WILDERNESS AND OVERPOPULATION
By Howie Wolke
Nobody knows how many species inhabit this lovely green planet, but estimates range from 10 to 30 million. Yet just one of these species, Homo sapiens, now consumes or otherwise utilizes over half of the plant biomass produced each year on Earth, funneling it into an ever-expanding human population plus related support structures and activities.
Nearly 7 billion humans are creating the greatest mass extinction event since the late Cretaceous Era, when an asteroid crashed into the Earth. As the Earth’s human population grows at the rate of about 76 million additional humans per year, we alter the Earth’s climate, deplete its fisheries, pollute its atmosphere, oceans, rivers and soils, and continually carve civilization into its remaining wild habitats. Overpopulation is at the root of nearly all of our problems, yet few work to tame this beast. That includes the U.S. government, which has no population policy.
Here in the United States, we are slowly increasing automotive fuel economy and building better energy efficiency into new structures. Renewable energy industries are growing. Yet in 2010, we spewed out more carbon and methane than ever before. Why? It’s simple. The technological gains are being overwhelmed by population growth (over 300 million and increasing).
Historically, as humanity grows and spreads, true wilderness has been the first thing to go. Forest are cut, soils plowed, prairies and deserts fenced and over-grazed, rivers dammed, and various habitats are dug up and drilled for oil, gas, coal and metals. Also, millions of miles of roads and highways dissect the landscape. And of course, cities and suburbs sprawl across the planet, gobbling up habitat like a hungry teen-ager gobbles up lunch.
In the U.S. south of Alaska, about 9% of our total land area remains in a wild or semi-wild condition; that is, it’s roadless and more or less natural in chunks of 5,000 acres or larger. About 2-½% of the landscape is protected as designated Wilderness. Yet even as the National Wilderness Preservation System grows, the overall amount of wild country shrinks, as unprotected wildlands in the United States and around the globe succumb to the ever-expanding human hoard.
Population growth also lowers our expectations for wild places. As humans experience increasingly crowded and unnatural living conditions, they settle for “wilderness” that’s decreasingly wild. As wilderness becomes less wild, so does the human soul. Daniel Boone probably wouldn’t consider much of today’s wilderness to be very wild. Nor, I suspect, would Teddy Roosevelt. Nowadays, even tiny chunks of degraded wildland – for example, over-grazed areas infested with exotics – are viewed by many as “wilderness”.
In the past, I have referred to this phenomenon of decreasing expectations as “Landscape Amnesia”. As ensuing generations experience less wildness and increasingly unnatural landscapes, they begin to collectively forget what real wilderness and healthy habitats are. So we settle for wilderness that’s less wild than ever before. Designated Wilderness becomes less wild and more impacted by the expanding population’s increasing pressures and demands. It is the inevitable result of population growth.
If you read Wilderness Watcher or the Guardian, you know that overcrowding, overgrazing, motor vehicle incursions, illegal water and other construction projects, predator control, pollution and various attempts to manipulate natural processes plague designated Wilderness, and they increase as population grows.
Obstacles to halting and reversing population growth are formidable. For one thing, the momentum of population growth IS the history of our species, so concurrently we tame, subdue and subjugate wild nature partly because we know no other way.
Many on the political left view jobs and social issues as more important than the environment; they miss the numerous connections to overpopulation. And they oppose the tough immigration policies that could halt continued growth (in the U.S. today, population growth is mostly a function of immigration) in the United States. Meanwhile, the political right worships at big industry’s altar of growth at all cost. In addition, religious fundamentalists of nearly every ilk believe that it is their duty to overwhelm all others with their progeny.
And the environmental movement, at least here in the U.S., remains oddly silent on overpopulation.
The solutions to overpopulation are no secret. Economic policies based upon stability, not perpetual growth, are essential. Better health care and education plus political and economic empowerment of women – especially in poorer countries – are equally important. Family planning services must be integral, safe, and available to all, everywhere. Also, men must assume greater responsibility for their obvious role in population growth. In the United States, immigration must be brought under control. We also need to create tax and other economic incentives for smaller families. But none of this will happen if overpopulation continues to elude the discussion.
Until overpopulation is recognized, the United States and many other nations will continue to fail to develop and implement population policies, and humans will continue to obliterate not just wilderness, but most remaining natural ecosystems on Earth. Oh well, it’s obvious that humans can endure in horribly over-crowded, polluted, denuded and impoverished squalor. That’s proven each day in many corners of the world. The flip side of that problem is that so many other forms of life cannot.
Howie Wolke is a Montana-based wilderness guide/outfitter, board director and former Wilderness Watch President, and long-time advocate for wilderness and other wild habitats.
2 comments
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March 3, 2011 at 8:40 am
erikloomis
This article is wrong-headed for many reasons. And the idea that immigration is a major environmental problem is offensive.
1. This idea that immigration is a threat to our environment assumes that somehow environmental issues stop at international borders and if we keep people out of our nation, our environment will be protected. Meanwhile, climate change imperils our wilderness areas whether people remain in Guatemala or try to improve their lives in the United States.
2. Even if the above assumption is strictly true when it comes to technical boundaries of wilderness, it assumes that environmental issues in the U.S. are somehow more important than environmental issues in other countries.
3. The entire argument that overpopulation is the major threat to the environment shifts the blame for environmental problems from rich people who consume a vast majority of the world’s resources and onto poor people. Immigrants, because they are poor, are going to have a much smaller environmental footprint than a person with a house in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico who commutes into Albuquerque for instance. Who is really to blame for climate change in that scenario–the person with the 3000 square foot mansion in the Sandias or 100 immigrants with their combined environmental footprint?
4. The focus on wilderness and the potential threats to it is emblematic of the white elitist form of environmentalism that has dominated the movement since the late 1970s. Rather than focus on the environmental problems of people and the ecosystems around them, Wolke worries about lands that most Americans will never visit. And while those lands have great value, this kind of argument does zilch to build the kind of bipartisan and electorally popular environmental movement of the 1960s that focused as much as the environment of the backyard as that of the alpine wilderness.
This isn’t to say that overpopulation is a non-issue. But it certainly isn’t the most important problem we have to face as environmentalists. And to reinforce the environmental movement as white and privileged, of which this article is guilty, does absolutely nothing to further a sustainable world.
March 7, 2011 at 4:29 pm
wildernesswatch
As a result of Howie’s essay “Wilderness and Overpopulation”, we’ve had – not unexpectedly – a few comments from folks who take issue with Howie. In a nutshell, their complaints are:
1. They are offended by the idea that immigration is a problem.
2. The ecological footprint of poor people, including immigrants, is much lower than that of affluent Americans, including those who frequently drive to visit wilderness areas.
3. An emphasis on wilderness is elitist since few people in general and very few poor people ever visit wilderness, and this emphasis does little to build effective political coalitions of people working on obvious immediate environmental concerns such as air and water pollution, toxic chemicals, etc.
4. They are offended by Howie’s assertion that reducing the U.S. population may be “especially important”, compared with other countries.
5. Lack of a discussion on over-consumption.
6. One writer from Texas challenged the Wilderness Watch staff’s lifestyles (while knowing nothing about them) and suggested that they should move to a 500 square foot apartment in New York, the “greenest” place in America, based on the ecological footprint of those who travel little and live in apartments.
Howie Wolke responds:
We at Wilderness Watch certainly appreciate critical opinions, but I think that these folks should carefully re-read my essay, leaving their ideological baggage behind. A sacred cow for some Americans is immigration. My essay never blamed individual immigrants for anything, but it is a demographic fact that immigration is responsible for most of today’s population growth in the United States. So if the U.S. is to stabilize and hopefully reduce its population, reducing immigration must be included in the equation. It’s simple mathematics, nothing more.
Obviously, we’re all either immigrants or descended from immigrants and it should be equally obvious that most immigrants aspire to become affluent. Which is why I suggested that stabilizing the U.S. population may be more important than anywhere else, simply because Americans consume so much, so inefficiently, and thus our per-capita ecological footprint trumps all. But yes, of course it’s a global problem. Yet policies are enacted by nations, and the U.S. is one of a dwindling number with no population policy. We need one, and its goal should be to reverse population growth and stabilize it. Let’s begin to take care of our little corner of the world as we also encourage others to take care of theirs.
We at Wilderness Watch agree that over-consumption and inefficient use of resources — especially energy — are bigger problems in the U.S. than most anywhere else. That just wasn’t the focus of my essay. As a writer, you can’t do justice to every problem at once. We are a wilderness group. Despite our individual concerns about other environmental problems and social issues, all of which are connected, we focus on wilderness and therefore we are effective at what we do: work to keep wilderness wild. I chose to discuss overpopulation because few others choose to, and because population growth is fundamental to the degradation of wilderness.
A couple of comments belittled the importance of wilderness. I’ll simply say that if you have no love for wildness, if you can’t appreciate or be open to the magic of the Earth’s most basic and most wondrous primordial environment, then nothing I can say here is likely to change your mind.
What I cannot ignore are personal attacks directed toward our staff. For the record, the entire Wilderness Watch staff lives in the city of Missoula, Montana. They live in modest abodes, mostly bike, walk, and bus-ride their short commute to the office, drive fuel-efficient vehicles, and they tend to buy primarily products that they need, including organic and locally produced foods, when possible. I’m a bit less pure; I live in a remote rural area and I drive too much.
It also occurs to me that yes, while the average urban New Yorker’s ecological footprint is relatively slight, New York is hardly a very green place. It’s mostly concrete. And if few visit or live near our remaining wild places, I guarantee that few will defend them.
So I shall not consider a move to New York City, as the fellow from Texas suggested for us Wilderness Watchers. For one thing, I would likely be incarcerated for any of numerous possible anti-social behaviors that I would quickly display as a result of being closed in and crowded like a rat in a maze. I’ll remain here, near Yellowstone, where I can continue my efforts to impact society’s outlook toward and efforts to preserve, real wilderness.