THE NEXT ADDED 100 MILLION AMERICANS: PART 3

By Frosty Wooldridge, www.newswithviews.com

January 3, 2007

http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty196.htm

THE NEXT ADDED 100 MILLION AMERICANS

Part 3: Losing land fast

By Frosty Wooldridge

Name one advantage to adding 100 million more Americans in the next 34 years. Don’t Americans suffer enough problems with one million homeless people staggering around our cities, unending and ulcer-provoking gridlock traffic, toxic air pollution and suburbs expanding over the horizon?

What does it take to wake up an entire civilization to its impending calamity? A lady named Miss Ross wrote me, “Sir, don’t you know that Malthus was proven wrong and that he retracted his thesis that overpopulation caused mass starvation?”

Thomas Malthus wrote his thesis when there were less than one billion people on the planet. Today, we suffer 6.5 billion. In the March 14, 2005 issue of Time Magazine, writer Jeffrey D. Sachs reported, “Eight million people die annually because they can’t feed themselves…35 percent of them don’t have access to clean drinking water.” While we add 100 million Americans, 190 countries around the world will add three billion people. If you think humanity suffers today, you’re invited to stick around to see it worsen beyond your wildest predictions.

I’ve traveled over six continents on a bicycle. I’ve seen overpopulation up close and ugly. I’ve seen what’s coming. What I am attempting to show readers is this: we cannot solve 21st century problems with 20th century thinking or actions. As Albert Einstein said, “The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.”

Our government and leaders create a policy for everything under the sun. We follow traffic, water, irrigation, immunization and dozens of other policies. However, we fail our children without a national “Population Policy”. Where does that leave us? Our leaders think it’s acceptable to grow this nation into 1.3 billion people like China.

But that kind of thinking created consequences China can’t solve. Why do you think millions of Chinese flee to America and Canada? As their population grew, their freedoms diminished. As their numbers exploded, their environment degraded. Their problems became irreversible and unsolvable.

India offers another example. I met Arun Gandhi, the grandson of the great Gandhi, a year ago. He said to me, “With 1.1 billion people, we have devastating poverty. We have four million people who are born in the streets, live in the streets and die in the streets without ever having taken a shower, used a toilet or slept in a bed.” Therefore, if you think Malthus is wrong or Paul Ehrlich, think again. It’s only a matter of timing.

Do we want to be like Germany with 82 million people in a landmass the size of Indiana and Ohio combined? How would you like to live in Holland which is 180 miles by 100 miles in size and houses 18 million people? Virtually everything must be imported. They exceeded their carrying capacity and depend on the outside world for food, energy and goods.

As we explode toward this next 100 million added Americans, let’s talk about losing farmland.

By growing at three million per year, each U.S. citizen destroys 12 acres which is developed, cultivated, paved and covered in concrete. It’s called a citizen’s ‘footprint’. You may call it ‘human impact’. In this case, that equals 1.2 billion acres of land destroyed nationwide to support 100 million added Americans by 2040. We’re talking serious destruction to natural habitat, wetlands, farmland and the “web of life”. You’re also talking about 100 million more people using water, gasoline, natural gas and electricity. In my state of Colorado, we suffered rolling blackouts last winter because we didn’t have enough natural gas to heat our homes.

For those of you who think we can grow endlessly because you see ‘lots of open space’ as you fly in an airplane across our nation, you must address “carrying capacity”. That means how many humans, plants and animals can be sustained by a limited amount of land and water.

Since I know Colorado best, let me use our example in order for you to apply it to your state. Colorado grew by 1.4 million since 1992. As reported in the Denver Post, May 7, 2006, “Disappearing Farmland”, because of massive population growth and housing development, we lose five family farms a week. Since 1992, we lost 2.89 million acres of agricultural land. At the current rate of growth, Colorado loses 3.1 million acres of prime farmland by 2022. That’s 16 years from now. If you extend that to 2040, you’ve got a whopping added 3.3 million more farmland acres destroyed for human development.

Note that we suffer a water crisis in our state with water restrictions in 2006.

With more pavement replacing pastures in Colorado, rainwater runs into drains instead of naturally working into the topsoil. Therefore, underground aquifers can’t recharge. At some point, no one can irrigate crops on the remaining farmland.

As we destroy prime farmland, our population explodes beyond our carrying capacity. Agricultural experts predict America will be importing more than 40 percent of fruits and vegetables within 30 years. As fuel prices rise, the cost of food will degrade our standard of living. And, worse, what if those countries sending us food today, can’t or won’t in the future?

To give you an even greater sense of the gravity of the dilemma we face, let’s turn to California. They add 1,650 people per day. That’s 600,000 people added per year. They expect to add 20 million by 2040 not counting illegal aliens that pour into that state without being counted.

If you take the same formula from Colorado’s land loss, that’s five times greater farmland lost. Right about now, you’re mentally staggering while you sit reading this information. This population nightmare grows so fast as to be almost incomprehensible. As California adds 20 million, Texas adds 12 million by 2025 and Arizona adds four million. Every state adds from 1.0 to 3.0 million and more.

Additionally, few take into account aquifers drying up like the Ogallala Aquifer feeding the irrigation systems in the Midwest. Few officials understand the long term consequences of spraying herbicides, pesticides and injecting fertilizer by the billions of tons into our soils. From the millions of tons of toxic smoke stack particulate flooding down with each rainfall, we’re poisoning our land faster than it can cleanse itself of 72,000 human-made chemicals. We poison our ground water with chemicals leeching into the soil from landfills and industrial waste. With an added 100 million people, we poison the land, which is the foundation of our existence, faster than it can recover.

Another sickening aspect of our society is a lack of respect for the land. Millions of Americans throw trash, cans, bottles, plastic, old cars, millions of gallons of used oil and other chemicals onto and into the land. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of personal dumps on farms, along the road and in the woods. Think what an added 100 million people from Third World countries will do to our land.

From my research, at the accelerating speed of America’s immigration-driven growth, we pave several thousand of miles of roads daily. If you notice across the land, you can’t take a picture without power lines or other human development. We’re flooding our natural world with everything un-natural. By adding another 100 million people, we can only pollute our natural world with more dams, power lines, highways, housing sprawl, malls, fire houses, schools, hospitals, bridges, airports and worse. In the end, where will the animals go, how do they feed and how do they procreate?

Because of loss of habitat in the lower 48 states, the National Academy of Sciences reports that 2,500 plants and animals suffer extinction every decade. How can we, a cognitive species, continue that kind of a killing spree?

Finally, aren’t we packed in like sardines already on the east and west coasts? Aren’t Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Denver, San Francisco and all the major cities horrible enough? Everyone is crammed, jammed and gridlocked into an ongoing hyper insanity.

We clearly need a national population policy. We, as Americans, created a stable population with a 2.03 fertility level in the 1970s. Immigration causes our population crisis. If we continue on this path, we’ll reach an added 100 million people on our way to one billion people with commensurate misery and consequences.

How can we stop this crisis? Simple: 10 year time out/rollback/moratorium on all immigration. After the moratorium, we allow a maximum of 100,000 immigrants annually ONLY if that maintains a stable, sustainable U.S. population. Those overpopulated countries need to stabilize their own populations. We can help them, but in the end, they must help themselves.

“Sustainable growth is a self-contradictory concept beloved by those who want to continue the same old stands—growth as a solution to all problems—very few people grasp the simple fact—demographic or economic growth is unsustainable.” Lindsey Grant, author of “TOO MANY PEOPLE”

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