Population stabilization: an integral component of Earth Day

6 April 2020

Earth day was founded in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson specifically to address environmental preservation and the impact of overpopulation. The 50th anniversary of Earth Day is on April 22, 2020.

Kathleene Parker wrote an excellent op-ed in the April 5, 2020 edition of Westword, titled As Earth Day Approaches, Remember the Politically Incorrect "P" Word. It is well worth reading in its entirety. Here are a few excerpts:

... Lost on most people is that the reason Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) founded Earth Day was to focus attention on the necessity to address the “P” word: population — global and, more important, domestic....

I’m told that during Nelson’s final days, he grieved over the loss of that message and feared that we face ever-worsening environmental and social ills, with nature intervening — as nature will — with things like pandemics.

Global population — as media deceptively report “falling populations” due to decreased birthrates (which take decades to have an impact) — reached 4 billion shortly after the first Earth Day, and today approaches 8 billion, to perhaps be 10 billion by late century....

Thanks to deregulated national media (seemingly doing only Wall Street’s endless-growth agenda), we’re told the U.S. — already the world’s third-most populated nation, behind only China and India — isn’t growing due to a falling birthrate. Hogwash! Our numbers explode by 28 million to 30 million a decade, meaning in some recent years we stood with just eight other nations to fuel half of ALL GROWTH ON THE PLANET! ...

... today we’re no longer a frontier nation, and thus, should perhaps acknowledge and discuss immigration's impacts on our numbers, particularly since Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development warned that immigration should never be allowed to fuel growth....

After the 1990s Cairo Population Conference, 58 member nations of the National Academies of Sciences issued a joint statement, warning emphatically that none of the world’s environmental or social problems can be solved without addressing population. Media’s response? They ignored it.

Last fall, over 11,000 of the world’s scientists jointly declared a climate emergency and stated, emphatically, that climate change CANNOT be solved without addressing population....

The world’s real problem nations are China, India and the United States.

Overpopulation is about overcrowding. But it’s also about water shortages, desertification, resource exhaustion and species extinction....

A 1980s Sierra Club bumpersticker — before the club in the 1990s, of record, backed off the topic of immigration (and, by extension, population) in exchange for a $100 million donation — called the United States, “The World’s Most Overpopulated Nation.” Simple math shows one of many ways that’s true....

American women voluntarily reached replacement level fertility (2.1 children per woman) in 1970. Yet mass immigration is causing U.S. population to double within the lifetimes of children born today. The Sierra Club's long-standing population policy clearly acknowledged the relationship between mass immigration and unending population growth - and resulting environmental degradation. Then in 1996 the Sierra Club abandoned their immigration / population / environment policy and other mainstream "environmental" organizations followed suit.

SUSPS chronicles the Sierra Club environment sellout:

Since 1996, leaders of the Sierra Club have refused to admit that immigration driven, rapid U.S. population growth causes massive environmental problems. And they have refused to acknowledge the need to reduce U.S. immigration levels in order to stabilize the U.S. population and protect our natural resources. Their refusal to do what common sense says is best for the environment was a mystery for nearly a decade.

Then, on Oct. 27, 2004, the Los Angeles Times revealed the answer: David Gelbaum, a super rich donor, had demanded this position from the Sierra Club in return for huge donations! Kenneth Weiss, author of the LA Times article that broke the story, quoted what David Gelbaum said to Sierra Club Executive Director Carl

I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me."

In 1996 and again in 1998, the Club's leaders proved their loyalty to Gelbaum's position on immigration, first by enacting a policy of neutrality on immigration and then by aggressively opposing a referendum to overturn that policy. In 2000 and 2001, Gelbaum rewarded the Club with total donations to the Sierra Club Foundation exceeding $100 million. In 2004 and 2005, the Club's top leaders and management showed their gratitude for the donations by stifling dissent and vehemently opposing member efforts to enact an immigration reduction policy.