The Environmental Movement’s Retreat From
Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998):

A First Draft of History

Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz*
 June 2001

"Explanations I"



Fear that immigration reduction would alienate "progressive" allies and be seen as racially insensitive.
The transformation of population and environment into global issues needing global solutions.
Notes


Years of pondering this question have led the authors to the conclusion that, of all the factors involved in the environmental movement’s retreat from U.S. population stabilization, the growing demographic influence of immigration is the single most important one. Thus we are devoting the remainder of this monograph to a discussion of its different aspects. Historians will find much to consider in the following possible explanations for the groups’ avoidance of immigration numbers:

There is much to suggest that advocacy of immigration reduction is a personally embarrassing position for many who serve as leaders in environmental organizations. For example, one Sierra Club chapter leader in Tucson, Arizona called the immigration referendum "an embarrassment" even though he claimed to be alarmed by overpopulation.124

Consider how immigration was perceived before Earth Day of 1970: Very few persons or groups anywhere in America had had any experience with immigration issues for a half-century. Annual immigration numbers had been averaging below 200,000.

Immigrants played a tiny fraction of a role in the 1950s and 1960s U.S. population explosion, which was detonated almost entirely by high fertility among the nativeborn.125 Immigrants were assimilating easily and quickly. Polls showed overwhelming American support for the immigration program of those decades.126 The little hostility toward immigration policy that reached the public eye tended to be from persons and groups who resembled the textbook cases of nativism (discrimination against Americans who are foreign-born) and xenophobia (irrational fear and hatred of foreigners and immigrants) of the past. But that was before immigration quadrupled and became the predominant contributor to half the Formula for environmental deterioration.

In 1977, the Washington Post quoted ZPG’s lobbyist for immigration reduction:

"Americans have traditionally thought that immigration was good and that speaking out against immigration was just like speaking out against motherhood and apple pie. Over and over at congressional hearings, ZPG is the only group that raises a voice questioning the wisdom of letting in so many immigrants."127

Even when environmentalists knew fully the environmental necessity of reducing immigration, they risked becoming pariahs ostracized by "progressive" friends and political allies as being like the xenophobes and nativists who also wanted to reduce immigration because of their fear or hatred of foreigners. One example occurred during the acrimonious 1998 debate within the Sierra Club, when two Club activists made a presentation to a northern Virginia chapter’s executive committee. Speaking in favor of the immigration-reduction measure, they were abruptly cut off in mid-sentence by the committee’s vice-chair, and heatedly denounced as comparable to the KKK, while other committee members sat in awkward silence.128 In another blatant incident, UCLA astronomy professor and Club population activist Ben Zuckerman was openly called a racist to his face at an Angeles Chapter executive committee meeting by a chapter officer of Chicano background.129 Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope raised the fear himself that if the Club came out in favor of reducing immigration levels, "we would be perceived as assisting people whose motivations are racist."130 Paralleling the larger environmental movement’s decisive shift on the issue, Carl Pope had actually been a ZPG lobbyist in the 1970s at a time when it publicly advocated immigration reductions.

The possibility of being accused of racism was an especially big risk for environmental groups as it concerned their allied organizations outside of the environmental movement. These allies tended to identify themselves in a liberal political camp. Although one key root of the modern environmental movement was a conservationist movement that had a strong conservative and Republican component, environmental groups by the 1980s were predominantly entering coalitions with groups that leaned toward more liberal and Democratic identities. Beginning in 1981, the outright hostility of President Ronald Reagan and most of his political appointees (in contrast to previous Republican administrations) toward the environmental movement certainly helped push environmentalists toward alliances with more liberal and Democratic camps.

Yet, among advocates for immigration reduction in the 1980s and 1990s were some major liberal figures, such as former three-term Colorado Governor Dick Lamm and former U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy, who renounced the 1965 immigration law he had helped enact. In the 1990s, the late Barbara Jordan, former congresswoman and liberal icon, chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which examined immigration policies in terms of how they affected vulnerable American workers. In 1995, the commission declared: "The Commission decries hostility and discrimination against immigrants as antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country. At the same time, we disagree with those who would label efforts to control immigration as being inherently anti-immigrant. Rather, it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interests."131 The bi-partisan commission went on to recommend elimination of extended family categories (an action that would end chain migration) and stronger steps to curb illegal immigration.132 Around the same time the National Academy of Sciences released a major study which documented that immigration was the most important cause in the decline of real wages for less-educated workers over the last three decades.133

But the primary lens through which environmental leaders in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to view immigration was not an environmental —or labor— paradigm but a racial one. According to this paradigm, immigration often appeared to be about non-white people moving into a mostly white country, just as whites themselves had done to indigenous Native Americans in previous centuries. To propose reductions in immigration was not seen as reducing labor competition or population growth but as trying to protect the majority status of America’s white population. It was seen as rejecting non-white immigrants.134 Thus immigration as an issue became confused with the positive American development of the last three decades in which very few groups would want to be seen as inhospitable to non-white Americans.

Australian sociologist Katherine Betts has examined this phenomenon. She uses the term "new class" (a group similar to what former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysts"135) to describe the intelligentsia, professionally-educated internationalists and cosmopolitans, lawyers, academics, journalists, teachers, artists, activists, and globetrotting business people and travellers. Her cogent analysis of why the new class has eschewed the cause of limiting immigration in Australia is germane to the case of U. S. environmental leaders: "The concept of immigration control has become contaminated in the minds of the new class by the ideas of racism, narrow self-seeking nationalism, and a bigoted preference for cultural homogeneity....Their enthusiasm for anti-racism and international humanitarianism is often sincere but there are also social pressures supporting this sincere commitment and making apostasy difficult." And later: "Ideologically correct attitudes to immigration have offered the warmth of in-group acceptance to supporters and the cold face of exclusion to dissenters."136 Similar analysis in the United States suggests that it is "politically incorrect" to talk of reducing immigration.

Taboos against challenging immigration policies are enforced by a "political correctness" that often is based on honorable sentiments tied to an individual’s personal connections to immigration. These sentiments are usually strongest among those with the most direct, and recent, immigrant experiences in their immediate families, i.e. those whose spouses, parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles immigrated to the United States.

Sensitivity is heightened still more for those who feel a strong personal identity as a member of ethnic groups —such as Irish, Italian, Greek, Slavic, Chinese, Japanese or Jewish— whose members once fled persecution in other countries or who may have met with discrimination in this country. Even when such a person does recognize that U.S. Even when such a person does recognize that U.S. population growth is problematic, and that immigration is a major contributor to it, he or she may well reason that it would be hypocritical, as a descendant of immigrants and indirect beneficiary of a generous immigration policy, to "close the door" even partially on any prospective immigrant. Dealing with immigration can become almost physically sickening for such people, who feel they must make a choice between environmental protection and their view of themselves as a part of an immigrant ethnic group. (For such Americans, their own ethnic group’s experiences seem to obscure the fact that more than 90 percent of present immigrants are not fleeing persecution or starvation but are simply seeking greater material prosperity.) Thus, the response of these Americans to the population dilemma may have more to do with their sense of ethnicity than any scientific analysis of environmental challenges.

Many participants in the 1970-era environmental movement have suggested that the strength of ties to immigrant ethnic identities was a major factor in determining which leaders abandoned population stabilization and which continued to advocate it even when it entailed tackling immigration. To learn if this was an important factor in the movement’s retreat from stabilization advocacy, scholars would need ways of quantifying this claim. Despite the reality of the above discussion about the effect of immigrant ethnic identity on many individuals, it is possible that environmentalists of such ethnic backgrounds were no more likely —and maybe even less likely— than other environmentalists to abandon the population side of the Foundational Formula. Careful research, quantification and analysis are required here.

Environmental groups had also been stung in recent years with criticisms from some quarters that they were white elitist organizations with little concern about how their advocacy on behalf of wilderness, biodiversity and open space might affect the jobs and economic opportunity of working class people – particularly non-white Americans.

From other quarters they were hit with the charge that they ignored environmental threats to urban areas and their mostly minority residents. Although environmentalists protested these criticisms, there was no denying that relatively few black, Asian and Latino Americans belonged to mainstream environmental groups or held positions of power within them.

Thus, some environmental groups engaged in aggressive programs to court members in minority communities, encourage greater diversity among their staffs and boards, and promote "environmental justice." In 1992, at his Sierra Club Centennial Address, then-executive director Michael Fischer went as far as proposing that the Club should be turned over completely to minorities.137 Professor and deep ecologist George Sessions commented in 1998 that: "The pressure upon (and even intimidation of) environmental organizations to turn towards social/environmental justice concerns has recently become enormous."138 Environmental justice advocates believe that poor and minority communities have been disproportionately "dumped on" or even systematically targeted by corporate polluters. Arising in the late 1980s, and spurred by civil rights activists like Jesse Jackson and former NAACP leader Benjamin Chavis, the environmental justice movement was given a big boost by the October, 1991, People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., at which the attendees issued a resounding "call to arms."139 (Some observers argue that in the 1990s, the environmental justice movement was "hijacked" by the much broader "social justice" movement, which had primarily non-environmental goals.140 In New Mexico, for example, one prominent Hispanic activist who served on the boards of two organizations dealing with consumer and environmental issues, denounced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for conducting a sting operation in northern New Mexico, an area with few job opportunities, that led to the arrest of a number of Hispanic residents for allegedly trafficking in endangered species parts, on the grounds that it was discriminatory.141)

The more that supporters of U.S. population growth and quadrupled immigration levels claimed that immigration reduction had racist motives, the more environmental groups appeared to fear that their minority members would desert them if they continued to call for U.S. population stabilization and reductions in immigration. Some Latino Sierrans were very direct in their threats. Angeles Chapter leader Luis Quirarte said that if the initiative passed, "I plan to quit [the Sierra Club]. I am a Chicano and blood is thicker than water."142 Another, Al Martinez, wrote of a bad dream he had in which "Sierra Club Envirocops" rounded up hapless immigrants for deportation.143

One of the main reasons the Sierra leadership gave in 1998 for avoiding the immigration issue was that they dared not risk appearing to be racially insensitive. Executive Director Carl Pope acknowledged that the official endorsers of the referendum trying to confront immigration numbers did not have racially questionable motives.

Rather, he admitted, they were esteemed Sierrans and environmental scholars, with distinguished records of environmental service to their country. In fact, Pope said, he used to agree with them that immigration should be cut for environmental reasons. But he changed his mind because he didn’t believe it possible to conduct a public discussion about immigration cuts without stirring up racial passions: "While it is theoretically possible to have a non-racial debate about immigration, it is not practically possible for an open organization like the Sierra Club to do so. A rational position paper and the desire for national debate do not yield a rational debate in the public arena of America today...[Recent history in California has] caused me to change my view of whether it is possible for the Sierra Club to deal with the immigration issue in a way which would not implicate us in ethnic or racial polarization."144 Pope acknowledged that it was the opponents of stabilization who were injecting race into the discussion by publicly "lambasting the club as racist." But the Sierra Club, he insisted, could not subject itself to those kinds of epithets merely in order to confront the full issue of U.S. population growth.145 This attitude struck a number of observers as an evasion of responsibility on a serious national issue. "The choice for the Sierra Club is whether it wants to grow up and take part in grownup issues," wrote columnist and editorialist Al Knight in the Denver Post.146

For Pope, the fear of being called a racist was more powerful than the endorsement of immigration reduction by such environmentalist heroes and distinguished scholars as Gaylord Nelson, E. O. Wilson, Lester Brown, Dave Foreman, Paul Watson, Stewart Udall, Herman Daly, Norman Myers, Galen Rowell, George Kennan and Martin Litton. These individuals, and many others, publicly indicated their support for the Sierra Club initiative for U.S. population stabilization including immigration reduction.147

ZPG’s president Judith Jacobsen addressed the racial issues in a 1998 letter to members: "ZPG is already explicitly committed to building bridges to communities of color and working on immigrants’ rights as part of our long-held goal of improving the success of the population movement by expanding it to include a broad spectrum of American diversity. A policy to reduce legal immigration now would make this work impossible. We want ZPG to strengthen our ties to communities of color, not jeopardize them. In this way, we can build relationships, listen and refine our immigration policy and strategy as the public debate evolves."148 Jacobsen said the ZPG board voted to take no position on reduction of immigration, "with full knowledge of immigration’s important role in the U.S. population growth, both today and in the future."

One participant at a "roundtable discussion on global migration, population and the environment" in Washington, D.C. on November 15, 1995, sponsored by the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative and the National Immigration Forum, was struck by how emphatically then-ZPG President Dianne Dillon-Ridgely dismissed any concern about immigration’s contribution to the country’s population growth as illegitimate.149 At a March, 1998 speech in West Virginia, ZPG Executive Director Peter Kostmayer, when questioned about immigration, told the audience: "Let me be frank. You are a wealthy, middle-class community, and if you concentrate on the issue of immigration as a way of controlling population, you won’t come off well. It just doesn’t work. The population movement has an unhappy history in this regard."150 About the same time, in a handwritten note to a ZPG member inquiring about the group’s immigration stance, Kostmayer wrote, "...it would be so, so counterproductive to be perceived as antiimmigrant."151. By the 1990s, at ZPG, the imperative of welcoming "diversity" had evidently trumped stabilization and environmental concerns.

It appears that many knowledgeable environmentalist leaders privately acknowledged the need for immigration reduction in order to stabilize the U.S. population. However, the harsh manner in which supporters of reduced immigration have so often been treated by the news media and intellectual and social (including environmentalist) elites understandably gave pause to such environmental leaders. Many would take such a stand publicly only if there was no risk of it jeopardizing the reputation, support or funding of their own organizations. For example, the late Henry W. Kendall, a Nobel laureate in physics and the co-founder and chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), initially indicated his willingness to be listed with other prominent supporters of the Sierra Club population stabilization/immigration reduction measure, but retracted it after the group’s executive director told him it could be damaging for UCS.152 Two other well-known environmentalists also initially signed on to the U.S. population stabilization/immigration reduction measure, but withdrew their public support after phone calls from Sierra Club president Adam Werbach.153 (In contrast, at least two other celebrated environmental leaders, Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson and Worldwatch Institute founder and president Lester Brown were also approached by Werbach, but turned down his appeal to revoke their support.154) Other group leaders would publicly endorse immigration reduction only as individuals or as members of unaffiliated government commissions. At about the same time that the Sierra Club and ZPG both formally disavowed positions on immigration reduction, a Sierra executive along with the then-president and a future president of ZPG all participated on the Population and Consumption Task Force of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. They were joined by the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund (neither of which has ever adopted a policy on U.S. population stabilization) in issuing the aforementioned statement that "reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stabilization and the drive toward sustainability."155

In 1970, population growth often was discussed in terms of its threat to local or national environmental resources – in countries all over the world. The argument often went something like this: The cultures, traditions, religions, economies, health care, tax structures and laws of each country create incentives for high birth rates. Each country has to make its own changes to bring down those birth rates to protect its own environmental resources, but nations also must act cooperatively in international efforts to provide financial and technical assistance to those nations requesting them. Because some of the problems of overpopulation were indeed global, each nation had a stake in every other nation moving toward population stabilization.

By the 1990s, most environmental group comments about population growth were that it was almost exclusively a global problem. Population growth rarely was described as a threat to localized environmental resources such as specific watersheds, landscapes, species habitats, estuaries and aquifers. Rather, population growth usually was linked to global (or world-wide) environmental problems such as biodiversity losses, climate change and the decline of the oceans.156 It was not uncommon to hear claims that the environment was a global issue and that efforts to address environmental problems nationally were inappropriate —both unseemly and doomed to failure. Many environmentalist elites and much organizational literature employed lofty rhetoric that seemed to echo the sentiment expressed by Erasmus in the 16th century when he proudly proclaimed: "I wish to be called a citizen of the world."157 This orientation is sometimes called the "One World" perspective.

Under the new thinking, the population size of individual nations was not nearly as important as the size of the total global population. Certain top leaders of the environmental groups said this was a significant reason they no longer saw U.S. population stabilization per se as a priority goal. They especially lost interest in U.S. stabilization when in the 1990s long-term U.S. population growth was being driven almost entirely by people in other countries moving to the United States and having their above-replacement-level number of babies in America. In the ascendant "global" view, this migration wasn’t important because it was merely shifting the growth from one part of the globe to another; the global problem was not increasing because of it, they reasoned.

The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope said: "I seriously doubt that anyone is in a position to calculate exactly which changes in immigration policy would minimize GLOBAL environmental stress..." 158 And after all, the Sierra Club’s mission, stated on the cover of Sierra magazine, had by the 1990s expanded to embrace the lofty goal of "protecting the planet," not just, or even primarily, the American portion of the planet. Any preference for saving U.S. environmental treasures first and foremost was implicitly regarded as parochial, outmoded, and futile. This contrasted with the earlier, more patriotic image of the Club as focused primarily on saving American resources and landscapes —perhaps reflected best in the 1960s-era poster "THIS IS THE AMERICAN EARTH" of a dramatic Ansel Adams photograph of the Sierra Nevada.159

When some Americans complained in the 1990s that U.S. population growth was threatening environmental resources in their own country, they were told by Sierra Club leaders that immigration-driven U.S. growth was environmentally acceptable because it was not making global environmental problems worse. Yet even on this count, the Sierra establishment had it wrong: In general, transferring large numbers of people from low-consumption, poor countries to the richest, highest-consuming country in the world was unequivocally worse for the global environment.160 The typical American consumer has a much larger "ecological footprint" than the typical consumer of the developing countries which were now the greatest source of immigration to the United States.161 The U.S. had the highest per capita industrial carbon dioxide (the leading "greenhouse gas") emissions of any country in the world, 19.1 metric tons/yr., compared to 0.9 tons for India (about 1/20th the U.S. figure) and 2.3 tons for China (roughly 1/10th U.S. per capita emissions).162 U.S. commercial energy production per capita was four times the world average, three times Mexico’s, ten times China’s, and 28 times India’s.163. Sierrans who favored U.S. stabilization criticized the Club’s national leadership for its inconsistency.

On the one hand, the Sierra establishment berated lavish American lifestyles for endangering the global environment with their bloated resource consumption and enormous waste generation. On the other, the Sierra establishment apparently saw no problem with an unlimited number of migrants moving to the U.S. precisely to join in this consumption binge while it lasted.

Certain conservation leaders continued to voice support for efforts to protect American treasures even in the face of massive global environmental problems. "We may not be able to save the world, but we aspire to take care of our piece of it," wrote Geoffrey Bernard, President of the Grand Canyon Trust.164 The former Sierra Club and Audubon executive Brock Evans wrote the board of the Sierra Club on the eve of the 1998 immigration referendum that, "[Immigration] is an environmental issue (among others). Somehow, if we love our earth – yes, even the earth of this, our own country, where we live (not some abstraction from far away) – we must face it."165 But the board was not swayed by this or other appeals. Instead, Executive Director Pope wrote in AsianWeek that overpopulation and its effects on the environment are "fundamentally global problems; immigration is merely a local symptom....Erecting fences to keep people out of this country does nothing to fix the planet’s predicament. It’s the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."166

Pope’s and certain other environmental leaders’ contention that it does not matter where people live acknowledges but a single spatial scale —the global— on a planet which possesses many spatial scales: from micro, to local, regional, state, national, inter-national, continental, and global, or in ecological terms, from organism, to population, community, ecosystem, biome, biosphere, and ecosphere. If it does not matter where any given number of global resource consumers/polluters are living, then by extension it should not matter if Ecuadorians continue migrating to the sensitive, ecologically-unique Galapagos Islands; it should not matter if Asia’s squalor and overpopulation were relieved by relocating its teeming multitudes to the unpopulated, virgin Amazon rain forest; and it should not matter if California’s mushrooming suburbs were transplanted to the empty Alaskan wilderness that the Sierra Club and other conservation groups struggled to preserve. America’s national parks, forests, and other public open space cannot and should not be protected with boundaries and patrolled by rangers from squatters, poachers, loggers, ranchers, rogue recreationists, and miners.

Under this same promiscuous "One World" or "open borders" logic, hundreds of millions of mothers in the Zambias, Indias, Colombias, Cambodias, and Haitis of the world —with their own private reproductive decisions (and the global mobility heralded by "One Worlders")— have effective veto power over whether concerned Americans (and especially Floridians) will be able to save the beleaguered Everglades, Florida Bay, and the Florida keys from pollution and sprawling development due to South Florida’s incessant population growth (driven by domestic and international migration as well as higher immigrant fertility). Surely, treating the entire planet as a "global village" or one open commons is a formula for ineffectual local actions, for paralysis, and ultimately, for a disaster of global proportions —a "tragedy of the commons" writ large. The biggest environmental groups have largely eschewed the notion of parallel efforts, of genuinely "thinking globally, and acting locally" in Rene Dubos’ popular phrase. They now seem to consider the Earth to be one big common property resource with each and every acre belonging equally to all of humanity. In their policies and rhetoric, they have spurned the philosophy reflected in the following words of astronomer and stalwart population activist Ben Zuckerman: "...it is imperative that in addition to trying to save the world we try to save some —horrors!— merely local spots on Earth, including the U.S."167

It is ironic that most environmental group leaders endorse what amounts to a laissez-faire approach toward migration, even as they scorn this sort of "hands-off" approach to other environmental/ecological issues. In a Sierra editorial entitled "Corporate Crime: The consequences of letting polluters police themselves,"168 Carl Pope inveighed against a growing tendency among government regulators to approve of self-policing by industrial dischargers and collaboration with extractive industries. He cautioned against the naďve belief that "win-win" solutions are always possible in environmental disputes. "Voluntary measures and self-policing sound appealing, but they aren’t enough to keep law and order on the environmental frontier," wrote Pope sensibly.

Yet when it comes to the actual U.S. frontier, across which ever more people (each of whom pollutes) migrate and wish to migrate, Pope and others seem to believe that self-policing will do just fine. That is, to migrate or not to migrate —to impose or not to impose additional ecological burdens on an already stressed America— should be the prerogative of prospective migrants themselves, not those Americans whose environment and quality of life are affected by ever more people. Were this "go with the flow" approach adopted in other areas of environmental policy, the results would be as disastrous for the environment as today’s lax immigration policies are for efforts to contain population growth. The Tragedy of the Commons would convert "America the Beautiful" into "America the Wasteland."

Learning how population became framed almost entirely as a global problem will require some research. Two of the possible antecedents are the 1945 birth of the United Nations as a reaction to the unprecedented carnage of World War II, and the 1950s movement against the atmospheric testing of atomic and nuclear bombs. Another very strong impetus was undoubtedly rendered, if inadvertently, from an unexpected quarter —outer space. By the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. space program began broadcasting views of the Earth from its moon missions that depicted a breathtaking and seamless blue, white, and brown planet against the black void of space. These moving images certainly helped sell the notion of One World captured in presidential candidate and statesman Adlai Stevenson’s evocative term "Spaceship Earth." NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in its public programs, regales audiences with an expansive, optimistic view of ever grander ventures into space by a united human race.

In a PBS interview with Bill Moyers, the late Joseph Campbell, author of many books on myths and a major influence on George Lucas’ creation of the Star Wars movies, spoke hopefully of the emergence of an enlightened planetary consciousness:

Moyers: "There’s that wonderful photograph you have of the earth seen from space, and it’s very small and at the same time it’s very grand."

Campbell: "You don’t see any divisions there, of nations, of states, or anything of the kind. "This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That [Earth as a whole] is the country that we are going to be celebrating, and these are the people [all humanity in its rich racial and cultural diversity] that we are one with."169

Another place to look might be the Nuclear Freeze movement toward the end of the Cold War. Global environmental and climatological disaster were at the heart of the warning from that movement against the nuclear arms race.170 On this issue, it would have been foolhardy to have talked about protecting one’s own country against a "nuclear winter." The solution ultimately had to be global.

In this sense, the threats of ozone depletion and global warming are similar to those that the Nuclear Freeze movement warned against. The staffs of environmental organizations typically mingle with the staffs of other non-profits, especially those with global orientations working on economic development, peace, human rights, women’s and hunger issues. As the environmental groups have reached out into global networks, this has become increasingly true. Perhaps that can help explain the transformation of population growth into almost entirely a global issue in the approach of U.S. national environmental leaders.


Notes

124. Rhonda Bodfield. 1998. "Sierra Club Split: Factions in Environmental Group at Odds Over Immigration Limits." The Arizona Daily Star. April 12.
125. Supra, note 111. Lytwak calculates that immigration accounted for 1% of U.S. population growth in 1950, 5% in 1960, 13% in 1970, 38% in 1980, 58% in 1990, and 61% in 1996.
126. Roy Beck. 1996. The Case Against Immigration. New York and London: W.W. Norton.
127. Supra, note 113.
128. This incident occurred to Leon Kolankiewicz and Richard Koris in front of the executive committee of the Great Falls Group of the Old Dominion Chapter of the Club, and was reported in the Washington Post article by William Branigin on March 7.
129. E-mail to the authors from Ben Zuckerman, May 26, 1999.
130. William Branigin. 1998. "Immigration Policy Dispute Rocks Sierra Club." The Washington Post. March 7.
131. U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. 1994. U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility. Quote from Executive Summary. Barbara Jordan also delivered these remarks in testimony before a congressional hearing.
132. The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (or Jordan Commission) issued a number of reports from 1994-98.
133. James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston (eds.). 1997. The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration. Panel on the Demographic and Economic Impacts of Immigration, Committee on Population and Committee on National Statistics, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
134. Emil Guillermo. 1997. "The Sierra Club’s Nativist Faction." San Francisco Examiner. December 17.
135. Robert Reich. 1991. The Work of Nations: A Blueprint for the Future. New York and London: Simon & Schuster.
136. Katherine Betts. 1999. The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove. Quotes from p. 5 and p. 29, respectively.
137. Supra, note 94.
138. George Sessions. 1998. "Will the Real Sierra Club Please Stand Up?" Focus, Vol. 8, No. 1. Washington, D.C.; Carrying Capacity Network.
139. Supra, note 94.
140. Fred Elbel. 1999. E-mail to authors. May 14.
141. This incident was personally observed by Leon Kolankiewicz in 1989.
142. Frank Clifford. 1998. "Immigration Vote Divides Sierra Club." Los Angeles Times, March 16.
143. Al Martinez. 1997. "Listen to the Wind..." Los Angeles Times. October 7.
144. Carl Pope. 1997. On-line post to Sierra members.
145. Sierra Club population activist Fred Elbel points out that at the Sierra Club as well as other organizations, "everything is now seen through the filter of ‘political correctness.’ It is not politically correct to address population stabilization and immigration reduction in any form if it means harming the interests of immigrant minorities" (written correspondence to authors, May 14, 1999).
146. Al Knight. 1998. "It’s Not Easy Being Green: Sierra Club Faces New Identity Crisis." Denver Post. February 15.
147. Three of the initiative’s most famous original supporters —David Brower, Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich— all dropped their public support in late 1997, before their names were printed on the official ballots. Brower and Anne Ehrlich were board members, and might well have felt pressured by the rest of the board to toe the "party line." Paul Ehrlich presumably dropped off in support of his wife, with whom he works very closely. (In Ehrlich’s case, the record over the years indicates considerable ambiguity and ambivalence on the subject of an environmentally-appropriate stance toward immigration levels.)
148. Supra, note 84.
149. Personal communication from individual present at the conference. 1999.
150. Georgia C. DuBose. 1998. "ZPG official says law, local action can cut population." The Journal (Martinsburg, West Virginia). March 29.
151. Peter Kostmayer. 1998. Letter to ZPG member. March 30.
152. Dr. Kendall subsequently indicated to Leon Kolankiewicz that his name could be used privately —and that he as a private individual strongly supported the measure— but that his name could not be placed on any publicly distributed lists because of the strong linkage in the public’s mind between him and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Ironically, a certain senior UCS staff member did publicly support the opposition. When Kolankiewicz asked Kendall if this wasn’t an inconsistency, Kendall replied that it was this staffer’s prerogative to do as he pleased, and that UCS executive director Howard Ris’ admonition specifically referred to Kendall himself and to siding with the pro-reduction Sierra Clubbers. Once again, it was apparently seen as riskier to explicitly endorse immigration reduction rather than to endorse ostensible "neutrality" (a neutrality that was an implicit endorsement of the high-immigration status quo).
153. Documented in private e-mails of members of Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization 1998. Werbach was widely known to be extremely hostile to the immigration reduction measure, which in a July, 1998 Outside magazine article he was quoted as saying was "horrendous." The same article, and other sources, recounted his pledge to have resigned from office if the measure were to have passed.
154. Watson case documented in January, 1998 e-mail by Ben Zuckerman. According to notes taken by Zuckerman referencing a conversation with Watson immediately after this incident, Werbach was enraged that Watson would sign such a "racist" measure. Brown case documented in personal communication to Leon Kolankiewicz, 1998. After SUSPS members learned that Werbach was himself phoning SUSPS signatories in an effort to dislodge them from the list of supporters, Kolankiewicz was requested to make contact with Brown to ensure that he was still "on board." Brown informed Kolankiewicz that he had already been phoned by Werbach, but had declined to withdraw his name in response to Werbach’s direct request.
155. Supra, note 117; Dianne Dillon-Ridgley, president of ZPG was the task force co-chair; other members included Michele Perrault, then International Vice President of the Sierra Club (as well as a former president and later, a board member), John Adams, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Fred Krupp, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund. The task force was assisted by Judith Jacobsen, who later became president of ZPG. Of interest is the fact that Perrault’s Sierra affiliation was not listed in the task force report, reportedly because the Club had just adopted its "neutrality" stance, and would not associate its name with any document advocating reduced immigration.
156. A prime example of this global view is Al Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance (1992, Houghton Mifflin). In 1998 Vice-President Gore again explicitly linked population growth to global issues when he touted increased family planning support as one means of combating global warming. The Washington based non-profit Population Action International (formerly the Population Crisis Committee) also released a report in 1998 linking global climate and population futures (Robert Engelman. 1998. Profiles in Carbon: An Update on Population, Consumption and Carbon Dioxide Emissions. Washington, D.C.: Population Action International).
157. Garrett Hardin. 1999. The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia. New York: Oxford University Press.
158. Carl Pope. 1997. Post to on-line Sierra Club population forum. December 16.
159. Network Bulletin. 1998. Vol. 8, No. 2. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network; Tom Turner. 1991. Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature. New York: Harry N. Abrams. The Sierra Club also published a book entitled This Is The American Earth with text by Nancy Newhall and photos by Ansel Adams in 1960.
160. Jason DinAlt. 1994. "The Environmental Impact of Immigration Into the United States." Focus, Vol. 4, No. 2. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network.
161. Supra, note 35.
162. World Resources Institute. 1996. World Resources, 1996-97. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
163. Ibid.
164. Geoffrey Bernard. 1998. Colorado Plateau Advocate. Winter.
165. Brock Evans. 1998. "The Sierra Club Ballot Referendum on Immigration, Population and the Environment." Focus, Vol. 8, No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network. Evans is the Executive Director of the Endangered Species Coalition, and a former Vice-President for National Issues of the National Audubon Society, Associate Executive Director of the Sierra Club, 1981 recipient of the Club’s highest honor (the John Muir Award), and 1984 candidate for Congress from the state of Washington.
166. Carl Pope. 1998. "Think Globally, Act Sensibly —Immigration is not the problem." AsianWeek (San Francisco, CA). April 2. Pope used the same comparison in a February 25, 1998 debate on (Santa Monica, California-based) NPR affiliate KCRW’s (Santa Monica, California) program "Which Way L.A.?" and on other occasions. The irony of using the Titanic analogy to represent overpopulation and immigration is that if the HMS Titanic’s bulkheads had been sealed and reached all the way up (a standard feature in ships nowadays) instead of just part-way, the ship might have been saved from sinking because in rushing ocean water would have been confined to several compartments instead of spilling over the top of each bulkhead into subsequent ones. (The Titanic could flood four compartments and still float. It breached five.) Thus, another conclusion that can be drawn from this maritime tragedy is that barriers between distinct nationstates may well be essential to preventing one country’s failure to address overpopulation from becoming the whole world’s failure. Economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding (author of "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth"), in another of his insightful essays, wrote that what really disturbed him was the possibility of converting the world from a place of many experiments into one giant, global experiment where failure somewhere would become failure everywhere.
167. Ben Zuckerman. 1999. E-mail to the authors, May 26.
168. Carl Pope. 1999. "Corporate Crime: The consequences of letting polluters police themselves." Sierra, July/August.
169. From "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth; Program 1: The Hero’s Adventure." 1988. Mystic Fire Viceo, Inc./Parabola Magazine.
170. See, for example: Jonathan Schell. 1982. The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf) as well as many articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

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[MFS note: works of several of the cited authors are available on the "Sustainability Authors" page here; for two directly related items on the MFS Website, see "How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population – Environment Connection" and Powerdown.]
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* Used with permission of the authors.