overpopulation

According to the Times, 161,000 new jobs created in October, and the unemployment rate dipping down to 4.9 percent, “suggest[s] a healthy outlook for the months ahead.” No, it suggests something much different. In effect, the unemployment rate went down in October because 425,000 people (in just one month!) were moved from the “unemployed” column to the “not in the labor force” column on a government spreadsheet. In 2000, the number of 18- to 64-year-olds not in the labor force was 38.1 million; today that number is 49 million.

The American middle class shrunk in 90% of 229 metros across the nation between 2000 and 2014, according to a report released this week by the Pew Research Center. In half of the metros, more Americans moved from the middle-income tier to the lower-income tier than from the middle-income tier to the upper-income tier.

I'll be in Dallas at the Texas State Fairgrounds the next few days at the largest Earth Day exposition in the country, presenting our massive new study, VANISHING OPEN SPACES.

Our latest study on sprawl -- "VANISHING OPEN SPACES: How an Exploding U.S. Population Is Devouring the Land that Feeds and Nourishes Us" -- tells a sad tale of woe for the nation's farmland and natural habitat. In just the eight years from 2002 to 2010, over 8.3 million acres (approximately 13,000 square miles) of farmland and natural habitat succumbed to the bulldozer's blade. That is an area larger than the entire state of Maryland -- cleared, scraped, filled, paved and built over -- in less than a decade.

If you were to do a quick Google news search of “California drought and population growth,” you’d be lucky to find more than a few passing statements buried deep within articles regurgitating the same information.  All of the news coverage on the devastating drought focuses on short-term problems and shallow solutions. Most writing about the drought assume that population growth is a factor that won’t help California’s water shortage.  Unfortunately, I have yet to find any news coverage that attempts to come up with real solutions to rapid population growth in the We

We are told that reforming immigration policy and combating climate change are two key policy goals of President Obama as he begins his second term. But there is no evidence that the Obama administration sees any connection between them. This despite the fact that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified population growth as one of the two key drivers of climate change; and that most of the increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in the past two decades has occurred due to population growth, while per capita emissions have remained relatively flat.

The Census Bureau came out with its predictions on U.S. population this month.  In response, Federal Departments including the Departments of Interior and Agriculture released reports on how this growth will affect our country’s natural resources including open space and water supply.  The U.S. will add over 100 million people by 2050 due to mass immigration policies.   Also to be expected by 2050 are severe water shortages and major losses of forests and open space.  When will America realize that population stabilization is the answer to our sustainability dilemma?

NumbersUSA again this year is at one of the nation's three largest Earth Day Festivals, at the Texas State Fairgrounds. We are displaying our giant red and green U.S. population chart, as usual.  And, as usual, lots of people do some double takes at seeing the population issue raised in the midst of scores of booths about green products, recycling, lower-consumption living, etc.  Melanie Oubre and I will be posting a few observations during this 43rd Earth Day.

Democratic Congressman Jared Polis sent out an interesting comment via Twitter on Wednesday afternoon. His Tweet simply said "Boulder residents r happiest ppl in the country :-)". And Boulder residents should be happy. While the U.S. population has increased at a rate close to 10% over the past 10 years, Boulder's population has grown by only 4.6% over the same period of time thanks to its strict population control policies.

Our call for replacement-level immigration (a reduction in annual numbers by perhaps 80%) has just received a huge boost of validity in a new book -- Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife -- by Dave Foreman. Over the last four decades, few people have been more true and highly-publicized in their championing of the U.S. environment than Foreman. Essentially, he concludes that wildlife in the U.S. face a dismal future without deep cuts in immigration.

One man loudly told me that I should be ashamed of myself for advocating U.S. population stabilization at an Earth Day festival -- and indicated that the founders of Earth Day were shamefully selfish if they advocated what NumbersUSA is advocating. But much more common at this Dallas event was a teacher who had her full class stand in our booth for me to give them a 10-minute population lecture about our "Wall charts."

Your NumbersUSA team has gone to great effort to produce an updated video that matches the professionalism, the integrity and the persuasiveness of the original. We're trying to push the views up quickly enough to land the video on some most-watched lists to greatly expand and broaden the audience which desperately needs to see this perspective about international humanitarianism and immigration.

It isn’t every day a person gets to sit down and chew the fat with one of their U.S. Senators. So I jumped at the chance to participate in an hour long Q & A session with Michael Bennet, the junior Senator from Colorado, who fielded questions from two dozen environmental activists here in northern Colorado. Senator Bennet considers himself a strong environmentalist and in his first year in the Senate he has earned good marks from the League of Conservation Voters. But his poor grade with NumbersUSA contradicts his commitment to the environment.