Audubon Speech

The Limits of Accommodation

U.S. Population Growth, Immigration & the Environment

Bob Perciasepe,
Senior Vice President, National Audubon Society
Speech before Western Land Managers,
October 2002

It's great to be here in Wisconsin, the home state of Aldo Leopold. It is a true honor to be a stand-in for Senator Gaylord Nelson, the Father of Earth Day.

Senator Nelson was originally asked to speak about the environmental consequences of U.S. population growth for the American west.

I am going to speak on the same topic - a topic too often given short shrift in the environmental movement, but one that remains a core environmental issue.

My comments about population and the environment follow a pretty simple structure -- I am going to talk about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

I am not going to give you answers - I am going to give you scenarios and choices and ask you to think about those choices. Good people can - and will - choose different futures for America and for the west.

That is perfectly fine. I am not interested in the choice so much as the process. I want the process to be thought through. I want the issues to be hashed out and mulled over.

And above all, I want the answers to come from the American people - not politicians in Washington or stock traders on Wall Street.

As Wood Guthrie said so well, "this land is your land."

First, let me talk about where we have been.

Well, we've been on Earth.

I make this point not to be flip, but to say that the story of U.S. population growth closely parallels that of world population growth --- at least through the first half of the 20th Century.

Between 1930 and today, world population tripled from 2 billion to 6 billion people.

This is a phenomenal rate of population growth, and it has shaped every thing on this planet, from coastlines to mountain tops, from the jungles of the Amazon to the pack ice of the Arctic.

During the same period of time, the population of the U.S. also grew by leaps and bounds, soaring from 122 million people in 1930 to over 285 million today - not quite a tripling, but far more than a mere doubling.

Between 1935 and 1965, the U.S. and the world shared a similar population and environment story.

As human populations burgeoned, massive amounts of toxins - from raw sewage to pesticides - were washed into fresh water streams and rivers.

Overgrazing of marginal lands resulted in rapid erosion and desertification on all continents.

Over-fishing, pollution, and coastal development resulted in the systematic depletion of fish stocks and the destruction of reef systems.

New roads were ripped into once pristine areas - from jungles to mountain tops

As more and more humans spread into new areas of the world, once-natural ecosystems were transformed into human-focused profit centers.

This is the population-environment history of the world, and for a long time it was the history of the United States as well.

Beginning about 1965, however, something interesting began to happen - the environmental history of the U.S. began to diverge from that of much of the rest of the world.

While population growth continued apace, both in the U.S. and the world, the environmental consequences of population growth seemed to slow here in the U.S.

In the last 30 years our water has actually gotten cleaner. Our air has gotten better. Much of our most depleted wildlife stock actually recovered. We have more forest in the U.S. today than we did in 1930.

How is this possible?

The short answer is law, government and urbanization - the stuff too many pure population pundits never talk about.

In 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act which resulted in the federal government buying back millions of acres of denuded mountain tops that had been ripped and robbed by timber and coal mining interests. This land is the backbone of the National Forest system we have in the Eastern U.S. today.

At the same time, large-scale farm mechanization and the railroads made marginal farmlands in the eastern U.S. less profitable. Millions of cleared acres were allowed to return to forest.

Even as forests began to regrow back East, a new environmental awareness began to take hold in the U.S.

Led by people like Senator Gaylord Nelson, the nascent environmental ethic that had begun with Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold, began to take off. By Earth Day 1970, environmentalism had become a mainstream political force - a widely shared common value uniting us across race, religion, political party, class, and geography.

This was a marvelous thing, and marvelous things came out of it. Thanks to the growth of the American environmental movement, new laws were implemented, including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

The result was that our air and our water actually got cleaner.

The same divergence that was occurring in terms of forests and clean water and clean air also began to happen with wildlife.

Commercial hunting of wildlife was banned at the turn of the century and, with the passage of the Lacey Act, wildlife hammered to the edge of existence began to slowly recover.

This recovery process was greatly accelerated with the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and with the rise of a professionally-trained corps of science-based land, water and wildlife managers.

The result of new law and good government was extraordinary: things began to turn around.

And what is more remarkable - or perhaps most remarkable - is that things began to turn around even though the population of the U.S. grew by leaps and bounds.

Consider this: Between 1970 and 2000 we added 100 million people to the population of the United States.

This is a LOT of people. One hundred million people is a population greater than ALL of 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 and Wisconsin COMBINED.

It is an extraordinary testament to America's environmental ethic and good government that between 1970 and 2000 we added 100 million people to the population of the U.S. and the water got cleaner ... and the air got cleaner.

Today we have more forests in the U.S. than we did in 1900 or 1930 or even 1970.

Today we have more protected land in the U.S. than we did in 1900, or 1930, or even in 1980.

Whale watching is a growth industry.

Today it is hard to imagine that populations of Canadian geese, whitetail deer, and beaver were once in critical danger. Today the issue for these creatures is control, not protection.

Wild turkey have rebounded too. Today there are more wild turkey in the U.S. than there were when Columbus landed.

The American Bison - almost extinct 100 years ago - is now so abundant the federal government will spend $10 million this year to manage down their numbers

Elk populations have rebounded nicely too. A small elk herd was recently reintroduced into Kentucky -- where they were last seen in 1850.

Elk are not the only thing showing up in old haunts. Red wolves are back in North Carolina. And in Minnesota there are now over 2,500 gray wolves - twice the target number the Fish and Wildlife Service hoped to achieve for that state when wolves were first protected back in the 1970s.

The alligator story today is not that they are endangered, but that they are eating the poodles of the retirees in South Florida.

The Bald Eagle may soon be off the endangered species list. The Peregrine Falcon already is.

Blue bird houses have helped restore the eastern blue bird. Wood duck nest boxes have brought back the wood duck.

All of this is great news. And it is great news that occurred despite the fact that we added 100 million people to the population of the U.S. in the last 30 years.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am NOT saying everything is fine with the environment.

We still have very serious environmental problems in the U.S. These include:

• Phenomenal - even alarming -- wetlands loss across the U.S.
  
  
• A coastal fisheries stock decimated by overfishing.
  
  
• Massive crown fires in our forests out West due to 40 years of Smokey-the-bear fire suppression that wreaked havoc on the natural fire cycles.
  
  
• Migrant bird species in decline over vast portions of the U.S.
  
  
• Many wildlife species are still teetering on the edge - the condor, the ocelot, the lynx, and the grizzly bear -- to name just a few.
  
  

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