The years surrounding 1970 marked the coming of age of the modern environmental movement. As that movement enters its fourth decade, perhaps the most striking change is the virtual abandonment by national environmental groups of U.S. population stabilization as an actively pursued goal.

How did the American environmental movement change so radically? Answering that question will be a challenging assignment for historians. The authors are not historians. We have spent most of our lives as a journalist and an environmental scientist, respectively. But to the historians who eventually take up the task, we have many suggestions of where to look.

To begin to understand why that retreat has occurred and the significance of the retreat, it will be important to review the 1970-era movement and its population roots.

Around 1970, U.S. population and environmental issues were widely and publicly linked.

In environmental "teach-ins" across America, college students of the time heard repetitious proclamations on the necessity of stopping U.S. population growth in order to reach environmental goals; and the most public of reasons for engaging population issues was to save the environment. The nation’s best-known population group, Zero Population Growth (ZPG) —founded by biologists concerned about the catastrophic impacts of ever more human beings on the biosphere— was outspokenly also an environmental group. And many of the nation’s largest environmental groups had or were considering "population control" as major planks of their environmental prescriptions for America.

As Stewart Udall (Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) wrote in The Quiet Crisis: "Dave Brower [executive director of the Sierra Club] 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.’"¹ Brower encouraged Stanford University biologist and ZPG cofounder Paul Ehrlich to write The Population Bomb, published in 1968, which surpassed even Rachel Carson’s landmark work, Silent Spring, to become the best-selling ecology book of the 1960s.² Ehrlich’s polemic echoed and amplified population concerns earlier raised by two widely read books, both published in 1948: Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, chairman of the Conservation Foundation, and Road to Survival, by William Vogt, a former Audubon Society official who later became the national director of Planned Parenthood.³

The seeming consensus among leaders of the nascent environmental movement was paralleled, and bolstered, by widespread agreement among influential researchers and scholars in the natural sciences throughout the 1960s and 1970s.⁴ The importance attached to each country’s stopping its own population growth was not confined to the United States. In 1972, Great Britain’s leading environmental magazine, The Ecologist, published the hard-hitting Blueprint for Survival, supported by thirty-four distinguished biologists, ecologists, doctors, and economists, including Sir Julian Huxley, Peter Scott, and Sir Frank Fraser-Darling. With regard to population, the Blueprint stated: "First, governments must acknowledge the problem and declare their commitment to ending population growth; this commitment should also include an end to immigration."⁵

Organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 note that U.S. population growth was a central theme.⁶ The nationwide celebration revealed a massive popular groundswell that 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.⁷ 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.

President Nixon addressed the nation about problems it would face if U.S. population growth continued unabated. On January 1, 1970, the president signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),⁸ often referred to as the nation’s "environmental Magna Carta."⁹ 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."¹⁰ Later in 1970, 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."¹¹

Environmental advocates envisioned making the transition to U.S. 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."¹²

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 same groups committed themselves to "find, encourage and implement at the earliest possible time" the policies and attitudes that would bring about the stabilization of the U.S. population.¹³

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, on the nightly TV news, and even on network entertainment such as the popular "Johnny Carson Show." Suddenly after more than twenty 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. Most of that interest had disappeared by 1998, however —but not because population growth had stopped or the problems it caused had been solved.

When the Society for Environmental Journalists held its annual conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in October 1998, urban sprawl was a recurring theme. And no wonder —U.S. population growth was every bit as potent a force in 1998 as it had been in 1970: some 2.5 million Americans were being added each year at a rate faster than some Third World countries and ten times faster than Europe. It was a volume of growth nearly matching that of the Baby Boom years that helped trigger the 1970-era environmental/population movement. The Earth Day 1970 vision of a stabilized American population within a generation had never materialized.

Yet population growth was strangely missing from most reporting on sprawl and from a popular session in which a panel of newspaper reporters and editors discussed their expansive coverage of the problems from, the causes of, and the solutions to urban sprawl in different parts of the country. The panelists talked about problematic zoning, planning and lifestyle choices, but not about the 25 million new residents added each decade —or the sheer amount of space required for their housing, worksites, schools, roads, recreation facilities, shopping centers, and other infrastructure. When challenged from the audience, all the panelists agreed that urban sprawl would be far less destructive without the massive population growth that was occurring in America.

And they agreed that urban life and environmental losses would be immensely different if some 70 million people had not been added to the U.S. population since 1970. In the late 1990s, as in 1970, the problems stemming from U.S. population growth were huge news. But the underlying population growth itself and its causes were barely being mentioned.

Journalists tend to look to competing interest groups to define the issues they cover.

The Sierra campaign instead focused its advocacy on creating more regulation and management of U.S. growth to ameliorate its adverse effects on the environment. And it assumed —and tacitly accepted— that the U.S. population would never stop growing. That Chattanooga room’s anecdotal reflection of the news media and environmental movement in the late 1990s was verified in national research by Professor T. Michael Maher of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He conducted a study of news coverage of urban sprawl, endangered species, and water shortages —all issues profoundly affected by population growth. In a random sample of 150 stories on those issues, he found only one which mentioned that part of the solution might be to try to stabilize the U.S. population.¹⁴

The journalists told Maher they were uncomfortable raising the population issue on their own. With the business and political establishments continuing to push for "more growth" and the environmental establishment now pushing for "smart growth," the special-interest groups had defined a spectrum for the media that excluded "no growth" and "greatly reduced growth" from the range of available, acceptable options. Maher studied the membership materials for the nation’s environmental groups and discovered:

"Population is off the agenda for the purported leaders of the environmental movement."¹⁵ The authors have chosen 1998 as the end of the period being analyzed here because that was the year when the environmental movement erupted in a highly public battle over U.S. population issues. After more than two decades of dwindling interest in population issues, many of the old environmental guard from the 1970 era openly challenged the national leadership of two influential organizations, the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, to put U.S. population stabilization —and the reduction in immigration levels it entailed— back on the agenda. The Sierra Club and ZPG, once so outspoken in the 1970s on the urgency of U.S. stabilization, had each changed their policies in the two years prior to 1998 to dissociate themselves from this cause. We use them as primary case studies.

[A note: In 1998, the national Sierra Club leadership defeated those who tried to return their organization to its earlier pro-stabilization policy, which advocated both lower fertility and lower immigration. It remains to be seen whether this failed attempt represented the last gasp of the 1970-era environmental-population movement or if it was in fact the latest skirmish in an ongoing, intensifying struggle.]¹⁶

The retreat from stabilization advocacy by environmental groups in the 1990s directly contradicted the conclusion of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development in 1996. Established by President Clinton to follow through on the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (the "Earth Summit"), the council acknowledged the integral relationship between a stable population and sustainable development, observing that "clearly, human impact on the environment is a function of both population and consumption patterns." and declaring the need to "move toward stabilization of the U.S. population."¹⁷

Such thinking was central to the environmental activism of the 1970 era because most environmentalists’ view of environmental quality was deeply shaped by what we will call here the "Foundational Formula" of the movement. That formula expressed the movement’s understanding of the problem it was tackling and of how to solve it. The 1990s environmental movement was fundamentally different from the 1970-era movement in that it had largely abandoned that Foundational Formula.

There are several ways of expressing the environmental impacts of humanity. One of the best known is the I=PAT equation offered by biologist Paul Ehrlich and physicist John Holdren:

Environmental Impact (I) equals Population size (P) times Affluence, or consumption per person (A), times Technology, or damage per unit of consumption (T).¹⁸

However it was expressed, the Foundational Formula considered the goal to be reduction of total environmental impact on a watershed or any other ecosystem. And it considered total environmental impact to be the result of two factors:

(1) Individual Impact and (2) Population Size

Individual Impact is the environmental effect of an average individual’s resource consumption from environmental "sources" and waste generation into environmental "sinks." An individual does not have direct control over all of his or her environmental impact. That impact is determined directly by individual voluntary choices about consumption and lifestyle, and indirectly by collective political choices through laws and regulations limiting the impact of producers and consumers (including private and public sectors, individuals and institutions), by the vigor of enforcement of those rules, by available technology to reduce the impact of economic activities, by the financial ability of a society to utilize available technology, and by the methods corporations use to produce and market goods and services.

Population Size is the total number of individuals living in a given bio-region or ecosystem. Thus, the Total Environmental Impact on the Chesapeake Bay is primarily the result of the Individual Impact of a person living within the larger Chesapeake Bay watershed multiplied by the Population Size in the watershed —plus some of the "ecological footprints" of people outside the watershed. The "footprint" is the area of ecologically productive land needed to supply per capita demand for food, housing, transportation, and consumer goods and services, as well as the land area necessary to sequester carbon dioxide emissions (via photosynthesis) from energy use, i.e., fossil fuel combustion.¹⁹

One doesn’t have to work with the Foundational Formula much to realize that changes in the Individual Impact and changes in the Population Size factor have roughly equal power over improving or deteriorating Total Environmental Impact. For example: Increasing the Individual Impact by 30 percent while holding Population Size constant, would have a tremendously deleterious effect on the bay. And so would increasing Population Size by 30 percent (as Individual Impact is held constant). It really doesn’t matter which one is increased; the bay feels similar pain.

By working on both factors of the environmental Foundational Formula, the early movement had a comprehensive approach to move toward restoration and protection of the environment. The later environmental movement, however, chose a course that allowed the Population Size factor to move ever upward. Every move upward by Population Size ratchets the Total Environmental Impact upward. Thus, the later "half-formula" environmental movement would forever have to work for lower and lower Individual Impact just to keep the environment from deteriorating further —let alone to achieve restoration— running faster and faster just to stay in place.

While most environmental groups averted their attention from the population issue, the U.S. population soared by more than 33 percent (nearly 70 million people) between 1970 and 1998 —mostly because of increased immigration. The Census Bureau projects that, under current immigration policies, U.S. population will grow by yet another 50 percent over the next fifty years.

As the Foundational Formula would predict under such rapid population growth, most U.S. environmental goals set in the 1970s had not been met by 1998. The worsening of the Population Size factor had in many respects negated the improvements in the Individual Impact factor. For instance, America’s lakes, rivers, and streams were to have become "fishable and swimmable," according to the 1972 Clean Water Act. But after more than half a trillion dollars spent controlling water pollution (costs passed on to consumers and taxpayers), around 40 percent of U.S. surface waters still weren’t fishable and swimmable in the mid-1990s.²⁰ The nation has more nitrogen oxide (a smog precursor) and more carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) emissions than thirty years ago, more endangered species and fewer wetlands.²¹ Regulations on Individual Impact that were thought to be sufficient to meet overall goals had to be tightened much further.

The environmental groups never stopped pressing Congress to lessen Individual Impact on the environment by advocating legislation and regulations targeting private companies, government resource managers, and individual consumers. But through the years, they dropped their advocacy for dealing with the Population Size part of the environmental Formula. And as Congress numerous times debated and approved policies that increased Population Size substantially, the major environmental groups stood silent.

Historians will likely find that the environmental movement’s abandonment of its Foundational Formula has many causes. We list several of the possibilities below, along with some evidence for each, which can serve as a "first draft" for future historians.

In 1972, the U.S. Total Fertility Rate fell to below the 2.1 births per woman that marks the replacement-level fertility rate. By 1976, fertility had hit an all-time low of 1.7 and hovered just above that for years.

A common remembrance of aging population activists is their memory of the night in 1973 when TV broadcasters announced that the 1972 U.S. fertility rate had reached zero population growth. The American people apparently were profoundly confused by this announcement, with many believing the U.S. population problem had been solved. (In fact, because of what demographers call "population momentum," it takes a country up to seventy years after the replacement-level fertility rate is reached to actually stop growing. But by 1972, the fertility rate had indeed declined to a level low enough to eventually produce zero population growth, as long as immigration remained reasonably low.)

With zero population growth supposedly achieved (or at least approached), many people in the population movement may have felt their activism was no longer needed. Americans had reduced the size of the average family as far as was necessary. On average they were living up to the rallying cry of "stop at two." Many activists shifted their former population energies into feminism, other aspects of conservation and environmentalism, or moved on to other pursuits altogether. "Full-Formula" environmentalism that dealt with both Individual Impact and Population Size factors shrank to a small core constituency as quickly as it had burst into a mass popular movement. The population committees of environmental groups lost popularity and significance or disbanded altogether.

The neglect of the population issue within organizations surely influenced new employees as they came on board during this period. Many of them probably never heard of the "full-Formula" environmental approach. They worked only on the Individual Impact side of the Formula. Many had little background in the natural sciences, resource conservation, or analytical/quantitative fields. To them, population advocacy may have looked like an external issue that could easily be left to external groups to handle.

Perhaps another factor was at work as well. The overwhelmingly non-Hispanic, white leadership of the environmental movement may have felt it was defensible to address population growth as long as the great bulk of this growth came from non-Hispanic whites, which it did during the Baby Boom. But the situation changed dramatically after 1972. From that year forward, the fertility of non-Hispanic whites was below the replacement rate, while that of black Americans and Latinos remained well above the replacement rate.²² To talk of fertility reductions after 1972 was to draw disproportionate attention to nonwhites. Certain minorities and their spokespersons —with long memories of disgraceful treatment by the white majority and acutely aware of their comparative powerlessness in American society— were deeply suspicious of possible hidden agendas in the population stabilization movement. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the Rockefeller Commission, "our community is suspect of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or levelling off our population growth. Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce."²³ And Manuel Aragon, speaking in Spanish, declared to the Commission: "what we must do is to encourage large Mexican American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed."²⁴

During the twenty-six years after 1972, the non-Hispanic white share of population growth declined significantly from the 1970 era.²⁵ Thus, by the 1990s, a majority of the nation’s growth stemmed from sources other than non-Hispanic whites (especially Latin American and Asian immigrants and their offspring). Environmentalist leaders —proud and protective of their claim to the moral high ground— may have been reluctant to jeopardize this by venturing into the political minefield of the nation’s volatile racial/ethnic relations through appearing to point fingers at "outsiders," "others," or "people of color" as responsible for America’s ongoing problem with population growth.

In June 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved oral contraceptives for sale. By the late 1960s, the Vatican and American Catholic leadership were engaged in a major counterattack on the growing use of contraceptives in the United States. They focused a considerable amount of their ire on groups advocating population control. Their focus made a certain sense from their point of view. Most population and environmental groups that called for stabilization also made explicit calls, not for abstinence or celibacy, but rather for more availability of reliable, safe contraceptives and sex education. Many of them also called for the legalization of abortion.

Then in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion. That set off a much more intense campaign by the Catholic Church —and increasingly by conservative Protestants —against the whole of the population movement.

Abortion had been something of a minor issue within the population stabilization movement but was included because of the thought that fertility might not be brought to replacement level without the availability of abortion. As it turned out, legalized abortion was not a necessary component to reach replacement-level fertility. America reached its stabilization fertility goal the year before the Supreme Court legalized abortion.

But to the Catholic hierarchy and the pro-life movement, the legalized abortion and population stabilization causes have been inextricably linked. In the 1990s, it was still difficult for a pro-stabilization person or group to get a hearing among many Catholic and pro-life groups without being automatically considered an abortion apologist.

A number of leaders of philanthropic foundations and politicians involved with population efforts in the 1970s have said that active measures by Catholic bishops and the Vatican were the greatest barrier to moving population measures and in setting a national population policy. Congressman James Scheuer was a member of the 1972 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.

In 1992, he wrote that "the Vatican and others blocked any reasonable discussion of population problems."²⁶ This opposition applied both nationally and internationally. In a 1993 interview, Milton P. Siegel, assistant director general of the World Health Organization from 1946 to 1970, indicated that "one way or another, sometimes surreptitiously, the Catholic church used its influence to defeat, if you will, any movement toward family planning or birth control."²⁷

Roman Catholic opposition, both from the Vatican itself and from American Catholic leaders, apparently played a key role in pressuring government policymakers as well. On May 5, 1972, gearing up for his reelection campaign, President Nixon publicly disavowed the recommendations of his own Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, which U.S. Catholic bishops had blasted for its permissive attitude toward contraception and abortion.²⁸ Evidently still concerned about overpopulation, however, Nixon ordered a study in April 1974 of the national security implications of population growth.²⁹ When the study was released in 1975, President Gerald Ford endorsed the findings of National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200).

The report strongly stated that exploding populations in the Third World would threaten the security of the United States. These threats would come from the destabilization of those countries’ economic, political, and ecological systems. Besides recommending helping those nations curb their population growth, NSSM 200 called on the United States to provide world leadership in population control by seeking to attain stabilization of its own population by the year 2000.

Although President Ford endorsed the NSSM 200, nothing ever became of it. Historians will want to study the literature that through the years since has made the case that NSSM 200 was never implemented because of meetings between Vatican officials and U.S. government officials of Roman Catholic background as well as a systematic campaign of pressure by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "American policy [toward support of international family planning programs] was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy," President Reagan’s ambassador to the Vatican told Time magazine.³⁰ How much pressure was actually exerted is an important question to resolve.

Another likely reason environmental groups did not fully engage U.S. population issues in the 1980s and 1990s was that the groups that specialized in population issues drifted away from population stabilization and environmental protection as primary reasons for being. Those groups had played key roles in the 1970 era by prodding the environmental groups to join them and by doing the bulk of the research that was used by the environmentalists. Except for such small groups as Negative Population Growth, Population Environment Balance, and Carrying Capacity Network, however, that role had ended by the 1990s.

By the 1990s, for example, Planned Parenthood no longer played any role in advocating for U.S. population stabilization to protect the environment. Its focus had narrowed to making sure that women had full access to the whole range of options concerning fertility and births. That had always been a primary mission of Planned Parenthood, but one of the major purposes of empowering women had once been to reduce U.S. population growth.

To understand these shifts, historians will need to look at the differing roots of the 1970-era population movement. While one root included people with high environmental consciousness, several roots did not. Many of the early population leaders were primarily concerned about health issues; others about development issues. Still others were predecessors of the modern feminist movement. The environmentalist angle tended to be pushed out front during the late 1960s as environmentalism reached mass popularity.

But as environmentalists abandoned population issues in the 1970s, the population groups more and more de-emphasized their environmental motives. By the 1990s, some of the groups actually opposed helping the environment through population stabilization or reduction efforts. Christian Science Monitor correspondent George Moffett observed: "Women’s groups complain that overstating the consequences of rapid population growth has created a crisis atmosphere in some countries, which has led to human rights violations in the name of controlling fertility."³¹

This was in striking evidence at the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt. As Catholic lay theologian George Weigel observed, "Over the long haul . . . the most significant development at the Cairo Conference may have been a shift in controlling paradigms: from ‘population control’ to ‘the empowerment of women.’" ³²

"The Cairo Programme contains hundreds of recommendations about women’s rights and other social issues but almost none about population," wrote former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Population Affairs Lindsey Grant.³³ The long international document from Cairo made no mention of the connections between population growth and the environmental ills of countries with growing populations.

This shift away from an overriding concern with population and environmental limits may be seen most importantly in the group Zero Population Growth (ZPG). In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb ignited a national movement. Zero Population Growth was founded that same year to take advantage of the incredible publicity the book generated.

Hundreds of ZPG chapters sprang up overnight. ZPG’s first leaders were described as all being pro-environmentalist, pro-choice, and pro-family planning. In the beginning, ZPG had a motto, "Zero Population Growth is our name and our mission." There were several large organizations dealing with population growth in other countries. But ZPG’s primary mission was explicitly to stabilize the U.S. population, according to members of the early ZPG boards of directors.³⁴ That remained the stated mission through the 1980s.

In the 1970s, ZPG’s population policy recommendations covered every contribution to U.S. population growth. It included stands on contraceptives, sex education for teenagers, equality for women, abortion, opposition to illegal immigration, and a proposal to reduce legal immigration from about 400,000 a year to 150,000 a year by 1985 in order to reach zero population growth by 2008.³⁵

ZPG started the modern immigration-reduction movement in the 1970s. After American fertility fell below the replacement-level rate, the ZPG board recognized that immigration was rising rapidly and would soon negate all the benefits of lower fertility.

Even though immigration seemed separate from the family planning issues that had dominated precursor population organizations, ZPG tackled it squarely because it related to the issue of U.S. population stabilization, which was deemed essential to the health of the American environment. By the late 1970s, the ZPG leaders who were the most interested in immigration issues spun off a new organization called the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Their idea was that FAIR would take no stand on abortion and other controversial family planning issues in order to attract a wider constituency that would work for immigration reform not only for environmental reasons, but for economic relief for the working poor and taxpayers, for social cohesion, and for national security.

The ZPG leaders who left the ZPG board for FAIR also happened to be most of the people with the greatest interest in population as an environmental issue. That meant that those remaining on the board were more inclined toward the type of population movement that was rooted in family planning and women’s issues. While ZPG continued to have policies on U.S. stabilization and the environment —and produce some outstanding educational materials— these policies and programs got less and less staff and board attention as the 1980s progressed. New staff were hired less on the basis of their environmental expertise and commitment and more because of their commitment to women’s issues.

By 1996, ZPG was focused overwhelmingly on global population issues from the women’s empowerment perspective. A secondary focus was excessive consumption by Americans.³⁶ The board removed the word "stabilize" from much of its literature and its Mission Statement. On October 25, 1997, the ZPG board substituted "slowing" for "stopping" so that it then advanced a goal of merely "slowing" U.S. and world population growth.

ZPG’s president Judith Jacobsen wrote in the newsletter ZPG Reporter that the reason ZPG didn’t support creating U.S. policies to reduce domestic population growth was that population problems in Third World countries needed to be resolved first. She said that the "Cairo Conference taught us that changing the conditions of women’s lives is the most powerful answer" for population problems. She then gave a long list of ZPG’s essential commitments, none of which were population stabilization or environmental protection.³⁷

Historians are likely to find other important clues to the environmental movement’s shift by studying the roots of the modern environmental movement. Three of the roots are of special interest here.

Two of the roots go back a century: (1) The wilderness preservation movement was exemplified by John Muir, the National Parks, and, later, Wilderness Areas.³⁸ (2) The resource conservation movement was exemplified by President Theodore Roosevelt, his chief forester Gifford Pinchot, and the National Forests.³⁹

A third root of the modern environmental movement is much younger. It was an outgrowth of what was called New-Left politics with, in some cases, a strong strain of socialism, as espoused by its guru of the 1970 era, Barry Commoner. This root was given its greatest impetus with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by naturalist Rachel Carson. Although Carson was deeply concerned about the unforeseen effects of pesticides and other man-made poisons being released indiscriminately into the natural environment, this third root of modern environmentalism came to focus more on urban and health issues such as air, water, and toxic contamination, as they affected the human environment.

Commoner, in fact, criticized conservationists for putting wildlife ahead of human health. As journalist Mark Dowie writes: "The central concern of the new movement is human health. Its adherents consider wilderness preservation and environmental aesthetics worthy but overemphasized values. They are often derided by antitoxic activists as bourgeois obsessions."⁴⁰

Having much in common with the emerging Green parties of Europe (social justice, peace, and ecology), the new "greens" of America joined with the wilderness preservationists and resource conservationists as the modern environmental movement was born in the 1960s. But the New Left greens held opposite views on population from those of most preservationists and conservationists. In his influential 1971 book The Closing Circle and elsewhere, Barry Commoner minimized the role of population as a cause of environmental problems. Commoner said the problems attributed to population growth were actually caused by unfair distribution of resources and by profitable technologies. Environmental degradation could be rectified by changing economic systems.⁴¹

Conservationists and preservationists, in contrast, had always been concerned about some aspects of population growth and became especially alarmed by the Baby Boom impact on the environment. Their decades of experience watching wilderness and other habitats disappear under the constant growth of U.S. population led large numbers of them to confront that growth boldly and directly by the late 1960s. Wilderness advocate and popular southwestern author Edward Abbey spoke for many when he said that "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."⁴²

It appears that the New Left greens tried to keep population issues off the Earth Day 1970 agenda. They lost. Conservationists and preservationists succeeded in retaining their fundamental tenet that there could be no long-term environmental preservation without limiting human numbers. The college students and young adults who were rushing into the movement at the time may have been more temperamentally inclined toward the antiwar, antiestablishment New Left greens, but the young new environmentalists —armed with millions of dog-eared copies of The Population Bomb— seemed overwhelmingly to accept the old-line conservationists’ assessment of population. Most of the new more-liberal environmental groups that were formed at the time rejected the New Left’s opposition to fighting never-ending population growth and joined with the conservationists on their population stances.

But the New Left wing of environmentalism reversed its losses in the 1990s, according to Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, one of the most publicized and aggressive players in the first twenty years of U.S. environmentalism.⁴³ He said the New Left wing —which he called "Progressive Cornucopians"— established its antistabilization view as the dominant one in the national staffs and boards of many groups, including the Sierra Club.

On the winning side of the 1990s population policy conflict were people like Brad Erickson, coordinator of the Political Ecology Group (PEG), which played a key role in helping the Sierra Club board abandon its proscriptive population stabilization policy in 1996 and then fight off the pro-stabilization Sierra members in 1998.⁴⁴ Erickson said the fight was a replay of the one at Earth Day 1970, which the New Left greens lost.⁴⁵

He said the plan of the New Left greens in the 1960s had been to use the environmental issue as one of several they hoped would bloom into a full manifestation of a progressive movement far beyond the confines of traditional American economics and culture. But conservationists hijacked Earth Day, forced their population issues into it and the movement, and have limited the effectiveness of environmentalism ever since, Erickson explained. This view is shared by author Mark Dowie, who argues that population stabilization and immigration reform have retarded the transformation of conservation and preservation-oriented environmentalism into a movement for "environmental justice."⁴⁶

Modifications in immigration law in 1965 inadvertently started a chain migration through extended family members that began to snowball during the 1970s. At the very time that American fertility fell to a level that would allow population stabilization within a matter of decades, immigration levels were rising rapidly.

By the 1980s, annual immigration had more than doubled and was running above 500,000 a year. By the 1990s, annual average legal immigration had surpassed a million. And that didn’t even include a net addition of 200,000 to 500,000 illegal aliens each year. By the end of the 1990s, immigrants and their offspring were contributing nearly 70 percent of U.S. population growth.⁴⁷

If immigration and immigrant fertility had been at replacement-level rates since 1972 —as had native-born fertility— the United States would never have grown above 250 million.⁴⁸ Instead, U.S. population passed 270 million before the turn of the century. And the Census Bureau projected that current immigration and immigrant fertility were powerful enough to contribute to the United States surpassing 400 million soon after the year 2050 —on the way past a billion.

Most environmental groups by the late 1970s simply turned away from these kinds of stark trends and didn’t address them. But a few remained true to the "full-Formula" environmentalism of the 1970-era. They responded directly to the new challenge —at least in their official statements.

The most aggressive group was Zero Population Growth —before it shifted away from being an environmental organization. A 1977 Washington Post story revealed the public way ZPG confronted immigration.⁴⁹ Under the headline "Anti-Immigration Campaign Begun," the story began: "The Zero Population Growth foundation is launching a nationwide campaign to generate public support for sharp curbs on both legal and illegal immigration to the United States." It quoted Melanie Wirken, ZPG’s Washington lobbyist, saying the group favored a "drastic reduction in legal immigration" from levels that were then averaging about 400,000 a year. The article reported that ZPG was adding another lobbyist so that Wirken could devote all of her time to immigration issues.

The Sierra Club urged the federal government to conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration policies and their impact on U.S. population trends and how those trends affected the nation’s environmental resources. "All regions of the world must reach a balance between their populations and resources," the Club added.⁵⁰ Then in 1980, the Sierra Club testified before Father Hesburgh’s Select Committee on Immigration and Refugee Reform:

"It is obvious that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate. It is perhaps less well known the extent to which immigration policy, even more than the number of children per family, is the determinant of future numbers of Americans."

The Club said it is an "important question how many immigrants the United States wants to accept and the criteria we choose as the basis for answering that question." In 1989, the Sierra National Population Committee declared that "immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.," a policy confirmed by the Club’s Conservation Coordinating Committee.⁵¹

The immigration-reduction advocacy of the Sierra Club and ZPG beginning in the 1970s was affirmed in the Global 2000 Report to the President in 1981, which stated that the federal government should "develop a U.S. national population policy that includes attention to issues such as population stabilization, and . . . just, consistent, and workable immigration laws."⁵² It was reaffirmed in the 1996 report of the Population and Consumption Task Force of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. The task force concluded: "This is a sensitive issue, but reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stabilization and the drive toward sustainability."⁵³

But even as that governmental recognition was being announced in 1996, ZPG and the Sierra Club were in the final process of abandoning immigration reduction and, as a practical result, U.S. population stabilization goals. Even though rapid U.S. population growth was making it ever more politically and technically infeasible to meet environmental goals set in the 1970 era, the environmental movement of the late 1990s was willing to miss those environmental goals (and newer ones) for the sake of protecting a level of immigration that was four times higher than the tradition before the first Earth Day. What was it about the immigration issue that made environmental groups, by and large, meekly acquiesce to a level of immigration that clashed head-on with the fundamental goal of population stabilization?

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 article 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:

• Fear that immigration reduction would alienate "progressive" allies and be seen as racially insensitive
  

The primary lens through which most 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 nonwhite 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 nonwhite immigrants.⁵⁴

Australian sociologist Katherine Betts has examined that phenomenon. She uses the term "new class" (a group similar to what former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysts")⁵⁵ to describe the intelligentsia, professionally educated internationalists and cosmopolitans, lawyers, academics, journalists, teachers, artists, activists, and globe-trotting business people and travelers.

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 ingroup acceptance to supporters and the cold face of exclusion to dissenters."⁵⁶ 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, or 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. 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 were even less likely— than other environmentalists to abandon the population side of the Foundational Formula. Careful research, quantification, and analysis are required here.

One of the main reasons the Sierra Club 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. . . . [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."⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸

ZPG’s president, Judith Jacobsen, addressed the racial issues in a 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.