Professional Documents
Culture Documents
KELLY/SUNI LAB
POPULATION DA INDEX
2 – 1NC SHELL
UNIQUENESS
6 – GLOBAL FERTILITY DOWN
9 – IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS UP
LINKS
12 – MANDATORY DETENTION
15 – KOREMATSU
16 – CONTAINER SECURITY INITIATIVE
18 – RACIAL PROFILING
INTERNAL LINKS
19 – IMMIGRATION CRUSHES CARRYING CAPACITY
22 – IMMIGRATION INCREASES FERTILITY RATES
24 – SAFETY VALUE / PERCEPTION LINKS
IMPACTS
25 – EXTINCTION (US KEY)
26 – RESOURCE WARS
31 – WATER WARS
34 – BIODIVERSITY
37 – URBAN SPRAWL
41 – DIE BACK
42 – DISEASE
45 – ECONOMY
47 – CLIMATE CHANGE
48 – TERRORISM
49 – LINEARITY
50 – 5 YEAR TIME FRAM
51 – TURNS RIGHTS ADVANTAGE
AFF ANSWERS
61 – NON-UNIQUE – OVERPOP NOW
62 – NON-UNIQUE – IMMIGRATION HIGH NOW
63 – NO INTERNAL LINK – IMMIGRATION NOT KEY
65 – IMPACT TURNS – POPULATION GOOD (***ALSO SEE RIMAL FILE)
69 – AT: URBAN SPRAWL BAD
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B. LINK –
Throughout its history, the United States has been a refuge for oppressed peoples from around the world. The Pilgrims, the Quakers,
the Amish, and countless others came to these shores in centuries past, while in the more recent past immigrants have been Cubans,
Jews, Southeast Asians, and others. What those diverse people shared was a belief that America could offer them refuge from
government oppression. Many people worldwide today face similar oppression; they live under governments that forbid them to freely
exercise rights that Americans hold dear as fundamental freedoms and persecute them when they try. We grant political asylum to
such persons: as a nation, we believe that government oppression because of one's race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or
social group is wrong. Oppression undermines our fundamental values. Thus, we traditionally have granted sanctuary to victims of
human rights abuses from around the world. Through its refugee and asylum protection policies, the United States has always been at
the forefront of protection issues, serving as a leader in garnering international attention and responses to refugee and humanitarian
emergencies around the world. America's example has great influence on how other countries respond to refugees.
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C. IMPACT
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PREFER OUR EVIDENCE BECAUSE IT SIGHTS DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS FROM THE TOTAL
FERTILITY RATE INDEX – THIS IS THE MOST QUALIFIED PREDICTOR OF GLOBAL
POPULATION
Ben Wattenberg, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, 2005
(The American Enterprise, January 1, p. 28)
These birth trends are not idle speculation, or theoretical projections. Many of the future population trends are already pretty well
baked into the global cake of the future. A stark New Demography is here. This new demography portends a different world. Joseph
Chamie, director of the U.N. Population Division, puts it this way: There was the Industrial Revolution. There was the Information
Age. Now there is the Demographic Revolution. The numbers of people on Earth will grow at an ever-diminishing rate, level off, then
begin shrinking. Whom does this help? Whom does it hurt? Why is it happening? Can we do anything about it? Should we? What
demographers call the "Total Fertility Rate" (TFR) is, put simply, the average number of children born per woman over the course of
her childbearing years. The TFR is the keystone of all demographic calculations, and I argue that it is the single most important
measurement of humankind. Moreover, it comes with some certainty. Demographers can tell you in 2004 with precision how many
20-year-old potential mothers there will be in 2025.
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LAST Wednesday, intelligence officials may have handed anti-immigration zealots the ammunition they needed. In a wide-ranging
analysis of terrorist threats, CIA chief Porter Goss and other ranking intelligence officers warned Congress that al-Qaida operatives
may try to sneak in through Mexico. Never mind that they wouldn't be Mexicans. Xenophobes in Congress and state legislatures will
no doubt use the warning as an excuse to turn up the pressure on Latinos who are in the United States illegally. Indeed, despite
President Bush's talk of less-punitive immigration reform, Republican lawmakers have already started to tighten the screws.
This month, citing security concerns, House Republicans rammed through a bill that would prohibit states from issuing standard
driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. (Apparently, they had no compunction about throwing over the vaunted GOP principle of local
control.) The bill also makes it easier for immigrants seeking political asylum to be expelled. Not to be outdone, the GOP-controlled
Georgia Legislature may consider legislation that would restrict illegal immigrants in a number of ways - prohibiting not only driver's
licenses, but also food stamps, college classes and work on state-funded projects. State Sen. Chip Rogers, a Republican from a small
town near Atlanta, said the laws he has proposed are not intended to discriminate. They're not intended to deal with illegal
immigration, either. Not really. To deal effectively with illegal immigration, the GOP would have to crack down on its major patron:
business. If a few business executives went to prison for violating federal law, fewer would risk hiring illegal workers. And if Latino
workers knew they'd be unlikely to find jobs here, fewer would endanger life and limb trying to get in.
But the fact is that the United States has never had a consistent policy of punishing employers. Indeed, for the past 20 years, the
unofficial policy of the federal government has been to accept illegal workers with a wink and a nod.
In 1998, for example, Immigration and Naturalization Service agents raided several farms in south Georgia, rounding up illegal
workers who were harvesting highly prized Vidalia onions. It took only two days for four Georgia congressmen to complain to the
INS about "a lack of regard for farmers." The four are still in office: GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Republican Congressmen Jack
Kingston and Charlie Norwood and Democratic Congressman Sanford Bishop. The INS got the message and backed down.
Despite lip service about national security, standard practice hasn't changed much since 9/11. Businesses still depend on unauthorized
workers - mostly from Latin American countries - to build houses, landscape lawns, clean office buildings and wash dishes in
restaurants. After all, businesses like employees who work hard for low wages and are unlikely to complain about brutish conditions.
The hypocrisy doesn't end with big-league farmers or business executives, either. It extends right down to the homeowners who are
only too happy to pay Mexican laborers low wages to mow their lawns or clean their houses. Then those same people bellow big time
over the notion that illegal immigrants might attend a college class to try to get a better job. Who's kidding whom?
Bush has suggested a kinder, gentler approach that might actually begin to reconcile the nation's bipolar attitude toward illegal
workers. He has proposed broadening the guest-worker program, allowing illegal immigrants already working here to apply. But many
congressional Republicans oppose the plan, and it is not yet clear that the president intends to fight for it.
That's too bad. In addition to national security, there are several good reasons to try to get a handle on illegal immigration. For one
thing, illegal immigrants tend to drive down wages for legal laborers. For another, it's exploitative to use undocumented workers for
their cheap labor while refusing to give them benefits. It violates America's sense of itself as a land of fair play.
But if the xenophobes get their way, we're going to keep right on doing it
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Listening to some in the public policy debate over immigration, one might assume that total immigration to the U.S. in recent years is
at unprecedented levels. The restrictionists would also have us believe that, in fact, immigrants are overwhelming us. Have you read
Pat Buchanan’s book? The title says it all: The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our
Country and Civilization. He and others would have us believe that immigration is out of control and fast leading us to what Buchanan
calls a “Third World America.”
However, a more objective look at the facts and a reasoned analysis of the implications of immigration trends point us in a different
direction. Yes, it is true that since 1965, when our immigration laws got rid of the severe restrictions against immigration from non-
European countries, the demographics of immigration have changed dramatically.
And, yes, at the turn of the 21st century the gross numbers of immigrants arriving to our shores exceeded the last great wave of
immigration at the turn of the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1910, nearly 9.5 million immigrants arrived in the U.S. Between 1990
and 2000, there were almost 11 million immigrants.
However, these numbers must be put into perspective. Let’s take a closer look...
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LINKS – KOREMATSU
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Sister Ping was convicted Wednesday of running a global immigrant-smuggling ring that included the 1993 ill-fated Golden Venture
that left 10 Chinese nationals dead in the waters off the Rockaways. The federal court jury in Manhattan, however, announced it was
deadlocked on a count of hostage-taking, which carries a life prison term upon conviction. The jury had earlier this week sent notes
indicating it was having difficulty agreeing on some charges. With yesterday's convictions, the Chinatown businesswoman, 56, who
real name is Cheng Chui Ping, already faces at least 35 years in prison. Ping showed no emotion as the verdict was read. She has a
prior federal conviction for conspiracy to commit alien smuggling that the judge will also factor into her sentence. "It's a long time,"
said her lawyer, Lawrence Hochheiser said. "There's enough years there to cause a problem." U.S. District Court Judge Michael
Mukasey, who has presided over the six-week trial, told lawyers that he would give the panel a so-called Allen Charge when jurors
returned to court Thursday and ask them to see whether they could agree on a verdict on the outstanding count. The jury acquitted
Cheng of laundering $60,000 from other illegal alien smugglers in December 1992. Assistant Manhattan U.S. Attorneys David Burns,
Leslie Brown and Christine Wong charged during the trial that the money was intended to promote the smuggling of 300 illegal
immigrants from China to New York. The jury convicted Cheng on conspiracy to commit alien smuggling, money laundering and
trafficking in ransom proceeds as well as in hostage taking of illegal immigrants she helped smuggle into the country. They also
determined that she had fled New York in 1994 to avoid prosecution. The trial provided a rare view into the world of snakeheads, or
illegal immigrant smugglers, who preyed on Chinese nationals, dominating them through gangland muscle. Two snakeheads who once
worked for Sister Ping testified at trial: Weng Yu Hui, and Guo Liang Qi. They described Sister Ping's multi-million-dollar empire
that smuggled immigrants out of China to Hong Kong, Thailand, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico and Africa and eventually to New York
City. They said her operation used ships, cars, planes trucks and vans to move in tens of thousands of immigrants from the Fujian
province of China and recruited members of the violent Fuk Ching gang to hold immigrants hostage until the smuggling fees were
paid.
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Its report states: “After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, securing the nation’s borders became the administration’s most
urgent job. Among responses, President Bush authorized federal officials to round up hundreds of Arabs, Muslims, and Arab
Americans as material witnesses in its investigation of the attacks and detain them on minor immigration violations. Arab and Muslim
immigrants and visitors were identified as a ‘dangerous class’, signaling the government’s intention to deny them entry into the
country whenever possible. America’s borders thus became more tightly controlled, and certain immigrants bore the burden of the
administration’s policies.”
The Commission found that by November 2001, “the DOJ had detained more than 1,100 men of Middle Eastern and South Asian
descent. DOJ did not reveal who it had detained, the reasons for detention, nor where detainees were held, not even to their families.
Many detainees alleged mistreatment by prison guards, including being hosed down with cold water, strip searched, forced to sleep
upright in freezing conditions, denied food or legal representation, and kept in their cells for long periods. President Bush has
nominated White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to replace Ashcroft, who resigned last week. Gonzales is the author of a
controversial memorandum to President Bush suggesting ways the United States could legally deprive detainees designated as ‘enemy
combatants’ the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales described international conventions governing prisoners of war,
including the Geneva Conventions, as ''obsolete.'' The administration’s policies also affected immigrants and visitors already in the
United States, the report says. “When the USA Patriot Act was signed into law on October 27, 2001, the attorney general was given
the authority to detain foreign citizens if believing that they pose a national security threat.”
The Commission’s Report claims that, while, “detentions were reserved for those believed to be a national security threat, other Arab
and Muslim immigrants were also viewed with suspicion.” In November 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft ordered the “voluntary”
interviews of approximately 5,000 men, ages 18 to 33, “who had entered the United States with nonimmigrant visas from countries
suspected of giving refuge to terrorists These men were not suspects in the attacks, but interviewers were told to ask about their
religious practices, feelings towards the U.S. government, and immigration status.”
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Immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness,
pollution, and so forth. Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for
encroaching on pristine nature. In the first instance, the main policy “solution” is immigration restriction; in the second it is coercive
conservation, the violent exclusion of local communities from nature preserves. Both varieties of the greening of hate are about
policing borders.
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Both the push factor of overpopulation and the pull factor of jobs and other benefits in the United States maintain the demand for
immigration. Rewards from having offspring who emigrate include receiving remittances. In some rural areas of Mexico, "remittances
constitutes over 80% of monthly cash incomes" (Sullivan, 1988, p. 1059; Wiarda and Wiarda, 1986; Hong Kong Women, 1989).
Similarly, "Economists often say El Salvador's best export is its residents. In fact, the estimated $700 million that Salvadorans living
abroad send back each year is more than the country earns from coffee, sugar and all its other exports combined" (Johnson, 1992, p.
9A). Families in these and like communities may rationally calculate that the chances of having at least one child emigrate improve
with the total number of children they have. Children may seem a good investment as parents conclude that scarcity within their own
country, which would otherwise encourage reproductive restraint, is outweighed by opportunities for their children to move.
Editors decide daily which stories to print and how much space to give them. If unbiased, they lead with the important points,
subordinate all others. Discerning the important from the trivial is a judgment call. The recent resignation of David Brower from the
board of the Sierra Club was unarguably newsworthy. The San Francisco-based organization has 600,000 members and ranks among
the most influential environmental advocacy groups. Brower joined the club in 1933, was its first executive director in the 1950s and
1960s, and is ranked after John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt as a signal environmentalist.
Yet on May 18 he resigned from the board "with no regret and a bit of desperation.” Fittingly, Brower's act received its fullest
coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle. A surprisingly large number of papers, including the Atlanta Constitution, chose not to run it
at all. Others edited out what prompted Brower's act. Brower asserted that "the planet is being trashed, but the board has no real sense
of urgency." He protested the board's support of federal government proposals that he felt would contravene the club's original
mandate to protect the California Sierras. He further chastised the club's leadership for not taking a strong stance on U.S. population
growth and immigration. "Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of the problem. It has to
be addressed," he said. Even retaining this admonition left the casual reader ill-informed about the severity of the country's
overpopulation problem. Shortly after the first Earth Day in 1970, the President's Commission on Population Growth and America's
Future urged Congress to act with alacrity to stabilize the population of 200 million. Ecologists such as Paul and Anne Ehrlich of
Stanford University peg 150 million as the maximum level consonant with long-term habitat preservation. Congress rejected
demographic accountability. Instead, it adopted policies that have added 75 million people in a scant three decades. This January, the
Census Bureau updated its historically conservative projections of future growth. Finally falling in line with academic demographers,
the Bureau conceded that with unchanged immigration policies we are likely to add 300 million persons by the year 2100! If
immigration policies - including our family reunification, refugee asylum, and H-1B visa programs - are liberalized, we could
approach one billion. At that level we will menace both our survival and the world's with our rapacious appetite for resources,
renewable and nonrenewable.
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Even as environmental groups increasingly distanced themselves from the population issue, Nelson’s concern with U.S.
overpopulation through the years never wavered, and his speeches around the country on environmental sustainability spotlighted the
U.S. population problem.236 A newspaper article describing an Earth Day 1998 speech began: "Senator Gaylord Nelson spoke to a
standing-room only audience at Beloit College’s Richardson Auditorium [in his home state of Wisconsin], advocating the U.S. limit
immigration before U.S. resources are depleted."237 Later that year, in a Washington, D.C., press conference, Nelson bristled at the
idea that what really motivates attempts to limit immigration is racism. He said that such accusations only served to silence a debate
that was long overdue: "We ought to discuss it in a rational way. We have to decide if we’re going to be comfortable with half a
billion people or more."238 In a March, 2000 speech to a civic group in Madison, Wis., Nelson warned that if immigration and
fertility rates continued, the U.S. could become as overpopulated as China and India. "With twice the population, will there be any
wilderness left? Any quiet place? Any habitat for song birds? Waterfalls? Other wild creatures? Not much," he said.239 When he saw
an earlier version of the present monograph, Nelson wrote one of the co-authors that its thesis that U.S. population growth was no
longer being addressed primarily because of immigration and fears of being labeled racist was "right on target."240
David Brower first became concerned about population growth decades ago, in part under the "coaching" of his friend and Berkeley
neighbor, scientist Daniel Luten.241 In 1997, Brower was one of the original signatories of the Sierra Club ballot measure in favor of
reducing immigration to stop U.S. population growth. He later withdrew his name, because as a member of the Sierra Club board of
directors at the time, it conflicted with the board’s official position. However, he never endorsed Ballot Question B, put forth by the
board in explicit opposition to Ballot Question A, the immigration-reduction measure. And immediately after the vote, he spoke out
against the board’s position. "The leadership are fooling themselves. Overpopulation is a very serious problem, and overimmigration
is a big part of it. We must address both. We can’t ignore either.
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million annually, any hope of' attaining an end to population growth within the next century becomes an illusion, even with reduced
fertility among all groups of Americans.
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Even if large-scale war can be avoided, it seems likely that regional conflicts will become more frequent as disputes over land,
dwindling water and energy sources, environmental refugees, and “who’s to blame” become more frequent. Whatever form it
ultimately took, the Whimper would destroy civilization just as effectively as a large-scale war. The changes in our environment seen
over the last fifty years will be dwarfed by those of the next fifty, and those changes are likely to be accompanied by an enormous rise
in death rates. That’s the rub. The world is ill-equipped to handle a massive escalation in death rates. The deaths of many hundreds of
millions of people in famines, for example, will present utterly unprecedented problems—especially when the nations in which they
are dying have the capability of threatening nuclear terrorism.
The Whimper thus could lead to a collapse of civilization just as surely as the Bang. Populations of human beings could be greatly
reduced, and national governments could be so weakened that they would be replaced by something resembling feudalism with a
strong overlay of tribalism. Large cities with ethnically mixed populations could suffer fates similar to that of Beirut, made all the
more difficult by severe shortages of food and the nearly total breakdown of centralized services. Attempts would be made to keep
high technology going, but it might prove impossible. As the “standing crop” of automobiles, trucks, railroad engines and cars,
refrigerators, power-plant turbines, and the like were destroyed or fell into disrepair, society could revert to the sort of conditions that
prevailed in the Dark Ages, with fundamentalist religions and local despots playing a greater and greater role in human affairs. This
precipitous decline would be most noticeable to those living in the now rich nations and to the very poorest people who now depend
on aid for survival. The adjustment might be less severe for survivors in less-developed regions, and hundreds of millions of people
might hardly notice at all, since they are living at a subsistence level now
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IMPACTS – BIODIVERSITY
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IMPACTS – BIODIVERSITY
OVERSHOOTING THE CARRYING CAPACITY LEADS TO TOTAL ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE
Ehrlich, Professor of Biological Science and Population Studies at Stanford University, 1999
(Paul R., The Scientific American, “Ethics, Evolution, and the Population-Environment Crisis”,
http://www.scifac.usyd.edu.au/chast/templeton/1999templeton/1999lecture.html)
But the degree to which the interests of indigenous peoples today are congruent with effective conservation policies is a matter of
debate.i[48] Human history suggests something quite different, a lesson of value to those seeking overall strategies for maintaining our
life-support systems. The conservation record of peoples after the agricultural revolution is, at best, somewhat mixed. Until very
recently, societies generally have not paid much attention to the long-term environmental effects of their behavior, but rather have
focused on the satisfaction of their immediate needs. Control by forest dwellers, peasants, nomadic herders (“ecosystem people”) ii[49]
of the local resources they depend upon often leads to superior husbandry of those resources,iii[50] in comparison of today’s citizens of
rich countries (“biosphere people”)iv[51] who are able to draw their resources from the entire biosphere. The latter have little or no
feedback about the status of the resource stocks they are tapping, and little incentive to conserve them. They “discount by
distance,”v[52] having less concern for possible depletion and degradation far away. Overall, history over the last 10,000 years has not
been mainly a story of sustainable management of resources but rather one of the progressive intensification of activities to support
larger populations, which in many cases led to ecological collapses. If there is a lesson for today, it is that global human society, which
now dominates the ecosphere, should be very cautious about further expanding its operations. Husbandry of the ecosystems that
supply society with essential services must be conscious and active, lest we risk repeating the fate of the Easter Islanders on a global
scale. Their society was destroyed when they destroyed their environment, a fate they shared with many other civilizations. We need
to try to understand the circumstances under which cultural evolution could lead to population stabilization and resource conservation,
as well as those that would lead to overpopulation and collapse. Few understandings would have more value in ending the population-
resource-environment crisis. Human history is largely one of continuous intensification of resource use, strongly controlled by
immediate rather than long-term needs. Whether in subsistence or industrial economies people need to develop social constraints on
resource use that make it sustainable. As the human population size shoots past the carrying capacity of Earth,vi[53] the ethical
foundations of both intergroup and intergenerational equity and the intimately connected ethics of treatment of our life-support
systems and their living components, are now moving to the forefront.vii[54] These will almost certainly be the great ethical issues of
the future.
It may not be too late for humanity to avert a vast ecological disaster and make the transition to a sustainable society, but the task will
not be simple. The required actions are evident, and they all have serious ethical implications for the required shifts in the norms of
societies. Population growth should be halted as soon as humanely possible and a slow decline begun to a population size that, in a
century or so, is environmentally sustainable and less beset with social problems related to crowding, forced migration, and conflict
over dwindling resources. A sustainable population would probably be less than 2 billion people, even after considerable
improvement of today’s technological and social arrangements.viii[55] Wasteful consumption in rich nations needs to be reduced in
order to allow for needed increases in poor nations. Fortunately, a reduction of consumption while increasing the quality of life is
technologically feasible. For instance, John Holdren’s scenarios offer a possible path toward an equitable and efficient pattern of
energy use that could close the rich-poor consumption gap and constrain environmental damage.ix[56] Those goals might be reached
while temporarily supporting the substantially larger human population that is inevitable before growth can be halted. But
technological feasibility is not enough. As work with my colleagues Anne Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily has indicated, our
sociopolitical systems need to undergo dramatic revision in the direction of increasing equity at all levels if sustainability is to be
achieved.x[57] One of the overriding reasons is that the needed cooperation to solve global environmental problems is unlikely to be
achieved in a world divided into “haves” and “have nots.” This brings us back to those intergroup and intergenerational ethical issues.
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IMPACTS – BIODIVERSITY
LEVELING OFF OF GLOBAL POPULATION IS NECESSARY TO PREVENT TOTAL
ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE
Engelman, Director of the Population and Environment Program at Population Action International, 1999
(Robert, Foreign Policy-In Focus, Vol. 4, No. 14, “Population and Environment”, May,
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol4/v4n14pop.html, (eds.) Tom Barry and Martha Honey)
Changes in population size, age, and distribution affect issues ranging from food security to climate change. Population variables
interact with consumption patterns, technologies, and political and economic structures to influence environmental change. This
interaction helps explain why environmental conditions can deteriorate even as the growth of population slows.
Despite slowing growth, world population still gains nearly 80 million people each year, parceling land, fresh water, and other finite
resources among more people. A new Germany is added annually, a new Los Angeles monthly. How this increase in population size
affects specific environmental problems is impossible to say precisely. Too many factors interact, and much depends on the time
frame under consideration. Obviously, trends such as the loss of half of the planet’s forests, the depletion of most of its major
fisheries, and the alteration of its atmosphere and climate are closely related to the fact that human population expanded from mere
millions in prehistoric times to nearly 6 billion today. No policy can change the past. But addressing current population needs would
head off the regrets that future generations will otherwise have about the failure of today’s generation to act. Equally importantly, the
policies that address demographic trends have immediate and beneficial impacts on the lives of women and their families. It is this
"win-win" strategy—slowing population growth by attending to the needs for health care, schooling, and economic opportunities—
that should encourage policymakers to consider population-related policies when addressing environmental risks.Future population
trends will influence the abundance and quality of such critical renewable natural resources as fresh water, fisheries, forests, cropland,
and the atmosphere. An international scientific panel, for example, noted recently that Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza are
home to 12 million people and yet receive only as much rainfall as Phoenix, Arizona. Sponsored by the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences and counterpart institutions in the region, the panel identified rapid population growth as a major concern for the region’s
critically stretched supplies of renewable fresh water. Stabilizing world population tomorrow won’t by itself solve natural resource
crises and other environmental problems. But without a leveling off of population, eventually environmental challenges press more
urgently no matter what other measures are taken. Policymakers tend not to address such interconnected issues. One result is that there
really is no U.S. policy on population and the environment, only a range of separate policies related either to international population
or to specific environmental issues.
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URBAN SPRAWL DEPLETES THE BEST US AGRICULTURAL SOILS – THE RESULT IS LOSS OF
GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY
Imhoff & Lawrence, Biospheric Sciences Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, & Professor, Bowie
State University, Deparment of Natural Science and Math, 2003 (Marc, “Assessing the Impact of Urban Sprawl
on Soil Resources in the United States Using Nighttime City Lights Satellite Images and Digital Soil Maps,”
http://biology.usgs.gov/luhna/chap3.html)
Abstract. Nighttime satellite images of the Earth showing city lights were merged with census data and a digital soils map in an effort
to estimate the extent of developed land in the United States and the impact of development on soil resources. The urban areas defined
by "city lights" had mean population densities of 1,033 persons/km2 and 427 housing units/km2 (4.13 persons and 1.7
households/acre). Urban areas accounted for 2.7% of the surface area in the United States, an area approximately equal to the state of
Minnesota or one-half the size of California. A United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization soils map of the United States was
overlaid on the nighttime "city lights" image to determine which soil types are most impacted by development. The more limiting
factors a soil has, the more difficult or expensive it is to farm; consequently a soil fertility classification system based on physical
factors that limit agricultural production was used to rank soils. Results for the United States show that the residential, commercial,
and industrial development, known as "urban sprawl," appears to be following soil resources, with the better agricultural soils being
the most affected. Some unique soil types appear to be on the verge of being entirely covered by urban sprawl. The conversion
of good agricultural soils to nonagricultural use may have long-term ramifications for sustainable development at the local, regional,
and global levels.
Introduction
The postagricultural growth of human populations, combined with technological advancement, has led to the widespread
transformation of natural ecosystems into those dominated and heavily managed by human beings. The potential impact of this
process on Earth's biological and geochemical systems is a current subject of debate, and concerns range from those dealing with
biosphere-atmosphere interactions and global climate change (Kates et al. 1990) to the preservation of biodiversity, sustainable
development, economics, and agricultural productivity (Vitousek et al. 1986; Ehrlich and Wilson 1991; Raven 1991; Ehrlich et al.
1995). The conversion of natural systems to agricultural production has been the primary basis for the successful growth of human
populations for the last 9,000 years (Kates et al. 1990). The conflict between urban and agricultural land use, however, is only now
becoming a subject of controversy. The transformation of productive agricultural land to urban use under burgeoning populations has
become a contentious element in debates over sustainable development and food security (Ehrlich 1989; Daily and Ehrlich 1992;
Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1992). As more land is converted to urban uses, the question arises as to whether this trend represents a systematic
reduction in our ability to produce food by placing our infrastructure on the most productive soil resources. A disturbing consequence
of this urbanization process is a growing dependence on ever greater yields per unit area (on soils that remain) or a reliance on more
distant soil resources and agricultural production. Given present demographic trends, it is important that issues of agricultural versus
urban land use be resolved. An increasing number of regional populations may be at risk of food shortages in the future as a result of
sociopolitical and economic instability (e.g., war, economic depression, social upheaval, etc.) with their consequent effects on global
food supplies. While the reality of some agricultural land loss is accepted, both the magnitude and the potential effect are hotly
debated. Central to much of the debate is the difficulty in acquiring accurate measurements of the area of urban land use, monitoring
changes in urban land use, and assessing the impact of these changes on agricultural land area or production in a way that can be used
in rational, cost-beneficial analyses (Parsons 1977; Meyers and Simon 1994).
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THESE FAMINES WILL CAUSE GLOBAL INSTABILITY, WAR, AND BILLIONS OF DEATHS –
THREATENING EXTINCTION
Winnail, Ph.D., M.P.H, 1996 (Douglas S., “On the Horizon: Famine,” September/October,
http://www.kurtsaxon.com/foods004.htm)
What is seldom stated is that optimistic forecasts for increasing grain production are based on critical long-term assumptions that
include normal (average) weather. Yet in recent years this has definitely not been the case. Severe and unusual weather conditions
have suddenly appeared around the globe. Some of the worst droughts, heat waves, heavy rains and flooding on record have reduced
harvests in China, Spain, Australia, South Africa, the United States and Canada--major grain growing regions of the world--by 40 to
50 percent. As a result grain prices are the highest on record. Worldwatch Institute's president, Lester Brown, writes, "No other
economic indicator is more politically sensitive that rising food prices.... Food prices spiraling out of control could trigger not only
economic instability but widespread political upheavals"-- even wars. The chaotic weather conditions we have been experiencing
appear to be related to global warming caused by the release of pollutants into the earth's atmosphere. A recent article entitled
"Heading for Apocalypse?" suggests the effects of global warming--and its side effects of increasingly severe droughts, floods and
storms--could be catastrophic, especially for agriculture. The unpredictable shifts in temperature and rainfall will pose an increased
risk of hunger and famine for many of the world's poor. With world food stores dwindling, grain production leveling off and a string
of bad harvests around the world, the next couple of years will be critical. Agricultural experts suggest it will take two bumper crops
in a row to bring supplies back up to normal. However, poor harvests in 1996 and 1997 could create severe food shortages and push
millions over the edge. Is it possible we are only one or two harvests away from a global disaster? Is there any significance to what is
happening today? Where is it all leading? What does the future hold? The clear implication is that things will get worse before they
get better. Wars, famine and disease will affect the lives of billions of people! Although famines have occurred at various times in
the past, the new famines will happen during a time of unprecedented global stress--times that have no parallel in recorded
history--at a time when the total destruction of humanity would be possible! Is it merely a coincidence that we are seeing a
growing menace of famine on a global scale at a time when the world is facing the threat of a resurgence of new and old epidemic
diseases, and the demands of an exploding population? These are pushing the world's resources to its limits! The world has never
before faced such an ominous series of potential global crises at the same time! However, droughts and shrinking grain stores are
not the only threats to world food supplies. According to the U.N.'s studies, all 17 major fishing areas in the world have either reached
or exceeded their natural limits. In fact, nine of these areas are in serious decline. The realization that we may be facing a shortage of
food from both oceanic and land-based sources is a troubling one . It's troubling because seafood--the world's leading source of animal
protein--could be depleted quite rapidly. In the early 1970s, the Peruvian anchovy catch--the largest in the world--collapsed from 12
million tons to 2 million in just three years from overfishing. If this happens on a global scale, we will be in deep trouble. This
precarious situation is also without historical precedent!
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POPULATION OVERSHOOT MAKES THE DIE-BACK WORSE AND ERODES THE LONG-TERM
CARRYING CAPACITY
Daly, Population Studies, 1994 (Gretchen, http://www.dieoff.org/page27.htm)
This commentary, given at the First World Optimum Population Congress (convened in London, U.K., 1993) is a contribution to that
necessary dialogue. What follows is a brief statement of our joint personal views of the criteria by which an optimum should be
determined (in no particular order).
1. An optimum population size is not the same as the maximum number of people that could be packed onto Earth at one time. The
maximum would have to be housed and nurtured by methods analogous to those used to raise bakery chickens, and the process would
inevitably reduce the planet's longterm carrying capacity. Many more human beings could exist if a sustainable population were
maintained for thousands to millions of years than if the present population overshoot were further amplified and much of Earth's
capacity to support future generations were quickly consumed. Thus, an optimum size is a function of the desired quality of life and
the resultant per-capita impacts of attaining that lifestyle on the planet's life support systems.
2. An optimum population size should be small enough to guarantee the minimal physical ingredients of a decent life to everyone
(e.g., Ehrlich et al., 1993), even in the face of an inequitable distribution of wealth and resources and the uncertainty regarding rates of
longterm, sustainable resource extraction and environmental impacts. We agree with Nathan Keyfitz (1991): "If we have one point of
empirically backed knowledge, it is that bad policies are widespread and persistent. Social science has to take account of them." The
grossly inequitable distribution of wealth and basic resources prevailing today is highly destabilizing and disruptive. While it is in
nearly everyone's selfish best interest to narrow the rich-poor gap, we are skeptical that the incentives driving social and economic
inequalities can ever be fully overcome. We therefore think a global optimum should be determined with humanity's characteristic
selfishness and myopia in mind. A further downward adjustment in the optimum should be made to insure both against natural and
human-induced declines in the sustainable flow of resources from the environment into the economy and against increases in
anthropogenic flows of wastes, broadly defined, in the opposite direction.
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IMPACT – DISEASE
IMMIGRANTS HARBORING DEADLY DISEASES INTO U.S., CLOSING THE BOARDER IS THE
ONLY WAY TO SOLVE
WorldNetDaily, online news source, 2005
Illegal Immigrants Pose Major Heath Threat, WorldNetDaily, http://www.alipac.us/article459.html
Madeleine Pelner Cosman, author of a report in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, is particularly
concerned with increases in multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis, chagas disease, dengue fever, polio, hepatitis A, B, and C, she told
Lou Dobbs on CNN last night. "Certain diseases that we thought we had vanquished years ago are coming back, and other diseases
that we've never seen or rarely seen in America, because they've always been the diseases of poverty and the third world, are coming
in now," she said. As WorldNetDaily reported last month, even leprosy is suddenly on the radar of health officials. Cosman
recommends closing the border to all illegal traffic, rescinding the citizenship of "anchor babies," those born in the U.S. to parents of
illegals, and making the aiding and abetting of illegals a crime and an end to all future amnesty programs.
IMMIGRATION ALLOWS FOR NEW DISEASES TO RAVAGE AMERICA, NOW IS KEY TIME TO
SOLVE
Frosty Wooldridge, magazine writer at Michigan State University, 2003
Illegal Aliens Spreading Diseases Across USA,
http://www.frostywooldridge.com/articles/art_illegal_aliens_spreading_diseases.html
If you travel into the Third World such as Mexico, Central and South America, you will notice that while visiting a bathroom there is a
box for used toilet paper in the corner and no soap or paper towels at the lavatory. The sewage systems can not handle toilet paper so it
is a habit to throw it in the box provided which is open to flies and cockroaches. Additionally, for most Third World people, washing
hands is non existent. Today, in California, Florida, Georgia and spreading to other states across the nation, recent arrivals are so
accustomed to throwing their used toilet paper into boxes, they throw it into trash cans. Whether they work at the counter or chopping
tomatoes, they often do not wash their hands. Thousands carry head lice, leprosy, tuberculosis and hepatitis A, B, and C. Annually, an
estimated 800,000 illegal aliens cross America's southern borders while avoiding a health screening. They are not stopped or
vaccinated for a host of diseases they're bringing into America. Who is at risk? Everyone, but especially our school children when they
come in contact with in-excess of three million illegal alien school children daily. What can those three million kids unknowingly
transfer to our kids? Tuberculosis, five years ago, was almost non-existent in the USA. Last week, a school in Sebewaing, Michigan
reported 30 children and four teachers had tested positive for tuberculosis infections. Michigan supports a large Latin illegal alien
population that migrated from Mexico. In the past four years, 16,000 cases of multi drug resistant (MDR) TB, which was formerly
endemic ONLY to Mexico, crossed over the borders inside the bodies of illegal aliens. These adults and their children have spread out
across the country to work in fast foods and harvesting. Another outbreak occurred in Austin, Minnesota where eight police officers
tested positive for tuberculosis. A similar outbreak occurred in Portland, Maine last week with 28 testing positive for tuberculosis. On
November 6, 2003, at a local restaurant chain, Chi-Chi's in Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, unscreened employees 'served' up plates of
infectious hepatitis A to their patrons. Over 3,000 had to receive the painful gammaglobulin shots while two Americans died. Health
officials reported, "Workers may have contaminated food by failure to follow basic hygiene in cleaning hands after using the
bathroom." The employees were not health screened by the restaurant chain. Another distressing disease, leprosy, long feared from
Biblical times, totaled 900 cases in the USA in the past 40 years. In the past three years, according to a report from the NY Times in
February, 2003, leprosy has infected over 7,000 people in the United States. It was brought in by illegal immigrants from India, Brazil,
Mexico and the Caribbean. Leprosy spreads by infected illegal aliens working in fast food, dish washing and hotels. Chagas Disease is
brought directly from Mexico and Latin America where it has infected over 18,000,000 people. The T-Cruzi protozoan destroys heart
tissue and other organs. "One can contract it by eating uncooked food contaminated with infective feces of the Vinchuca Bug. It
crosses over the border in the bodies of an average of 2,200 illegal aliens daily. Whether it's dengue fever, now in Florida,
Hemmorhagic Fever coming up from Texas border towns or E-coli intestinal parasites arriving with illegal aliens from Mexico daily,
every American citizen is under a form of 'Bio Terrorism'. Tom Ridge of Homeland Security presents Americans with color coded
'alert' levels from Al Queda, but what he doesn't protect us from is a mounting invasion from an 'unarmed army' of disease carrying
illegals who are becoming just as deadly as 9/11.
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IMPACT – DISEASE
Across the country this week, hundreds of bus loads of illegal immigrants are bringing a message to Washington DC that they want
better treatment and instant citizenship. What they don't mention is their reckless disregard for legally immigrating into the USA has
created a growing health care crisis in America. They demand their rights, but they disregarded our rights by illegally crossing into our
country without being health screened. It's what they are carrying that we don't want. There is another ticking bomb crossing our
borders daily by the thousands--entirely unregulated, unscreened and untracked in our nation. Their numbers average two per minute
and over 800,000 annually, according the Center For Immigration Studies in Washington, DC. SARS and West Nile virus make big
news, but other diseases are creeping into the heartland unnoticed. In the past 40 years, the US incidents of leprosy stood at 900
recorded cases. Today because of massive immigration from Third World countries, we have more than 7,000 people suffering with
leprosy, "And those are the ones we know about," said Dr. John Levis, physician at Bellevue Hospital's Hansen's Disease Clinic in
New York. "There are probably many, many more and they are spreading." Most of those infected in the United States are immigrants
from global leprosy hot spots, places: Mexico, Brazil, India and the Caribbean. But, in the past six years, Levis and his colleagues
have proved that a few of his patients — including a 73-year-old man from Queens who had never been out of the country and an
elderly Jewish man from Westchester County, New York — have contracted leprosy in the United States. Leprosy's symptoms--
bumpy rashes, skin indentations and loss of feeling in hands and feet. As a result, The disease is now officially endemic to the
Northeastern United States for the first time ever. Another bug riding in the bodies of newcomers to America is tuberculosis. In a
recent article from 'THE PATIENT PREDATOR', Dr. Reichman of New Jersey TB Clinic, "In the 1990s, cases among foreign born
Americans rose from 29 percent to 41.6 percent. Anti biotic resistant strains from Mexico have migrated to Texas. Since three years
ago, 16,000 new cases of TB were discovered in the United States. Half were foreign born. Strains of TB once found only in Mexico
have migrated to border states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. It will move north as illegal aliens work in restaurants
as cooks, dishwashers and food handlers. We sit on the edge of a potential catastrophe." Disease is another crisis 'sneaking' across our
borders in the form of unrestricted illegal immigration. Once it's inside our country, it's our problem and we will be forced to pay for
it. If American political leaders okay the matricula consular card, give them drivers licenses and assist illegal immigration by not
enforcing our Homeland Security laws.
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IMPACTS – DISEASE
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IMPACTS – ECONOMY
OVERPOPULATION SPEEDS UP THE OIL PEAK – COLLAPSING THE ECONOMY
Abernathy, Professor of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University, 1996
(Virginia, “Population Politcs: The Choices that Shape Our Future,” http://www.dieoff.org/page58.htm)
Energy security is in far greater jeopardy from our population growth than from denying access to the few remaining pools of oil in
the northern hemisphere. Indeed, population growth in the United States drives the increasing use of energy: From 1970 to 1990-while
per capita use hardly budged-total energy consumption increased by 24 percent. John Holdren (1991) states that 93 percent of the
increase in the United States' use of energy in this twenty-year period can be traced to population growth. With population growth,
planning for energy security means taking aim at a moving target. The next several decades will not likely experience just a gradual
exhaustion of oil as the primary energy source. Rather, the supply of oil likely will be periodically disrupted owing to its increasingly
narrow geographic distribution into the single dominant area of occurrencethe Middle East. We can be substantially confident that
new, large occurrences of oil, such as would be necessary to alter the proportional contribution of the Middle East to world petroleum,
are not likely to be found; certainly, no such occurrences have been found in the several recent decades of intense worldwide
petroleum exploration.
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IMPACTS – TERRORISM
IMMIGRATION CAUSES TERRORISM
Mark Krikorian, Director, Center for Immigration Studies, Spring, 2004 (“Keeping Terror Out: Immigration
Policy and Asymmetirc Warfare,” National Interest, http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/mskoped050104.html)
9/11 was not the only terrorist plot to benefit from lax enforcement of ordinary immigration controls—every major Al-Qaeda attack or
conspiracy in the United States has involved at least one terrorist who violated immigration law. Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, for
example, who was part of the plot to bomb the Brooklyn subway, was actually caught three times by the Border Patrol trying to sneak
in from Canada. The third time the Canadians would not take him back. What did we do? Because of a lack of detention space, he was
simply released into the country and told to show up for his deportation hearing. After all, with so many millions of illegal aliens here
already, how much harm could one more do? Another example is Mohammed Salameh, who rented the truck in the first World Trade
Center bombing. He should never have been granted a visa in the first place. When he applied for a tourist visa he was young, single,
and had no income and, in the event, did indeed end up remaining illegally. And when his application for a green card under the 1986
illegal-alien amnesty was rejected, there was (and remains today) no way to detain and remove rejected green-card applicants, so he
simply remained living and working in the United States, none the worse for wear. The same was true of Hesham Mohamed Hadayet,
who murdered two people at the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport on July 4, 2002—he was a visa overstayer whose
asylum claim was rejected. Yet with no mechanism to remove him, he remained and, with his wife, continued to apply for the visa
lottery until she won and procured green cards for both of them. Ordinary immigration enforcement actually has kept out several
terrorists that we know of. A vigilant inspector in Washington State stopped Ahmed Ressam because of nervous behavior, and a
search of his car uncovered a trunk full of explosives, apparently intended for an attack on Los Angeles International Airport. Ramzi
Binalshibh, one of the candidates for the label of “20th hijacker,” was rejected four times for a visa, not because of concerns about
terrorism but rather, according to a U.S. embassy source, “for the most ordinary of reasons, the same reasons most people are
refused.” That is, he was thought likely to overstay his visa and become an illegal alien. And Mohamed Al-Qahtani, another one of the
“20th hijacker” candidates, was turned away by an airport inspector in Orlando because he had no return ticket and no hotel
reservations, and he refused to identify the friend who was supposed to help him on his trip. Prior to the growth of militant Islam, the
only foreign threat to our population and territory in recent history has been the specter of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. To
continue that analogy, since the terrorists are themselves the weapons, immigration control is to asymmetric warfare what missile
defense is to strategic warfare. There are other weapons we must use against an enemy employing asymmetric means—more
effective international coordination, improved intelligence gathering and distribution, special military operations—but in the end, the
lack of effective immigration control leaves us naked in the face of the enemy. This lack of defensive capability may have made sense
with regard to the strategic nuclear threat under the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, but it makes no sense with regard to the
asymmetric threats we face today and in the future. Unfortunately, our immigration response to the wake-up call delivered by the 9/11
attacks has been piecemeal and poorly coordinated. Specific initiatives that should have been set in motion years ago have finally
begun to be enacted, but there is an ad hoc feel to our response, a sense that bureaucrats in the Justice and Homeland Security
departments are searching for ways to tighten up immigration controls that will not alienate one or another of a bevy of special interest
groups.
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IMPACTS – LINEARITY
EACH US LIVE LINEARLY DEGRADES THE EARTHS CARRYING CAPACITY – US POPULATION
GROWTH CAUSES
Ehrlich, Professors of Population Studies and Biology at Stanford, 1994 (Paul, Proceeding from the
International Conference on Population and Development: Cairo, “Too Many Rich People”, September,
http://www.dieoff.org/page27.htm)
Concern about population problems among citizens of rich countries generally focuses on rapid population growth in most poor
nations. But the impact of humanity on Earth's life support systems is not just determined by the number of people alive on the planet.
It also depends on how those people behave. When this is considered, an entirely different picture emerges: the main population
problem is in wealthy countries. There are, in fact, too many rich people. The amount of resources each person consumes, and the
damage done by the technologies used to supply them, need to be taken as much into account as the size of the population. In theory,
the three factors should be multiplied together to obtain an accurate measurement of the impact on the planet*. Unhappily,
Governments do not keep statistics that allow the consumption and technology factors to be readily measured—so scientists substitute
per capita energy consumption to give a measure of the effect each person has on the environment.
USING AND CONSUMING
In traditional societies—more or less in balance with their environments—that damage may be self-repairing. Wood cut for fires or
structures regrows, soaking up the carbon dioxide produced when it was burned. Water extracted from streams is replaced by rainfall.
Soils in fields are regenerated with the help of crop residues and animal manures. Wastes are broken down and reconverted into
nutrients by the decomposer organisms of natural ecosystems. At the other end of the spectrum, paving over fields and forests with
concrete and asphalt, mining the coal and iron necessary for steel production with all its associated land degradation, and building and
operating automobiles, trains and aeroplanes that spew pollutants into the atmosphere, are all energy-intensive processes. So are
drilling for and transporting oil and gas, producing plastics, manufacturing chemicals (from DDT and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to
chlorofluorocarbons and laundry detergents) and building power plants and dams. Industrialized agriculture uses enormous amounts of
energy—for ploughing, planting, fertilizing and controlling weeds and insect pests and for harvesting, processing, shipping, packing,
storing and selling foods. So does industrialized forestry for timber and paper production.
PAYING THE PRICE
Incidents such as Chernobyl and oil spills are among the environmental prices paid for mobilizing commercial energy—and soil
erosion, desertification, acid rain, global warming, destruction of the ozone layer and the toxification of the entire planet are among
the costs of using it. In all, humanity's high-energy activities amount to a large-scale attack on the integrity of Earth's ecosystems and
the critical services they provide. These include control of the mix of gases in the atmosphere (and thus of the climate); running of the
hydrologic cycle which brings us dependable flows of fresh water; generation and maintenance of fertile soils; disposal of wastes;
recycling of the nutrients essential to agriculture and forestry; control of the vast majority of potential crop pests; pollination of many
crops; provision of food from the sea; and maintenance of a vast genetic library from which humanity has already withdrawn the very
basis of civilization in the form of crops and domestic animals.
THE RELATIVE IMPACT
The average rich-nation citizen used 7.4 kilowatts (kW) of energy in 1990—a continuous flow of energy equivalent to that powering
74 100-watt lightbulbs. The average citizen of a poor nation, by contrast, used only 1 kW. There were 1.2 billion people in the rich
nations, so their total environmental impact, as measured by energy use, was 1.2 billion x 7.4 kW, or 8.9 terawatts (TW)—8.9 trillion
watts. Some 4.1 billion people lived in poor nations in 1990, hence their total impact (at 1 kW a head) was 4.1 TW. The relatively
small population of rich people therefore accounts for roughly two-thirds of global environmental destruction, as measured by energy
use. From this perspective, the most important population problem is overpopulation in the industrialized nations. The United States
poses the most serious threat of all to human life support systems. It has a gigantic population, the third largest on Earth, more than a
quarter of a billion people. Americans are superconsumers, and use inefficient technologies to feed their appetites. Each, on average,
uses 11 kW of energy, twice as much as the average Japanese, more than three times as much as the average Spaniard, and over 100
times as much as an average Bangladeshi. Clearly, achieving an average family size of 1.5 children in the United States (which would
still be larger than the 1.3 child average in Spain) would benefit the world much more than a similar success in Bangladesh.
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An average of 8,200 people are added to our country every day via annual net gains in US births at 1.0 million and immigration at 2.3
million--legal, illegal and their births. Soon past the mid-century, those 200 million more Americans will be struggling for dwindling
resources, water, food and a diminishing quality of life. In a western state like Colorado or Arizona, a drought in 2050 will become a
DISASTER along with many other consequences. When one state suffers such a monumental crisis, all other states will be affected in
time. For graphic examples, one need only look at India and China. In a recent speech, Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi,
said, "In my country, 4 million people are born in the streets, live in the streets and die in the streets-never having used a toilet or
shower." If massive population is so good, why is India so poor? Even more sobering is China's plight at 1.3 billion and growing at 12
million per year. Overpopulation will become the 'plague of the 21st century'. Where is America headed? Do we want such a legacy
for our own children? According to 60 Minutes, we have one million homeless children struggling in our inner cities today. Why can't
we take care of their needs even today? What will be the fate of another 200 million people who create homeless children? How many
is too many and when will Americans address itself to that fact? Who possesses the courage to step up to the reality of
overpopulation/consumption/pollution in America-in the long term? At this time, no one. Politicians scurry like cockroaches at the
mention of population stabilization. Corporations demand larger markets as if nonrenewable resources will appear out of thin air. They
sacrifice the future of our children. Wake up! We're like a runaway freight train with no brakes headed toward a rock wall. By failing
to act now, what kinds of consequences will we as a nation face when we hit 1/2 billion people? States like Colorado will add 100%
more people to their already drought prone state. That's 100% more cars, etc. In the US with 200 million more people, that's 77% more
traffic, 77% added planes in the air, 77% increased pollution, 77% faster uses of already such limited resources as gasoline. For
example: we're paving over 3000 acres of land each day for homes, roads, and malls. With each new added American, 12.6 acres of
wilderness is plowed up to support that person. In the next 10 years, according to the National Academy of Sciences, 2,500 plants and
animals will become extinct in the USA because of habitat destruction via population growth. Why aren't we addressing the moral and
biological consequences of such horrific extinction rates? When you add global warming, ocean fisheries collapsing, acid rain, ozone
destruction, drought, contaminated water supplies, poisoning and sterilization of the soils by insecticides and fertilizers--we're
building unimaginable consequences. How serious is our problem? Upon receiving the Sanger Award for Human Rights in 1966, Dr.
Martin Luther King said, "Unlike the plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases, which we do not understand, the modern
plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient
knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of billions of people who are
its victims." Fifty year go, Bangladesh, India and China ignored their accelerating populations. Their problems are so gargantuan,
they can't solve them and simply suffer. Today, America's leaders are following the same steps. According to the Center for
Immigration Studies, we're allowing the immigration of more than 2.3 million people annually from countries that refuse to offer
family planning. Since the American female has a fertility rate of 2.03 children, it's not Americans causing the rising population tide.
We need immigration reform and reduction to less than 175,000 people annually before population momentum forces us to an added
200 million Americans and an unsustainable society. If we don't tame this 'immigration monster' within the next five years, it will
grow past our ability to manage it. Once the numbers are here, we will be saddled with Balkanization conflicts, over 100 foreign
languages, accelerating diseases, cultural conflict and severe limits to our freedoms as the numbers grow out of control.
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SIMON ARGUMENTS ARE CONTRARY TO 1,700 OF THE WORLDS LEADING SCIENTISTS AND
A CONSORTIUM OF NATIONAL ACADEMIES
Ehrlich, Professors of Population Studies and Biology at Stanford, 1994 (Paul, Proceeding from the
International Conference on Population and Development: Cairo, “Too Many Rich People”, September,
http://www.dieoff.org/page27.htm)
There is now a campaign of deceptive books and articles designed to persuade people that all is well on the environmental front. The
basic message of this campaign is that some favorable trends show green concerns to be "doomsaying." Our basic message is that
indirect trends such as those listed below are more relevant to human welfare than direct ones such as the prices of metals.
Julian Simon has been a leader in this campaign. He is best known for his belief that resources are infinite (he wrote in 1980 that the
theoretical limit to the amount of copper that might be available to human beings was "the total weight of the universe"!) and that
population can and should grow indefinitely. He's still at it ("Earth's Doomsayers are Wrong," Chronicle, May 12), this time citing a
1986 report prepared by social scientists for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that was subsequently protested by a substantial
number of Academy scientists. Somehow he missed the 1994 statement from the NAS and 57 other national academies of science
worldwide that contradicted his position. He also ignored the 1993 "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," signed by some 1700
leading scientists, including over half of all living Nobel Laureates in science, which reads in part: "A great change in our stewardship
of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be
irretrievably mutilated....A new ethic is required—a new attitude towards discharging our responsibility for caring for ourselves and
for the earth. We must recongize the earth's limited capacity to provide for us. We must recognize its fragility....The scientists issuing
this warning hope that our message will reach and affect people everywhere. We need the help of many." It is impossible to say
exactly how direct measures of human well-being will be impacted by the general deterioration of Earth's life-support systems. We
know, however, that deterioration makes society increasingly vulnerable to severe negative impacts.
The cornucopian unlimited growth school of thought, represented by the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation and the Julian
Simons of the world, are not worried about resource depletion because, they claim, science and technology will create substitutes for
anything we need. Neither are they concerned about population growth because with the help of science, we can feed 10 or 20 billion
or more. Maybe so, but arguing about how many people the world can feed is a meaningless exercise. The important question is what
will be the quality of life if the population doubles or triples? The answer: Life on the planet will continue in some sort of condition
regardless of population levels but certainly not in a condition that we would find tolerable.
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In the long run, the impact on population growth will be hthe most lasting legacy of our current immigration policies. Largely as a
result of immigration, the United States now has the fastest-growing population in the developed world, while immigration-driven
population growth in California rivals that of some Third World countries. Population growth comes at great cost that cannot always
be measured in dollars and cents. First, we must realize that the human race is a part of the natural ecosystem of the Earth, not a
privileged super-species that can transcend the laws of nature. The United States, because of its size and consumption habits, is the
most destabilizing entity within Earth's fragile ecosystem. Population growth here has a far more profound impact on that ecosystem
than growth elsewhere. The disturbances caused by human activities have accelerated dramatically in the past half a century. Driven
by population growth and the technological explosion, these disturbances threaten not only the perpetuation of a way of life we have
come to take for granted, but even the continuation of life systems as we understand them.
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The Mexican government projects that mass immigration to the United States will continue at between -3.5 and 5 million people per
decade until at least 2030. Even assuming strong economic growth and declining birth rates in Mexico, and weak demand for workers
in the United States, immigration in 30 years is still projected to be nearly 400,000 people a year. Immigration will cause the Mexican-
born population in the U.S. to at least double by 2030, reaching 16 to 18 million regardless of economic conditions in Mexico.
Although the Mexican government report calls migration flows "inevitable," the report itself offers no evidence to support this.
But just because everyone agrees more enforcement is necessary that doesn't mean we are on the verge of a solution. In fact, this only
sets up a new battle between those who believe we can solve the immigration problem by appropriating money for enforcement only
and those who see enforcement as part of a broader reform package. It's not that we don't know how to enforce the law. We do. But by
itself, enforcement doesn't work. Consider our success on the border in Southern California. Over the last decade, we tripled the
manpower and quintupled the budget for policing what used to be the four busiest crossing points in California and Texas. And in
each case, we managed to dramatically reduce the number of migrants apprehended in each sector. The only catch: We didn't actually
stop the flow. We just diverted it to other, less populated stretches of frontier — such as Arizona and New Mexico — where it will
take much more personnel and technology to wrest control. But the problem goes deeper than that. The truth is that beneath the
bluster we're ambivalent about enforcing immigration law because we know that if we were to succeed, it could be disastrous for U.S.
businesses and the American workers who depend on them.
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AT: URBAN SPRAWL BAD
ITS AWESOME!
Julian L. Simon; Professor of business administration at University of Maryland 1981
(The Ultimate Resource, Pg. 232)
Many well-intentioned people worry that population growth produces urban spral, and that highways pave over “prime farmland” and
recreational land. We shall now examine these claims, which turn out to be empty slogans.
First, the fomenting of the “sprawl”: As e see in figure 16-3, there are 2,3 billion acres in the US, as of 1974. All the land
taken up by cities =, highways nonagricultural roads, railroads, and airports amounts to only 61 million acres – just 2.7 percent of the
total. Clearly there is very little competition between agriculture on the one side and cities and roads on the other the notion that the
US is being “paved over” is ridiculous, though frightening, exaggeration.
How about the trends? From 1920 to 1974, land in urban and transportation uses rose from 29 million acres to 61 million
acres – a change of 1.42 percent out of the 2266 million acres in the US. During those fifty four years population increased from 106
million to 211 million people. Even if this trend were to continue (population growth is clearly slowing down) there would be an
almost insignificant impact on the US agriculture.
Lest you have lingering doubts, here is the opening sentence from the US Dep. Of Ag.’s 1974 study Our land and water
resources:” Although thousand of acres of farmland are converted annually to other uses organization, roads, wildlife and recreation-
and population has risen a third in 20 years, we are in no danger of running out of farmland.” Increasingly efficient production
methods are the major factor enabling to “insure our domestic food and fiber needs” and yet use less land for crops – not because land
is being “taken” for other purposes, but because it is now more efficient to raise more food on fewer acres than it was in the past.
But what about the fertility of the land used for human habitation and transportation? Even if the total quantity of land used
by additional urban people is small, perhaps the new urban land has special agricultural qualities. When often hears this charge, as
made in my own home town in 1977 city council election: V Major “is oppose to urban sprawl because “it eats up prime agricultural
land.””
New cropland is created, and some old cropland goes out of use, as we have seen. The overall effect, in the judgment of the
US dept of Agriculture, is the between 1967 and 1975 “the quality of cropland has been improved by shifts in land use … better land
makes up a higher proportion of the remaining cropland.”
The idea that cities devour “ prime land” s a particularly clear example of the failure to grasp economic principles. Let’s take
the concrete (asphalt?) case of a new shopping mall on the outskirts of Champaign Urbana, Illinois. The key economic idea is that the
mall land has greater value to the economy as a shopping center than it does as a farm, wonderful though this Illinois land is for
growing corn and soybeans. That’s why the mall investors could pay the farmer enough to make it worthwhile for him or her to sell. A
series of corn-y examples should bring out the point.
If, instead of a shopping mall, the corn-and-soybean farmer sold the land to a person who would raise a new exotic crop called, say,
“whornseat,” and who would sell the whornseat abroad at a high price, everyone would consider it just dandy. The land clearly would
be more productive raising whornseat than corn, as shown by the higher profits the whornseat farmer would make as compared with
the corn-and-soybean farmer, and as also shown by the amount that the whornseat farmer is willing to pay for the land.
A shopping mall I similar to a whornseat farm. It seems different only because the mall does not use the land for agriculture. Yet
economically there is no real difference between the mall and a whornseat darm.
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Critics of urban sprawl blame suburbia for a plethora of modern societal ills, including pollution, traffic congestion, inner city poverty,
even obesity.
However , a recent study by Matthew Kahn at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy identifies one important
benefit of sprawl: it reduces the housing consumption gap between white and black Americans. Historically, there has been a gap
between black and white Americans in almost every aspect of housing consumption, including homeownership rates and average
housing sizes. But this gap has been closing in recent decades. Kahn found that the black/white homeownership and housing size gaps
close as a metropolitan area’s sprawl level–measured as the share of area jobs located outside of a 10-mile ring around the area’s
central business district–increases. Moreover, the study found that black households living in sprawling metropolitan areas live in
larger homes, are more likely to be homeowners, and are more likely to be located in the suburbs than otherwise identical black
households in less sprawled areas. As an example, Khan predicted housing consumption for two identical black households: one living
in a high-sprawl metropolitan area and the other living in a low-sprawl area. Assuming the households had two adults (including a 40-
year old head of household), two children, and an annual household income of $35,000, Kahn found that the black household in the
high-sprawl metro area consumed 0.5 more rooms and 10% more square footage, was 12% more likely to live in the suburbs, and was
9.3% more likely to own its home than its counterpart in the low-sprawl area. Kahn suggests two possible explanations for these
findings. First, sprawling areas tend to have a greater supply of developable land on the urban fringe, which helps to moderate land
prices and keep housing affordable. Second, inner-city housing becomes cheaper as jobs gravitate from cities out to the suburbs. In
short, suburban growth provides opportunities for black households to move into newly constructed housing at the urban fringe or to
move into center city or older suburban houses vacated by white households that relocate. Perhaps the study’s most important
conclusion was that "[housing] affordability is likely to decrease in the presence of more antisprawl legislation." A growing body of
research is providing evidence that growth controls–such as urban-growth boundaries that limit the supply of developable land and
impact fees imposed on developers to recoup the costs of infrastructure and public services–can have a very real inflationary effect on
housing prices and tend to decrease affordability. Advocates of anti-suburban growth management policies should stop and consider
this point. Measures to limit sprawl are likely to have the unintended consequences of reducing economic opportunity for black
Americans and other minorities, and slowing or reversing the socioeconomic gains they have made in recent decades.
For example, an article by David Whelan in the July issue of American Demographics magazine pointed out that more blacks than
ever (17 percent) hold college degrees, and that median black household income is at record levels, with 51 percent of black
households earning over $50,000 annually. Concurrently, the percentage of blacks living in the suburbs has jumped from 34 percent to
39 percent between 1990 and 2000, and median black suburban household income totaled over $37,000 in 2000, almost 44 percent
higher than income earned by counterpart black households in cities. Similar trends were identified for other minority groups.
of the suburbs as the bastion of "white flight" émigrés. Whelan describes the black suburbanizati Looking at the bigger picture, a
recent Brookings Institution study found that racial and ethnic minorities made up over 27 percent of the total suburban population in
the 102 most-populated metro areas in 2000, up substantially from 19 percent in 1990. It also found that the bulk of suburban
population gains in many of those metro areas could be attributed to minorities. These figures may surprise those accustomed to
thinking on trend succinctly: "Like whites, affluent blacks head off to the suburbs with their good fortunes." In other words, the
American Dream of homeownership, backyards, good schools, and safe communities is still alive and kicking. In fact, it’s within the
reach of a more diverse body of people than ever before. Planners and policy makers should remember this as they continue to address
the challenges posed by urban and suburban growth and development. In the pursuit of a new and improved American Dream, the
policies advocated by the anti-sprawl movement may ultimately help to perpetuate the socioeconomic inequities that generations of
Americans of all races and ethnicities have struggled to overcome.
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The alternative to urban sprawl will cause more harm than in the status quo
Randal O'Toole, senior economist with the Thoreau Institute and author, 03/01/2001, Environmental News and The
Heartland Insitute, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=9156
Will increased population densities reduce pollution? Environmental Protection Agency and Census Bureau data show a clear
relationship between air quality and population density: The densest cities and metropolitan areas have the worst air quality. Smart-
growth's density prescriptions will simply increase air pollution problems.
Water runoff is more complex. In general, a certain percentage of any watershed can be paved over or otherwise made "impervious"
without seriously disturbing water runoff. When that percentage is exceeded, disturbances in runoff patterns can quickly become
severe. The simple fact is that large-lot subdivisions pave (or make impervious) a far lower percentage of land than does high-density
smart-growth.
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