Americans Still Worried About Population Growth, But Environmental Groups Couldn’t Give a Hoot

A recently released opinion poll by Rasmussen Reports reveals that more than twice as many Americans think the U.S. population is growing too fast rather than too slowly. Now if only blind, deaf and dumb environmental groups like the Sierra Club would realize this. (In the case of the Sierra Club, I should say former environmental group; now it’s primarily a left-wing “social justice” organization.)

When asked, “Which is a bigger problem for the United States – a population that is growing too fast or one that is growing too slowly?” 51 percent of 800 American adults surveyed in early January 2015 answered “too fast.”

Only 22 percent disagreed and responded that too-slow population growth is a bigger problem for the country.

This is despite the fact that America’s birthrate has been in decline for six straight years. I think that most Americans – even without a modicum of instruction in the principles of demography, and clueless about whether the U.S. population weighs in at 320 million or 3.2 billion – sense intuitively that our nation is becoming ever more crowded and overpopulated.

Not exactly wilderness anymore – throngs of sightseers flock to Yosemite National Park’s famous “tunnel view” of Yosemite Valley.

They have to fight worsening traffic jams on our streets and freeways; they confront ever more fierce job competition, and when they get a chance for some respite and R&R from their harried, frenzied routines, they visit city, state and national parks that are ever more swarming with the maddening crowds.

Once upon a time American environmental groups were actually leaders when it came to recognizing the population problem and advocating for solutions. But once excessive immigration levels rather than a high birthrate became the dominant force driving our numbers higher and higher, mainstream environmental groups – the Environmental Establishment – were nowhere to be found. They deserted the front lines.

Like scared little bunnies running from a frightful predator, they scurried into the bushes and peered out timidly.

Or like regal eagles, they retreated to the high hills of lofty opinion, at safe remove from the hurly-burly national debates over immigration policy. From these safe sanctuaries, they oozed political correctness. Better to be politically correct than environmentally correct, because then they avoided the smears and ostracism that inevitably came the way of anyone who told the honest truth about overimmigration, overpopulation and environmental degradation.

As long as environmentalists stuck to safe territory, they wouldn’t stray off the reservation. If they stuck to pontificating that overpopulation was at most a global issue (but not a national one), or even that sheer numbers of people actually didn’t matter at all, or that the environment could be protected merely by reining in greedy multinational corporations and exhorting commuters to ride in buses instead of cars, or that nuclear power plants along the coast should be traded in for concentrated solar plants in the desert, nobody would denounce them as a racist, nativist, xenophobe or purveyor of “hate speech” and try to exile them from the arena of acceptable public discourse.

But then, they wouldn’t exactly be telling the truth, would they?

Then we have the Sierra Club, which simply sold its soul to the highest bidder.

But perhaps the biggest reason that environmental groups lapsed into silence on the single greatest threat to the environment is party politics.

Over the last two decades, the American environmental movement became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. Thus, it now toes the party line on immigration. And the party line on immigration – because it benefits Democratic Party elites, if not rank-and-file Democrats, to say nothing of the nation as a whole or the nation’s environment – is the more immigration, the merrier. More voters, more donors, more clients, more power.

That is the sad truth.

This is why the American public as a whole is actually more concerned about overpopulation – the biggest environmental threat of all – than so-called environmental groups.