A Human License to Breed?

Could you pass a minimal intelligence test if one were required for a "license to breed"?

To find out, simply answer this question:

In light of the 40,000 children dying of malnutrition each day, and considering the number of species going extinct as a result of our excessive reproduction, do you think it would be a good idea to create another of yourself?

YES

NO

Thank you for playing.
.

From Pearl Harbor to a Robot Economy

Pearl Harbor, USS Virginia

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, but if you ask a dozen people why Japan bombed Pearl Harbor back in 1941, not one will give you a complete answer.

Here's the short story: Too many people.

The entire War in the Pacific was initiated by overpopulation.

There is no "beginning" to this story, but suffice it to say that Japan was a very isolated country up until the late 19th Century. With the arrival of western influence, Japan began to change and demand for "western" goods such as steel and oil, skyrocketed.

So too did population.

In 1870, Japan's population was estimated to be 33 million. By 1900 it was about 45 million, and by 1930 it was over 64 million. An island nation, Japan's economy and social systems were beginning to show real stress by the second decade of the 20th Century. A key issue was lack of farm land.

Large rural families needed more land to support new families, but new land was simply not available. At the same time, rising urbanization created a new and rapidly growing demand for oil, coal, iron and steel -- commodities Japan had very little of.

Looking across a short stretch of ocean, the Japanese saw a vast amount of farm land and raw resources in northern China. In 1931 Japan invaded that region -- Manchuria -- in order to satisfy their "shortage" of resources which, in reality, was a "longage" of human population.

Japan's invasion of Manchuria led to a U.S. threat of an oil blockade of the island nation. This threat of an oil blockade led to the Japanese "first strike" at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

World War II is a long story, but the short version is that we won.  Japan had to give up its land grabs in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

After the defeat of Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur encouraged the development of new laws in Japan, including laws to allow women to vote and to hold elective office. In addition, he encouraged the amendment of Japan's pre-World War II pro-natalist law so that it now legalized abortion (which remained illegal in the U.S. until 1973).

Why did MacArthur and the Occupation Forces turn Japan's old "pro-natalist" law into a "pro-choice" law?

Basically, because they understood the causal origins of World War II in the Pacific.

Japan's overpopulation (or over-shoot of its resource base) was seen as a core issue of geo-political consequence. Slowing Japan's rapid population growth rate was, therefore, at the top of both the national and the global agenda. As one Japanese web site (written in semi-fractured English) notes: "How to popularize family planning became the No.1 policy in health care of postwar Japan ..."

With the end of WWII Japan switched from being a pro-natalist country to being a country that was interested in slowing population growth.

After the death and carnage of World War II, no one in Japan needed too much encouragement to consider voluntary family planning as an alternative worthy of consideration and support.

How did fertility fall so quickly in Japan? The mechanics were simple and effective, if not particularly modern or enlightened: Condoms and abortion. To this day, these are the primary birth control options available to Japanese women. Though Japan is on the cutting edge of electronics, they are in the Dark Ages when it comes to contraception. Low-dose oral contraceptives, medicated IUDs, injectables and implants were still not legal in Japan as of 2004, and the diaphragm is no longer produced there due to lack of demand. High-dosage pills and the copper IUD were only approved in Japan in 1999.

Despite the lack of contraceptive options, the Japanese saw rapid and amazing reductions in fertility after 1945. While the rest of the world experienced a Baby Boom, Japan saws its total fertility rate (TFR) fall from over four to two in the space of just 15 years -- a phenomenal rate of reduction even by today's standards.

One factor driving fertility reduction was later age at marriage. Another factor -- too often overlooked -- was crippling poverty after the War. Japan in the late 1940s and 1950s was a miserable place, and few people could afford to have the large families they did prior to World War II.

The real driver of fertility reduction in Japan, however, was a desire for peace and prosperity. While prior to WWII large families had been seen as a source of prestige and economic growth, afterwards they were seen as destructive to the long-term peace and economic self-sufficiency of the nation.

Japan's new small-family ethic was fueled by both central government and local Government commitment to the goal of slowing pre-war rates of human population growth. A system of midwives, nurses, family planning clinics and doctors was put in place and it took root with assistance from the Family Planning Federation of Japan (FPFJ) and the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA).

While very wide, Japan's family planning program was not very deep. Despite a post-war interest in reducing the number of births, Japan has never really subscribed to what we in the U.S. think of as a "comprehensive" family planning program. Sex education in schools was (and still is) poor, and access to a full range of modern contraceptive choices was (and still is) very limited. In the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, the only "modern" contraceptive option was the condom. Though effective most of the time, the condom is not a perfect contraceptive vehicle. To be precise, condoms have a per-use failure rate of about 3%, which means even with "perfect use" the contraceptive device fails about 3 times a year on average (yep, 100 times a year is "average" according to the people that count these things).

In actuality, of course, we do not live in a perfect world with perfect and consistent humans. Due to inconsistent product usage (i.e. situational nonuse) the "real world" pregnancy rate for couples using only condoms is somewhere between 10 to 15 percent (numbers vary depending on the study).

Bottom line: There were (and are) quite a lot of abortions in Japan.

In 1996 the pre-World War II law was further amended and it is now called the "Mother's Body Protection Law" and remains the principle family planning law of Japan.

Today, Japan's total fertility rate is 1.4, one of the lowest in the world.

While Japan's fertility rate fell rapidly after WWII, and reached below-replacement levels by 1970, the nation's absolute population continued to grow. A population that had topped 64 million by 1930 was over 83 million by 1950, was over 103 million by 1970, and was over 123 million by 1990.

The good news is that Japan's population has very nearly topped out. The bad news is that it took 45 years AFTER it hit replacement level fertility (and then went far below it) to achieve this goal. And this is in a country with essentially zero immigration.

Today, across the world, the effect of Japan's post-World War II population growth is felt in the form of massive factory-like fishing fleets that prowl the world's oceans to feed that nation.

In the Southern U.S., massive chip mills pulp our forests to supply pulp for Japanese paper and wood-strand mills.

Forests in Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam are being chainsawed to supply plywood. Around the world chainsaws and oil derricks crank out product going to a nation that had already "overshot" its resource base by 1931 -- and whose population has doubled since then.

While Japanese fertility declines have yet to translate into a smaller population size (I doubt Japan will ever return to a population small enough that it can actually live within the "carrying capacity" of the nation itself) a great deal of "Global Good" has come out of its lower fertility rates.

One bit of "good news" for Japan and the world was a tightening of labor markets that began to occur in Japan in the late 1970s as the low-fertility rates of the early 1950s moved their way up the population pyramid. As wages of entry-level workers began to rise in Japan due to labor market constraints, Japanese businesses began to export capital overseas in order to take advantage of lower-wage labor pools in developing countries (much as many U.S. businesses are doing today). Much of the "miracle" economic growth of South Korea was, in fact, abetted by Japanese money going overseas due to fertility declines in Japan that had begun 20 and 30 years earlier.

Japanese investment in Korea's economy, in turn, helped improve the status of women there and helped speed urbanization, which in turn helped to reduce fertility rates in that nation.

The same labor market constraints that drove some Japanese businesses to export capital in order to find cheaper labor drove other Japanese companies to automate. Today, Japanese industry has more robots and complex automation systems in place than any other country in the world -- one reason that both Japanese productivity and quality remain quite high.

Are there lessons here for the rest of the world? I think so.

Though far less pronounced than Japan's labor market contractions (due to a very long Baby Boom, higher domestic fertility, and high rates of international immigration here in the U.S.), U.S. capital movements to Mexico and other nations seem to be doing for these nations what Japan's money did for Korea (albeit at a slower rate due to increased diffusion of our capital over a larger area).

At the same time, the very same labor market forces that worked to push automation in Japan are doing the same here at home where timber, steel, and manufacturing plants are producing more products with less labor (and at higher quality) than ever before. Though we may not think factory automation has an environmental component, it most certainly does -- automated plants, as a rule, waste far less than their non-automated counterparts.

The big lesson, however, is that fertility decline is the START, not the end, of bringing the "runaway train" of population growth under control. Even after fertility has fallen to replacement levels, total population numbers continue to rise for decade after decade after decade.

For a country like the U.S., where the total base numbers are already very large, this is a very sobering thought.

In terms of absolute population size, the U.S. is already the third largest country in the world.

In terms of population growth rates we are not yet where Japan was in 1955 thanks to a combination of massive immigration and the highest fertility rates of any country in the industrialized world.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's middle-series projections, the U.S will add more people to its population in the next 50 years as currently live West of the Mississippi River -- and this is the middle-series (most likely) projection.

Our population growth will not end there, of course.

Once the Population Juggernaut starts to roll, it tends to roll a heck of a long way before it comes to a stop. This has been true for Japan (which had rapid and sustained fertility decline and no immigration) and it will be even truer for the U.S. (which has non-sustained fertility decline and high immigration). It will be even more true for countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are still some distance away from achieving replacement levels of fertility.
.

• Related Links:
  ** The Real Threat to Hunting in America
  ** Drawing the Line at the Border for Wildlife's Sake
  .

From Near Extinction to Common Pest in 50 Years

It is hard to describe the destruction of American wildlife between 1850 and 1900.

By 1850 all the Elk had been shot out in the East, the Forest Bison pushed into complete extinction, the Wolf extirpated from everywhere in the East but the Maine woods.

Between 1850 and 1900 the great herds of Plains Bison were cut down to within a few hundred animals of extinction, White Tail Deer and Wild Turkey were virtually extirpated along most of the Atlantic seaboard, geese and ducks of every type were slaughtered in dizzying numbers by shrapnel fired from cannon used by market hunters, and the beaver had simply vanished from every state East of Ohio. The Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon were gone, as was the Eskimo Curlew -- birds which once numbered in the millions.

The turn around in American wildlife populations began with passage of the Lacey Act in 1907, which banned market hunting.

A critical turn around in the fortunes of wild geese and duck occurred in 1935 when live decoys -- wild birds that had been trapped and made flightless with pinned or clipped wings -- was made illegal.

It looked like the ban on live decoys had come too late for some species, however. One of those species was the Giant Canada Goose which was thought to be extinct -- or nearly extinct -- in the wild.

The good news is that while there were almost no wild Canada Geese left, captive decoy goose populations still existed. With the 1935 ban on the use of decoy geese, most of these animals were released into marshes and onto ponds. Unable to fly, many of these animals quickly fell prey to fox and dogs, but some managed to grow back their feathers or live long enough to reproduce.

During World War II and into the 1950s, the descendants of once-captive Giant Canada Geese slowly multiplied in remote marshes and isolated ponds. While a natural recovery seemed to be occurring, these descendants of once-captive geese were largely non-migratory since, after three or four generations in captivity prior to 1935, they no longer had any "lead geese" to show them the way North.

In the 1960s the Giant Canada Geese population remained so low across the U.S. that it was considered extirpated in most states and near-extinct in the wild. In order to prevent extinction, a systematic effort was made to captive-raise Giant Canada Geese and introduce small flocks back into areas where they had once existed.

The introduction of Canada Geese was a phenomenal success. Absent hunting and disease, small flocks of Canada Geese grew by 10 to 20 percent percent a year -- a population doubling time of just 3 to 7 years time.

In a relatively short period of time, states saw a phenomenal growth in their Giant Canada Goose populations. Ohio, to cite on example, began with just 20 captive-raised birds in 1956, but by 2002 had a population of over 140,000 birds. Today almost all the geese you see in the Eastern U.S,. and Midwest are Giant Canada Geese.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the current resident Giant Canada Goose population of the U.S. at 4 million birds and growing rapidly, with a small number of truly migratory Giant Canada Geese still found in the mid-Atlantic flyway.

Giant Canada Geese have also been introduced into other parts of the world, most notably Europe, where they are also thriving.

The "goose problem" today is not extinction but an over-abundance of geese in areas where heavy population densities may inconvenience golfers and cause eutrophication of farm ponds.

A boom in geese populations, however is not too bad a problem as problems go, and it has certainly been a benefit for fox which frequently raid Canada Goose nests in order to feed rapidly growing kits.

The rise of Canada Geese has also created a boom in sport hunting which now pumps hundreds of millions of dollars a year into rural economies. No one has benefited more from the demise of commercial market hunting than the sport hunter.

With the demise of market hunting, and with the assistance of capable wildlife managers, the Giant Canada Goose has returned, as has the wild turkey, the beaver, the bison, the elk, white tail deer, alligator and even the wolf. Truly, these are the good old days.



.

Tree Huggers Discover the Best Way to Go Green

Over at Tree Hugger they have discovered the obvious: The Best Way You Can Go Green: Have Fewer Children:

Forget changing your lightbulbs, driving a car with high fuel efficiency, adopting a vegetarian diet or even switching to green power. If you live in the United States and really want to reduce your carbon emission legacy, perhaps the single largest change you can make to your life is commit to have fewer children.

The story goes on to quote a LiveScience article entitled Save the Planet: Have Fewer Kids

For people who are looking for ways to reduce their "carbon footprint," here's one radical idea that could have a big long-term impact, some scientists say: Have fewer kids.

A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives - things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

"In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime," said study team member Paul Murtaugh. "Those are important issues and it's essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources."

Reproductive choices haven't gained as much attention in the consideration of human impact to the Earth, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child - and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future - the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.

Under current conditions in the United States, for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent - about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is
responsible.

The impact doesn't only come through increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases - larger populations also generate more waste and tax water supplies.

Of course births are NOT the main driver of U.S. population growth. Immigration is, and this has been true since the beginning, as the graph, below makes clear.



As John Chamie at Yale Global Online notes,

Contrary to popular thought, the dominant force fueling America’s demographic growth is not natural increase, but immigration. This is because immigrants not only add their own numbers to the nation’s overall population, but also contribute a disproportionate number of births whose effects are compounded over time.

Next time some vegan spouts nonsense to you about how the world is going to hell in a hand cart because there are too many people eating cows and chickens, do what I do: Suggest they get themselves sterilized and that they support immigration reform.

If that sounds harsh, be advised that voluntary sterilization is the most common form of birth control in the world. And yes, I advocate men get the procedure as it's a simple in-and-out operation for us.

Also be advised, that 82% of U.S. population growth is due to immigration, and that this immigration is negating ALL other savings being made through conservation.

Bottom Line: Stop talking about what other people should be doing (you cannot do a damn thing about them), and take direct action on the one thing you actually control.
You say you are an environmentalist? Prove it! Stop at none ... or one ... or two. And support immigration control.

.

• Related Links:** The Real Threat to Hunting in America
  ** Population Growth and the Limits of Accommodation
  ** Drawing the Line at the Border for Wildlife's Sake
  ** How Many Americans?
  ** Dead Man's Curve
  ** The Fox Versus the Stork
  ** What Would You Give Up to Keep What You Have?
  ** When Population Growth Comes Homes to Roost
  ** National Security and Population Growth
  ** Field Guide to Contraception.
  .

The Fox Versus the Stork

The states of Virginia and Maryland can be described as "the mother church of fox hunting in America."

Robert Brooke of Maryland introduced fox hunting to the United States in 1650 and imported the first pack of foxhounds from Great Britain at that time.

To this day, Maryland and neighboring Virginia are the center of mounted fox hunting in the U.S., providing good cover for a healthy fox population as well as fairly dense numbers of raccoon, groundhog and possum.

The Jack Russell Terrier Club of America holds its annual National Trial in about an hour up the road from my house, and many people who hunt terriers will spend at least one week of their lives attending this trial and, if they are lucky, hunting farms in the days before or after the long weekend.

While there are still a lot of open space in the Baltimore-Washington area, no one can deny that there has also been a very rapid growth in sprawl.

National Forests and state park land may be the same distance from home that they have always been, but increasing amounts of traffic make the trip seem longer and certainly less enjoyable.

The distance out of the city to sizeable farms is growing as land prices rise, and estate taxes force subdivision.

The simple and sad truth is that farming has become less profitable than construction of mini-estates.
The animated map, below, shows population growth and sprawl in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore corridor between 1792 and what is expected for 2075. The interval between each slide is 25 years, and I have put the data for each slide in the lower right hand corner.






While population growth in the Baltimore-Washington corridor has been rapid, the effect on local habitat can best be seen by looking at a smaller slice of land.

To bring it back down to terrier history, let's look at Fairfax County, Virginia which is just 15 minutes up the road from where I live.

The first fox hunting pack maintained for the benefit of a group of foxhunters, rather than for a single owner, was instituted by Thomas, Sixth Lord Fairfax, in 1747 in northern Virginia.

Lord Fairfax swapped hounds with George Washington who lived just up the road at Mount Vernon. To this day, Virginia proudly counts fox hunting as part of its cultural heritage. The state dog is the foxhound, and the Master of Fox Hounds Association of America is headquartered in Millwood, Virginia, about 35 minutes away.

While Lord Fairfax may have lived to fox hunt, there are no mounted fox hunts in Fairfax County today, and only a few farms worthy of the name. Most of the forest fell to farms in the 1960s and 1970s, and most of the large farms have since fallen to tract homes, mini-estates and freeways.

The map below gives a visual presentation of what happened to Fairfax County, Virginia between 1937 and 1998, a period of just 60 years. As can be seen, very large blocks of forest fell to develoment between 1978 and 1988. It was during this period of time that major roads, such as I-66, were constucted. These roads effectively served to subsidize environmental destruction and the loss of farmland.

The U.S. Now Has More Lions Than Africa

I tossed the latest copy of Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine into the truck on the way to work this morning, and was flipping through it at a traffic light when I opened it up to see the picture at left. Hey, I know that fellow!

And sure enough I do -- it's John B., who I see once a year at the only dog trial I go to, the JRTCA Nationals.

That's a 200-pound stock-predating Mountain Lion John hunted in Arizona a few years back (subscribe to Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine if you want to read the full story).

John's Mountain Lion got me to thinking about the rise of Cougar populations here in the U.S.

As regular readers might recall, a Mountain Lion was recently shot in Chicago, and roadkills in Iowa prove they have gotten that far east as well.

Rumors of Mountain Lions in Appalachia remain (as yet) unfounded, but it is agreed by all that it is only a matter of time before they come here. With over over 2 million acres of contiguous National Forest in Virginia and West Virginia alone, and plenty of deer, they will not want for food or space!

On a hunch, I did a little research and confirmed what I suspected: there are now more lions in the United States than there are all in all of Africa.

Now granted that Puma concolor and Panthera leo are a different genus of big cat, but a Mountain Lion is no small animal; it is, in fact, the fourth largest big cat in the world.

Right now there are more than 30,000 Mountain Lions in the U.S., and their numbers are slowly growing despite the fact that hunting these large animals is legal (if controlled by permit) in 10 of the 11 western states where they reside.

All in all, about 3,500 Mountain Lions a year are shot by U.S. hunters, and another 800 or so are killed by vehicle impacts.

A slow steady increase in Mountain Lions is excellent news, and the kind of thing we can live with provided the populations are allowed to expand in the right direction (i.e on public lands) and away from farms, ranches and suburbs.

The return of the Mountain Lion (along with the concurrent rise in bear, wolf, coyote, turkey, eagle, hawk, osprey, deer, elk, and beaver populations) is proof-positive that the American way of science-based wildlife management has been a roaring success.

This is not to say, of course, that there will never be human-wildlife conflicts. There always will be with large meat-eating predators.

Problem lions, wolves and bears will always have to be shot, but regulated hunting and culling of these animals does no long-term harm provided the slaughter is not indiscriminate and the wild habitat they require is preserved as large unbroken blocks of land.

The real threat to animals like Mountain Lions is not regulated hunted; it is unregulated population growth which results in more roads, more water consumption, and more sprawl.

If we protect the habitat, the wildlife will generally take care of itself.

But to take care of the habitat, we have to control ourselves.

We cannot allow U.S. population growth (largely driven by immigration) to increase our numbers to the point that humans become like locusts on the land. If we plough and graze fence post to fence post, fragment the forests, drain the rivers and streams for irrigation, and put in roads every mile or two (with shopping centers in between), it is not just Mountain Lion we will lose; it is wild America as we know it and love it.

And, to put on a point on it, it will not take much human population growth in Arizona, where this mountain lion was shot, to wreck things forever.

As John McCain recently noted, Arizona is already so dry the trees have been known to chase the dogs!

So heads up; human population growth is what is killing off Africa's lions.

Now that we have a healthy Mountain Lion population in the American West, let's make sure we do not allow human population growth to kill off our lions as well.

Let's not worry about sustainable levels of hunting, while ignoring unsustainable rates of immigration.

Yet, as far as I can tell, that is exactly what every Mountain Lion and Cougar protection organization in America is now doing. Talk about missing the forest for the trees!

A repost from 2008.

• Related Posts:
  ** Drawing the Line at the Border for Wildlife's Sake
  ** The Real Threat to Hunting in America
  ** One Million More Local Residents
  ** Comparative Demography, Geology & Ecology

.

The Real Threat to Hunting

A repost from this blog, July 2004.

For hunters, fluttering orange tape and popsicle-colored sticks mean only one thing: Doom.

This is the spoor of the tract-home surveyor. This is the end of the game.

The hill where your terrier worked that fine red fox last season will soon be covered by plastic-sided houses and kiddie swing sets.

The hedgerow you counted on for the occasional raccoon and a steady supply of groundhogs will soon be an asphalt ribbon.

Across the country the same story is playing out, again and again. It is not PETA that is hammering hunters, but real estate developers.

Pheasant, quail and bear are long gone from most areas, as are bobcat, cougar and wolf.

Even if deer and geese manage to thrive on 15-acre tracts, the American hunter will not.

When land is cut up into small parcels, acquiring permissions is difficult and firing a gun impossible. More houses means more roads. It does not take too many roads before a man with working dogs no longer feels comfortable letting them off leash.

Most of us know the big picture: forests are falling to farms, and farms are falling to freeway all over the planet. Across the globe wild rivers are being dammed, and increasing numbers of species are being pushed on to the endangered species list. Cars, factories and electricity-generating power plants are spewing forth greenhouse gases contributing to global warming, even as mile-long gill nets decimate fishing grounds, and raw sewage spills untreated into once pristine waters.

The environment is not committing suicide -- we are killing it. As Pogo so aptly put it, "we have met the enemy, and he is us." The common denominator to every clearcut forest and decimated hedgerow is human population growth.

It’s hard to overstate the speed of human population growth. It took perhaps two million years to add the first billion people to the population of the world -- a number reached about 1830. It took only 100 more years to add the second billion people (1930), and just thirty more years to add the third billion (1960). The global population counter clicked past four billion by 1975, five billion by 1987, and six billion by 1999. World population will climb past seven billion within the next 15 years.

It’s hard to get a handle on such numbing numbers. Let's bring it closer to home to gain a little perspective. Surely, we have nothing to worry about here in the United States, right?

Think again.

Consider what has happened in your own lifetime. Take a look at the table below, and find your approximate age in the far left column. The number next to it is the size of the U.S. population when you were born, and the number to the right of that is the relative population growth that has occurred in the U.S. since then.



Of course, the U.S. population growth that has occurred since you were born is only part of the story.

Let’s think for a minute about the U.S. population growth that will happen over the rest of your lifetime. I will use middle-range Census Bureau projections even though these numbers have consistently been too low for over 50 years because Census Bureau demographers habitually under-estimate illegal immigration and over-estimate emigration (people leaving).

In the table below, look in the left column to find your approximate age -- or the age of your children or grandchildren if you prefer. Now look at the next column to see what the population of the U.S. will be when you (or your children or grandchildren) are age 70. The third column gives the percentage population growth that will occur in the intervening years. Again, these are very conservative numbers.



Another way to think about these numbers: over the course of the next 50 years, using the very conservative mid-range projections of the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. will add about 150 million people to its population -- a sum greater than the population of the United States west of the Mississippi River today.

To put it another way, over the course of the next 50 years, the U.S. will add more than twice the current population of the United Kingdom.

Where is all this population growth coming from? Most of it originates overseas.

About 70 percent of all future U.S. population growth will be due to immigration (legal and illegal) and the children and grandchildren of immigrants that have not yet landed on our shores. In a very real sense, America's hunting and angling future is being determined in Karachi, Mexico City, Beijing, Moscow, Dublin and Hanoi.

Most of the organizations that we think of as protecting the environment and sports hunting do not mention the speed of U.S. population growth, not because it is not an issue, but because they are afraid that talking about limits on immigration might harm future membership growth. After all, today's illegal alien is tomorrow's permanent resident alien or U.S. citizen, right? At the top reaches of organizations as divergent as the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association, success is not defined by what is going on in forest and field, but about what can be done to grow out the membership base now and in the future. Association executives are as enamored with population growth as any real estate agent or strip mall developer.

I suspect it will only be in hindsight that we realize what we have lost and what we have gained. Very few people notice the absence of box turtles or make the connection between population growth, habitat change, and Lyme disease.

Only when we are very old and America has changed to the point where we no longer recognize it will we understand the wisdom of Sioux Chief Ben American Horse, who warned Vice President Alben Barkley, "Be careful of your immigrations laws. We were damn careless with ours."
.

God Bats Last

For other thought games along this line see:

• Barbed Wire and Biodiversity
• The Complete History of the World in 15 Seconds
• The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
• R. Crum's Short History of America

Monarchs & Mexico

A repost from this blog, 2009.

"I understand more and more how population is the problem. I was asking almost every peasant I met how many children they have. They say 'I have eight, 12, 15, nine.' These people are in their 50s. I ask how many children their children have. They say, 'Oh, senor, there are so many that we can't count them.' And most of them are getting their living from the forest. They want to get permits to log in the forest."
- Homero Aridjis, Mexico's foremost authority on Monarch butterflies

The Monarch butterfly migration, from Canada to Mexico, is now in full swing.

This butterfly migration predates human existence in the western hemisphere. For thousands of years, millions of Monarch butterflies from the United States and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains have flow up to 3,000 miles to overwinter in a small forest area in central Mexico.

Now, however, the Monarch is seriously threatened. The reason: rapid deforestation of Mexico's high-altitude Oyamel fir stands which provide the rare micro-climate necessary to prevent the butterflies from freezing, but keeps them cold enough so that their reproductive systems remain dormant until spring.

The Mexican forest wintering ground of the Monarch was not discovered by scientists until 1975.

By the mid-1980s, scientists realized that rapid deforestation in the Oyamel fir forest was not sustainable, and could drive the Eastern Monarch butterfly to extinction. At that time, the Mexican government created a monarch reserve of approximately 62 square miles that consisted of no-logging zones at five known overwintering sites.

But local residents have largely ignored the restrictions, saying they are too poor to care about the monarch butterfly -- the trees must fall to put food on the table for hungry mouths.

"Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if the butterflies didn't come back. At least we could log," said one campesino.

Ultimately, humans and butterflies are competing for the same forest resources. Unless population growth is stemmed, and alternative economic opportunities are developed, the fate of the Monarch may be sealed.

Aerial photographs of Mexico's forest region where the butterflies hibernate show that that 30 years ago the forest was nearly 2,000 square miles.

Today, only a tenth of it remains. The largest tract today is 20 square miles, five times smaller than the largest tract 30 years ago.



.

Why Anti-Hunt Vegans Should Get Sterilized

A repost from December of 2004.

Most animal rights activists do not spend much time thinking about how animals die in the woods.

Here are the options: starvation, disease, poison, ripped apart while living by a predator, and vehicle impact.

The harsh reality of the wild is that no wild animal dies quickly without human help.

In the wild animals starve due to food shortages, or they die with broken bones in ditches and pipes, or they expire curled up under bushes, their insides riddled by fever, parasites and sickness.

Cars already kill far more fox than all the mounted hunts, lurchers, and terriers combined, yet there are no major national campaigns to fund millions of wide and brushy culverts for fox to use while traversing from stream to field.

The fox "saved" from the hunt will likely die from a vehicle impact.

By the same token, the people that pale at the idea of fox hunting, seem to have no compunction about ripping up ocean ocean bottoms in order to put a few more flounder and shrimp on their already groaning plates.

"I'm a vegetarian" they say, "except for fish."

These are the folks who own free-roaming cats and think nothing of the carnage these animals inflict on baby birds, rabbits, and chipmunks.

These are the folks who give to organizations that run massive direct mail campaigns decrying hunting, oblivious to the fact that the bright-white paper used in all those mailings is derived from clearcut old-growth forests being chainsawn with abandon.

You really want to help nature?

Great!

Here's how to do that: Get yourself sterilized.

Nothing you can do will do more to save the enviroment this generation, and for a hundred years to come. Nothing you will ever do will prevent more misery to animals.

Nothing.

Back to the Start... Back to the Garden of Eden

Willy Nelson sings Coldplay's "The Scientist"on this video.


Back to the start... back to the Garden of Eden, which was not crowded with two.

Remember, factory farms are not the problem -- they are a symptom of the problem.

The problem is human over-population.

No one woke up this morning trying to ruin the world.

They woke up trying to feed all the children.

And to do that, they cut down the forest, plowed up the land, pumped water from the aquifers, and tried to raise more crops and more animals with greater efficiency.

They tried to make a profit, which meant they raced to the basement in terms of pollution control, and they tried to keep up with their next door neighbors who boosted their farm yields with fertilizers while suppressing weeds and bugs with herbicides and pesticides.

No one set out to ruin the world. 

No one set out to be cruel or so far removed from nature.  But without family planning and self-restraint, this is what happens.
.

The Missing Birds of Rock Creek Park

OvenBird

This was written in 2003 for a major environmental organization.

The decline of neotropical migrant song birds in the U.S. was first noticed by birders in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park, a small federally-protected enclave nestled along a stream bed in Washington, D.C., just 15 miles from Fairfax County.

Breeding Bird Surveys from 1947 through the 1970s, revealed that the yellow-billed cuckoo and yellow-throated vireo -- as well as the northern parula, black-and-white warbler, Kentucky warbler, and hooded warbler -- were disappearing. Six other migrant song birds -- Eastern wood-pewees, Acadian flycatchers, wood thrushes, red-eyed vireos, ovenbirds, and scarlet tanagers -- had declined by more than 50 percent.

What was going on?


Evidence from Overseas

Domestic forest destruction was ruled out, as Rock Creek Park had suffered no substantial encroachment in decades.

An analysis of radar images, done in the early 1980s, however, showed only half as many birds were flying to the U.S. from Mexico's Yucatan as had been migrating just 20 years earlier. Clearly, some part of what was happening to "our" birds was happening overseas. Experts theorized that much of the song bird decline, now being documented across the U.S., was due to forest destruction in Central and South America.

In fact, forest destruction in Central America was proceeding at a very rapid pace, driven in no small part by truly sobering rates of human population growth. In the Peten region of Guatemala, for example, 77% of the original forest cover still existed as recently as 1977. By 1980, however, that number had fallen to 42% and by 1989 just 29 percent of the original forest cover was gone. Scientists now believe as little as 10% of the forest may be left by 2025.


Evidence from the U.S.

By the late 1990s, however, scientists began to realize that forest destruction in Central and South America did not tell all of the story. Analysis of migrant song bird populations at the national level showed that birds loss was not evenly distributed across the U.S.

While most migrant song birds are experiencing clear negative trends east of the Mississippi River, and along the thin coastal strip of the West Coast, neotropical migrants seem to be doing fairly well on large tracts of forested land in the West.

An overlay of neotropical migrant song bird decline and a map of federally protected lands, showed a fascinating pattern: migrant song birds were not in general decline in our national parks, our national forests, or on lands managed by the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management. Migrant song birds were in general decline in the east and in the Midwest, however, where changing agricultural practices and increasing levels of forest fragmentation seemed to be having a real impact.

Scientists looking for clues to song bird loss in Rock Creek Park began to look at the forested areas immediately surrounding the suburbs of Washington, DC, and what they found was pretty startling. Between 1980 and 1995, Fairfax County saw 69 percent of its forests converted to homes and businesses.

While scientists had been puzzling over bird loss in Rock Creek Park, just 15 miles away, Fairfax County's forests had been vanishing under asphalt at an astonishing rate.

Scientists now recognize that these once-vibrant suburban forests were probably the principal "home" of many of the birds that had once been seen in Rock Creek Park. Rock Creek had merely served as way-station between larger forest blocks that once ringed the Washington, DC area.

As new roads and light rail systems continue to be built in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, more and more forests are falling to farms and more and more farms are falling to freeways and subdivisions.

Once large blocks of unbroken forest are being shattered into increasingly smaller fragments, allowing such meso-predators as crows, jays, raccoons, possums, feral cats and fox to prey on once-secure migrant song bird nests. In addition, increasingly fragmented forests have enabled the brown-headed cow bird to colonize areas they once would have found unattractive.

Cowbirds nest at the edge of forests and feed in farms fields and pastures. Though native to North America, the brown-headed cowbird was once confined to the forest edges of Midwestern prairies where they fed in grasslands grazed by roaming bison. Today, however, because of widespread forest fragmentation, parasitic cowbirds can be found all across the United States.

The brown-headed cowbird is a parasitic nester, which is to say it builds no nests of its own, but instead lays its eggs in the nests of other birds -- most frequently in the open, cup-shaped nests of neotropical migrants. A single cowbird may lay as many as 80 eggs in a breeding season - one or two eggs per songbird nest. Because cowbird chicks hatch earlier, and are much larger than the offspring of migrant songbirds, they are able to out compete songbird chicks for food, and often simply push them out of the nest altogether.

In the end, a single cowbird may prevent 20 to 30 warblers, finches and vireos from raising their young. If the bird species has a short nesting period, it may not be able to hatch out a second brood that year, in which case that species may fall off rapidly in that area over a relatively short period of time.


Yellow-throated Vireo


More Trouble Ahead?

While a great deal of population-driven environmental damage has already occurred in the suburbs of Virginia, more population growth lies ahead. Fairfax County's population continues to grow rapidly, most of it driven by a combination of internal domestic migration (military and government families coming to support a burgeoning government and high-tech corridor) and international migration.

Fairfax County may be a demographic "canary in a coal mine" signaling where the rest of America may be headed in terms of land use patterns and population growth. With U.S. population growing by more than 3 million people a year, and suburban sprawl gobbling up more than 500,000 acres of forest and farmland every year, the pace of habitat fragmentation is likely to increase rapidly in the years ahead.

Under the Census Bureau's middle-series projection, which assumes that current U.S. immigration and fertility levels will stay about the same, the population of the U.S. will increase by 120 million people over the course of the next 50 years. About 63 percent of this future population growth will be due to immigrants and the children of immigrants that have not yet arrived in the U.S. -- the remaining 37 percent of population growth will be driven by demographic momentum as current U.S. residents move to complete their families.

One hundred and twenty million people is a very large population to add to the U.S. over the course of the next 50 years. To put this number into perspective, this is a population equal to the current populations of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana combined.

In addition to sprawl directly driven by population growth, the U.S. can expect to see increased forest fragmentation due to more and more folks moving farther and farther out into the countryside, abetted by high-speed internet hookups, satellite television, and light rail systems feeding into an ever-expanding network of four, six and eight lane highways.

As Canadian real estate agent Ozzie Jurock noted in an article for The Vancouver Sun (June 30, 2001),

"People throughout North America are on the move. Population growth in smaller towns is exploding. Californians move to Oregon and Arizona, New Yorkers joke at the rain but moved to Washington. The ski resorts and lakes are teeming with 'former' city slickers clutching cash and the hope for the elusive 'better quality of life."

Even as population growth continues apace in the U.S., the population of Central America continues to grow. Over the course of the next 50 years, Central America and Mexico combined are expected to add 90 million people to their populations -- a 65% percent increase in population.


Why the Fairfax Bird Loss Story is Important

Bird population data are such a robust metric of general environmental health that in the United Kingdom they are used as an official indicator of environmental sustainability.

A broad decline in many wild bird populations in the Western Hemisphere may be an indication that a broad decline in environmental quality is occurring across much of the region.

In the case of neotropical song birds, population-driven habitat decline along the entire migration flyway -- including the United States -- has had a serious impact on U.S. song bird numbers. The decline of songbird species in the U.S. is a powerful reminder that population pressures beyond our borders really do "come home to roost" and that reducing the rates of population growth at home, and abroad, is a real and serious "back yard" environmental issue.

Ironically, even as many bird populations are in decline, the number of Americans interested in birds is on the rise. The National Survey on Recreation and the Environment found that over 71 million Americans are recreational birders, up 250 percent from 1982, making birding the fastest-growing outdoor activity in the U.S.


Black and White Warbler
.

Bird Species Decline in the U.S

In large parts of the U.S., over half of our songbird species are in decline. Scientists say habitat destruction is largely to blame.

Across the United States, more than 250 species of neotropical migratory birds fly south for the winter.

Beginning in the early 1970s, scientists began to notice that many species seemed to be in decline

What was going on?

Scientists have concluded that the decline of neotropical migratory song birds in the United States is closely linked to four issues closely linked to human population growth and habitat destruction:

• Tropical Forest Destruction
  The population of Latin America and the Caribbean has doubled in the last 35 years, and with it has come unprecedented destruction of tropical rainforests. As populations have exploded, more landless peasants have colonized forest areas and cleared vegetation, with slash-and-burn cycles becoming progressively shorter. At the same time, logging over wide areas and the rapid expansion of commercial farming has accelerated the disappearance of forests and fueled the rapid destruction of once-lush bird habitat. In the Peten region of Guatemala, for example, 77 percent of the land was covered in dense forest in 1960. By 1990, that number had fallen to just 29 percent.
  
  
• Pesticide Use Overseas
  Neotropical migratory birds are being killed by the heavy use of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, which are used to boost crop productivity to feed increasing numbers of people in the developing world. In some cases, birds are poisoned outright by chemical application, or by consuming grain and insects that have been sprayed. In other cases, the pesticides accumulate and concentrate within the birds, resulting in deformed chicks or eggshells that are so thin they break before hatching.
  
  
• Suburban Sprawl and Forest Fragmentation
  As the population of the United States has grown from 76 million in 1900 to over 280 million today, cities and suburbs have sprawled outward. Fairfax, Virginia, for example, a suburb of Washington, D.C., saw 69 percent of its forest converted to homes and businesses between 1980 and 1995. As human populations have risen, and forests have fallen, primary predators such as wolves, bobcats, and cougars have been wiped out, while the ecological niche of meso-predators such as feral cats, raccoons, possums and foxes has expanded. The result has been massive predation of Neotropical songbirds, which tend to nest in the open and near the ground rather than in tree cavities or higher up in the forest canopy.
  
  With forest fragmentation has come an invasion of native and non-native birds that compete with deep-forest species for food and nesting sites. One example is the brown-headed cowbird. Cowbirds were once confined to the forest edges of mid-western prairies where they fed in grasslands grazed by roaming bison. Today, however, because of widespread forest fragmentation, parasitic cowbirds can be found all across the United States. A single cowbird may lay as many as 20 eggs in a breeding season - one or two eggs per songbird nest. Because Neotropical migrants tend to build open cup-shaped nests, and raise only a single brood a year, they are particularly susceptible to cowbird parasitism.
  
  
• Intensive U.S. Farming Practices
  As American farmers make increasingly intensive use of their lands, bird populations suffer. Post-to-post cultivation has wiped out edge-row thickets where many songbirds used to nest, while many farmers now cut hay three times a year where they used to cut just once. The result is that hedgerow and ground-nesting birds like the northern bobwhite, the eastern meadowlark, the vesper sparrow, and the grasshopper sparrow are in rapid decline.
  
  

Pump Jacks and Plastic Houses

As we enter election season, it's worth remembering what the REAL threat to hunting is in America, and it's not a loss of guns. As Tom Reed put it back in 2004, writing in High Country News:

A ranch where I once killed a dandy mule deer buck in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin was roaded and tapped for coalbed methane two years ago. It will not recover in my lifetime.

When Bill Clinton was elected to the White House, the pro-gun folks said the government was coming to our doors to take away our rifles, shotguns and pistols. No agent showed up at my place.

But I have seen the place where I used to hunt for pronghorn. There’s a pump jack there now. And there’s a sign that warns me of possible poison gas. And there’s not a pronghorn in sight.

Not everyone is losing their hunting lands to oil rigs.

Some of the land I have hunted on in the past has been lost to church construction, subdivision, and cattle grazing.

One thing is for sure: God is not making more hunting lands. This is a resource we only lose, and once lost, it is lost forever.

• Related Posts:
  ** The Real Threat to Hunting in America
  ** Crying Wolf in Dog and Hunting Debates
  .

Islands of Wolves, Rats, Lions and Dogs

Isle Royale, Michigan.  An island of wolves.

In the real world, population bottlenecks are not always quite as big a problem as some people imagine, nor are they quite as easy to correct as some people hope. 

If that sounds like two statements in direct opposition, then you have grasped a core message of this post, which is that not all animal populations are the same, that few real-world cases line up squarely with simple theory, and that there are multiple facets to both genetic isolation and genetic rescue.

In order to understand a little more, let's look at four real-world animal populations:

Imagine a pregnant rat jumps ship on to a large island that is 200 square miles in size.  The population of rats multiplies very rapidly but without any apparent long term problems due to inbreeding.  How is that possible?  Answer:  With rats, massive population numbers within a short period of time are possible, and a mid-sized island of 200 square miles (over 259,000 acres) can easily hold a million rats.  In this situation, genetic drift and mutation will eventually result in a population with little or no obvious genetic dysfunction.  On an island with 1,000,000 rats, in which each rat lives for a year or so, a 100-year old population of theoretically "inbred" rats will have very low coefficients of inbreeding, no inbreeding depression, and no discernible early mortality due to genetic weakness.  To be clear, this is not a theory; rats have colonized almost every island in the world exactly this way.

Now imagine that a pregnant wolf lands on an island that is 200 square miles in size.  The wolf whelps five pups, and the pups interbreed and the population grows for a time until it hits some sort of food-availability threshold.  A boreal island that is 200 square miles in size and with a sizable moose population can, for a while, feed a population of 50 wolves, but eventually that population can be expected to collapse down to as few as dozen individuals before it rises again and falls again due to the vagaries of disease and weather which will impact prey species such as moose, deer and rabbit.  After 75 years, the population of wolves on this island will be very inbred, and infecundity and disease will be common.  The reason for this is simple:  wolves typically live between six or seven years in the wild, and the smaller number of wolves on the island, combined with the smaller number of generations, means that there will be very little room for genetic drift or mutation.  Is is possible to import a single individual wolf to achieve a "genetic rescue" of this heavily inbred wolf population?  A single wolf, sadly, is not likely to do it.  The reason for this is simple:  the small number of wolves on the island (a population of 24, on average) and their high rate of infecundity due to inbreeding, means that the genes of the new male wolf will quickly dominate.  Inbreeding will then continue as before.  Though there may be a short temporal  improvement in population health, that may not be observed if there is a counter-balancing downtick in food sources occurring at the same time.  To be clear, this scenario is not one I have made up; it appears this is exactly what happened with the wolves on Isle Royale, Michigan.

Now imagine a large population of lions that has been reduced by hunting to just 30 individuals living on an isolated isthmus 200 square miles in size.  The population is so isolated that the coefficients of inbreeding within the lion population begin to rise, and a rise of infecundity and an increase in genetic defect is feared.   The good news, however, is that this isthmus is not at carrying capacity for lion, and so eight completely unrelated female lions are imported from another country more than 1,000 miles away -- a 25% population boost representing a massive increase in genetic diversity.  What happens?   A rather significant improvement in species health and fecundity seems to occur, and the lions begin colonizing more space on the isthmus.  Why did this genetic rescue work?  Well, for one thing, the original 30-lion population was more diverse than it at first appeared.  Remember that these 30 lions did not actually spring from a closed registry of two individuals, but were the remainder left from a massive population that once numbered scores of thousands.  While inbreeding to failure appeared to threaten this lion population, the actual genetic diversity beating under the hood was likely to be quite a bit more expansive than a purely mathematical population model would suggest.  Factor in the relative size of the genetic infusion coming from the other side of the country, and the ground is set up for a successful genetic rescue.  To be clear, this scenario is not one I have made up; this is exactly what happened with the lions of Southern Florida (aka, the Eastern Puma, Florida Panther, or Eastern Mountain Lion).

Now imagine a pair of dogs that are mated and their pups are then inbred to each other for 25 years at which time another dog is added to the population and the result is further inbred for another 40 years.  The result is a population of about 180 potential breeding dogs (30 dogs are born a year, and not all dogs will be bred) which have a Coefficient of Inbreeding of 80 percent.  What would it take to have a successful genetic rescue here?  If we use the Florida Panther model as a guide, we would need to see an addition of 45 new dogs to the gene pool.  Would the addition of  one or two dogs be enough to turn the tide?   Probably not.   The addition of only a handful of dogs in a show-breed situation, where dominant sire selection will continue unabated, will not provide the genetic fix needed to turn things around.  Remember we are starting here with a very high COI, and the public demand for these dogs is apparently quite low; this is a breed that hits its consumer "carrying capacity" with just 30 to 40 puppies a year.  To be clear, this scenario is not one I have made up; the dog presented here is the Cesky terrier, a breed that has never been very popular.

So what's the point? 
 
The point is this:  the issues associated with population bottle necks are not quite as simple as some imagine.  Yes, the relative size of the founding population matters, but so too does the genetic health of the founding population, the total number of animals bred, the number of generations it took for the population to achieve a large size, and whether the animal in question was breeding randomly or within an organized scheme that encouraged (or discouraged) genetic diversity.

Consider, for a moment, a dog breed that was drawn into a closed registry 120 years ago with 150 dogs in its foundation registry.  The breed grew rather quickly so that after 40 years it had a worldwide population of 125,000 dogs; a population it has maintained for the last 80 years.  Coefficients of inbreeding in the modern population of this dog will, on the whole, be quite low, and though the apparent "effective population size" may have dropped from 150 dogs to 80 dogs due to dominant sire selection, effective population size is quite a meaningless number when you have bred well north of 1 million dogs over a 100-year span.  In a situation like this diversity is not destroyed over time, but created through the sheer beat of numbers over vast distances.
 
Of course, there is another factor in all this, and it is an important one, and one that is too often left out.

You see, in the world of Kennel Club dogs there has always been a little "pedigree leakage."  

Pedigree leakage may be small or even nonexistent in a very rare breed where everyone knows everyone else, and the dog in question is likely to look a bit odd or extreme and not have an obvious analog in another breed or cross-breed.

But what of the other more popular breeds, where there are a lot more dogs in the wind, and only a small number are likely to ever see the inside of a show ring, and analogs exist all over? 

In a situation like this, instead of a reduction in effective population size, there may actually be a little growth! 

After all, a Labrador Retriever with five-generation pedigree papers from the AKC may, in fact, have a Flat-coated sire, or even be whelped by a cross-bred dog of "pedigree unknown." 

A Miniature Poodle may have a little Maltese coursing through its veins only a generation or two back. 

And what does it matter?  Not a whit if the cross was a sound one and did not add a new or heavier genetic load to the mix.

The bottom line is that there is more to population genetics than any one number, and while it's important to be worried, and to take action to increase breed genetic diversity, it's equally important to recognize that one can fall in love with less than robust genetic theory and falsely specific numbers just as easily as one can fall in love with cocked up doggy histories and the romance of breed purity.   In the end, population science and genetics is about more than one number; it's about a small stack of numbers meeting a real gene pool coursing through the flesh and blood of a real population that is living in a real environment (whether wild or artificial, free-feeding or subsidized).

Yes, let us work to increase diversity, but let us also look towards Mother Nature as well. 

Remember that while Mother Nature abhors closed breed pools, she also manages to work out solutions for most of those that wash up as single or paired animals on tropical islands or are introduced to foreign lands.  Observe the birds in the park.  How many Starlings did we start off with here in America?  How many English Sparrows?  How many Red Fox?   How many wolves in Yellowstone?  They are clearly thriving.  How is that possible?  And, of course, the answer is that they colonized in vast numbers over a vast space of land, and in the slow beat of numbers and space they managed forge their own genetic health.
..

Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom'

Jonathan Franzen's fourth novel 'Freedom' hits on population growth, mountaintop removal mining, invasive species, conservation, and cats killing birds.  Sounds like my cup of coffee!

In an interview he notes.

It's hard to drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the exurbs of this country and not feel, you know, maybe it would be better to have less people. It is clear that many of our environmental problems, certainly climate change foremost among them, would be scaled down dramatically and perhaps scaled down into solvable range if there were half as many people contributing to the problem.

.

Losing Nature

“Worldwide we are estranged from nature.  Over half of the world’s population is now urbanised which means that more than one person in two is to some degree cut off from the natural world. There will be some people who do not see a wild creature from one day to the next – unless it is a rat or a pigeon – and they aren’t wild.... If you are not very careful, the natural world is something you do on your holidays – you visit a nature reserve in the summer here or overseas and that is the end of it. But it is not like that. The natural world is around us all the time in our houses and gardens. And it is not just a question of standing back and looking at it in a passive way; it is about getting involved in an active way and that transforms your attitude.”
. . . . - Sir David Attenborough

.

The Common Denominator is Too Many of Us

.

You are Here.

This is the world. We can do better.
.

The Pace of the Problem

IN 1950, the populations of North America and the area that comprises Latin America and the Caribbean were exactly the same.

TODAY, the population of Latin America and the Caribbean is over 200 million people greater than that of the U.S. and Canada.

BY 2050, the population of Latin America and the Caribbean is projected to be 400 million people greater than that of North America.
.