelines, ridgelines and meadows are developed. Despite millions spent on remediation, Lake Champlain is only marginally cleaner, if at all, because of increased stormwater runoff. Ski areas get more like cities, and now, even tiny East Burke faces the development of some 800 new living units.

Many factors have contributed to our environmental problems, including the myth that we must have continued growth no matter what, a media that has not paid much attention to the environment and our personal consumption patterns. Yet, environmental organizations hold a good deal of the responsibility. There are several reasons for this.

Today, environmentalists are afraid to talk about population control.

The environmental movement has gone from largely a citizen-based activist movement to an organizational movement run on paid staff. While this seems to happen with all citizen movements, it has been particularly harmful to the environmental movement. It has resulted in less passion, less citizen involvement, less creativity and less risk taking. The movement relies on paid lobbyists to do most of the work, and the members are largely limited to signing petitions after receiving an email action alert. With their paid staffs and large budgets, environmental organizations have become businesses, with their business interests sometimes taking precedence over their mission. Environmental groups also often find themselves being roped into legislative and administrative task forces and commissions to “solve” problems, making them part of the bureaucratic “solution” and less able to act independently.

Each environmental organization works with its own limited agenda and pursues only items that it thinks it has a chance of winning. Cooperation among environmental groups is fairly limited. As an example, it took the international (and some would say, radical) Greenpeace to send a staff person to Vermont during the months leading up to the 2006 elections before we finally got some real action dealing with global warming. Vermont environmental organizations knew some 20 years ago that this was likely to be a tremendous environmental issue yet they did nothing. Churches, with all their outward differences, are joining forces through the Vermont Interfaith Action and have hired a staff person to help them identify and work on important issues they can all agree on. Why couldn’t environmental organizations have done the same thing 10 years ago?

The organized environmental movement, with a few exceptions, lacks leaders who are willing to be even the slightest bit outspoken and radical. We need some folks who are a bit radical to call attention to issues, so that the rest of the movement does not seem so extreme. The last time we had a real action in Vermont was when the Hydro Quebec opponents unfurled a banner from the top of a building in Montpelier in the early 1980s to call the attention to the devastating impact the monstrous dams would have on the environment and the Cree and Inuit people.

Finally, and most importantly, environmental organizations have not mentioned population growth on their websites or in their literature as a major cause of our environmental problems. When the modern-day environmental movement began in the 1960s and 1970s concern for the environment and population growth were very closely interconnected and were widely and publicly acknowledged. Many of the nation’s largest environmental groups, had or were considering “population control” as major planks of their environmental platforms for the country.

The Biggest Problem

David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club at the time and a leading environmental leader, expressed the consensus of the environmental movement on the subject in 1966 when he said, “We feel you don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.” The first big Earth Day in 1970 had population growth as a central theme. A large coalition of environmental groups in 1970 endorsed a resolution stating that, “population growth is directly involved in the pollution and degradation of our environment—air, water and land—and intensifies physical, psychological, social, political and economic problems to the extent that the well-being of individuals, the stability of society and our very survival are threatened.”

The connection between population growth and the environment is perhaps best expressed through what is known as the foundation formula or the environmental impact equation,

I=PAT.

What this says is that any environmental impact is the result of three factors; the size of the population, the affluence or wealth of that population and the technology or type of consumption that the population spends its wealth on.

What has happened is that environmental organizations have disregarded the population part of the equation and focused almost entirely on the technology part of the equation, be it driving more fuel-efficient cars or encouraging “smart growth.”

While some of the national environmental organizations acknowledge that population growth is a concern they put almost no resources into addressing this concern. In Vermont, only two of the some 25 environmental organizations have publicly acknowledged that population growth is a contributor to our environmental problems — Vermonters for a Sustainable Population and the Vermont Earth Institute, both of which were founded originally to bring attention to population issues because other environmental organizations were not doing it.

Several environmental authors have written that population size and growth is of major concern including Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, James Kuntstler in The Long Emergency, Sandra Postel in Saving the Planet, Lester Brown in Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and A Civilization in Trouble, James Speth in Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment, and Garret Hardin in Our Population Myopia. An environmental folk singer, Jeanie Fitchen, has even written a song about population growth titled, “Changes in the Wind/No More.” Why is it that so many well-respected environmentalists can make movies, and write and sing about population growth but our environmental organizations seem tongue-tied when it comes to discussing it?

Why have environmental organizations abandoned dealing with population growth? There are several reasons, including the fact that fertility rates dropped in the 1970s to 1.75, which is below replacement level. Perhaps it appeared to some that population growth would take care of itself. Abortion and contraception entered into politics, becoming hot-button issues. Some of the emphasis shifted to conservation, with people trying to protect what they had rather than dealing with a root cause of why natural resources were being lost.

It also became clear, beginning in the late 1980s, that immigration was the driving force of our population growth, with some 70 to 90 percent of our population growth since 1970 due to historically high immigration levels and the descendents of these immigrants. Environmental leaders did not want to be seen as racist. Finally, funding became an issue, with some donors and foundations threatening loss of funds if an environmental organization talked about population and/or immigration.

Environmental organizations heavily promote “sustainability,” as well they should. However, a population of 300 million, growing by approximately four million a year, is not sustainable. Experts say that a truly long-term sustainable population without cheap oil is probably more like 150 to 200 million. The larger the U.S. population grows, the more difficult it is going to be to achieve a sustainable population.

The founders of the modern environmental movement had it right. Population growth is a major cause of our environmental degradation. Action on population growth should be reestablished as a high priority by environmental organizations. Population is a sensitive issue, but it really is time that environmental leaders stopped worrying about offending, gathered their courage, and began alerting everyone to the need to rein back human numbers, humanely and democratically, for the sake of the planet.

CONTACT: Vermonters for a Sustainable Population; Vermont Earth Institute

MARK POWELL is the secretary/treasurer of Vermonters for a Sustainable Population and is writing a book about the politics of population growth.




It’s conspicuous by its absence. In all the environmental-related discussion taking place, it’s a word we seldom dare to speak: Population.

Two hundred years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus asserted that human population will inevitably increase until it outgrows its resource base. More recently, population issues were once commonly discussed, peaking around the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

But today it’s as if some inadvertent conspiracy has eliminated population from discussion of natural resources, energy supply, global warming, and ecosystem preservation. Instead of useful data, a Google search of “population control” yields hundreds of hits debunking the need for limiting population, exposing the secret agendas of population organizations, and articles like “The Inherent Racism of Population Control.”

George Plumb, a resident of Washington and president of Vermonters for a Sustainable Population (VSP), is hardly a candidate for the role of evil, racist conspirator. He’s small, fine-boned, with a quiet voice and a sober, almost shy demeanor. A father of three, he’s active in his church and community.

George recalls the moment when it really hit him. He had grown up in a rural Massachusetts town before moving to Essex Junction in 1963. Two decades later, when he returned to his old home town, he found only sprawling subdivisions, malls, traffic. Gone were all the familiar, good places. It’s a too-familiar tale.

He co-founded VSP when the birth of his first grandchild caused him to have more concern for living beings: “My priority expanded from caring for myself to caring for my family and finally to caring for the whole world. And I saw lot of suffering there.” Overpopulation was an obvious cause.

A number of factors have caused the issue to fade from view. On the positive side, advances in commercial agriculture increased the Earth’s capacity to feed people, with new crop strains, tehcnologies, and chemical fertilizers vastly improving yields. Massive irrigation programs, such as those in China, doubled the amount of land under cultivation. More recently, economists and social scientists showed that more efficient use of resources and high tech could reduce per capita consumption. Population could grow much more than Malthus anticipated.

Just as important were negative social reactions to attempts at regulating population. Tales of coercive abortions or sterilizations in China deeply offended our values. And religion abhorred family planning: In the Bible, God urged mankind to be fruitful and multiply, to “cover the Earth.” As religious traditionalists gained political power, the U.S. cut funding for population programs because of perceived links with abortion and concern that birth control led to promiscuity. For their part, secular liberals felt queasy about resonances with discredited ideas like eugenics and racist economic or immigration policies.

The issue was largely abandoned even by those who should have most embraced it, environmentalists. Why? Because there were plenty of other fights to take on; no sense inviting opposition to tough but ultimately less-contentious efforts such as preserving species or eliminating air pollution by having them associated with a populationist agenda. Gotta pick your battles.

Today the net U.S. birthrate – number of births in excess of deaths -- produces relatively slow growth. But our population continues to swell due to another major factor: immigration.

Talk about hot potatoes! Immigration issues divide opinion paradoxically, with some on the right advocating for more because it means a growing economy and labor supply, some disliking it because of concerns for American cultural identity. On the left, some want to assure refuge for the world’s downtrodden and welcome cultural diversity, while others worry about the influx of disenfranchised cheap labor, pressure on social services systems, and, yes, the environmental burden.

So, given the issue’s volatility, what can we do about population?
VSP seeks to help Vermonters engage the issue. The first goal is public education – making sure people understand overpopulation’s environmental and social effects and the range of action options available. They also recommend support for family planning programs, nationally and internationally.

And, importantly, for better immigration policies that reduce the flow into our country. George stresses that immigration control should not be equated with racism or bigotry. It’s a matter of common sense. Could we live abundantly and happily with twice as many people here? Maybe. How about ten times as many, or a hundred? Clearly not.

If we accept that there must be a limit at some level, where should it be?

So another item on the agenda must be research into what is truly sustainable. We need to determine what constitutes a viable population level – and what our criteria should be. Is the maximum number the land can possibly feed the only limiter, or should subjective aspects of quality of life – privacy, level of affluence, access to unspoiled natural lands – also be considered?

George and VSP don’t claim to know the answers to these questions, but they do assert the importance of asking them, and of giving the issue the rational, unbiased consideration it warrants.


Vermonters for a Sustainable Population provides scores of useful links to population-related organizations and publications on its website, www.vspop.org.

Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.



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