The Triumph of Innumeracy

by Mark Powell

Vermonters for Sustainable Population

At a December 21^st press conference, Census Director Robert Groves released the results of the 2010 census. News coverage across the board has echoed the soundbite that population growth had slowed signficantly, with a typical headline calling it “ the slowest since the Great Depression.” In reality, the US population in the past twenty years has grown faster than ever before, but that was not the message we heard. That was not the message we heard from the Census Bureau, however. In its press appearances and written statements, Director Groves and other Census Bureau spokepersons emphasized percentage rates of growth almost exclusively, providing real numbers only in their entirety and not at all in any graphical context. As if aware of the potentially explosive response he was hoping to avoid, Director Groves showed a slight squeamishness as he stated, “The percentage growth this last decade . . . . is thus the second lowest of the past century.”[i]

The characterization is fair and accurate only if the increase in the U.S. population is measured as a percentage of the existing population, but is irresponsibly inaccurate when considering the actual numerical increase in comparison to past decades of growth. At a minimum, the Census has reported an increase of 27.5 million people in the U.S. from the year 2000 to the year 2010, a 9.7% increase. Looking at the percentage increases of the past century, this is indeed a modest growth that is surpassed by every one of the previous five decades. Since the U.S. population at the start of this decade was more than twice the size of the 1940 population, however, the use of percentages understates the significance of this decade’s growth. Looking at the actual numbers of decennial census results, on the other hand, shows that this decade is surpassed only by two others. One of these, the previous decade from 1990 to 2000, recorded an unprecedented 32.7 million increase to the size of the U.S. population. The other comparable decade, from 1950 to 1960, the high point of the legendary baby boom, saw an increase of 27.9 million people to the U.S. population, barely enough to supersede the current decade, which, as I mentioned, was portrayed in headlines as the slowest decade of growth since the Depression. I think this is an important distinction that is clearly de-emphasized in the language and analysis that prevails in the news coverage of this preliminary report.

It is fair to ask whether the percentage increase or the increase in actual numbers is a better measure of the impact of continued U.S. population growth, but I fear that the Census Bureau, in choosing to report out on the less-controversial interpretations based on percentage increase, is de-emphasizing the significance of current immigration policy and its impact on current and future population growth. If it were not for the recent economic downturn, experts all agree, immigration would have continued at its record pace through the end of this decade. If it had done so, it would probably have exceeded even the 1990’s in the numerical increase of the U.S. population.

In the chart below, I have graphed U.S. population growth from 1900 to 2010 in two different ways. The first shows the percentage increase, which appears fairly innocuous in that it shows a modest trend of declining population growth relative to the existing size of the U.S. population. The second shows the actual numerical increase by decade, indicating in a much more definitive way the fact that U.S. population growth has rebounded considerably in the past twenty years.

US Population: Percentage Growth by Decade as Emphasized in 2010 Census Coverage

Decade Ending:

U.S. Population: Numerical Growth by Decade as Ignored by 2010 Census Coverage

Decade Ending:

If they had been interested in showing a clearer picture of the historical trends, they could have used a rolling average, as statisticians often do in situations where short term variations are potentially unrepresentative. Using a twenty-year rolling average to portray U.S. population growth over the past century would produce the following graph:

Even if you were to specifically bracket the baby boom years, comparing the growth from 1945 to 1965 rather than on the basis of distinct decades, the two decades of the baby boom saw an increase of 54 million people in our population, while the twenty years just ending saw an increase of at least 59 million. The baby boom has just been eclipsed by the 20 year period just ending, and we are poised for even more population growth as the economy rebounds. When the baby boom reached the age of 20, it called it quits and went to bed. This boom, at 20 years old, is snoozing at the moment. However, with a likely resurgence in immigration as the economy improves, and taking into account the fertility of recent immigrants, this boom is likely to wake up and drive forward with continued unsustainable growth in our population, making this not only the largest population surge in our history but also the longest running one.

This is the most widely distributed graph portraying the 2010 Census Results.


As you can see, this graph does portray the overall population size, using green bars, and that is obviously at a higher level today than ever before. They have used a scale, however, that portrays the per-decade increases on a much diminished significance, making it very difficult to discern even minor variations between decades. Had they used the bar elements of the graph to portray decennial increases rather than cumulative totals, however, the differences in numerical growth between decades would be much more emphatic. So what this graph most readily conveys is not the decade-by-decade total size as shown by the green bars but the decade to decade shifts in the percentage growth, indicated by the jagged red line, so that the percentage growth of one decade becomes the visual standard by which the succeeding decade is measured. Since the 1990s witnessed the largest numerical growth in our history, anything that follows it has to meet a higher standard of growth just to avoid an inferiority complex. As mentioned earlier, when all is said and done the Aughts will likely be recognized as the second fastest growing decade, population wise, in our history. Sure doesn’t come across in this 2010 graphic, though, does it? Now have a look at a graphic that was used in 2001 to inform the American public of the demographic earthquake recorded in the 2000 census.

Clearly, then, U.S. population growth is not slowing down when considered from a long-term, statistically meaningful way. This begs the question; does the Census Bureau have an interest in portraying our current population growth as slower than it actually is? And if so, why?

A Parched Future

A Parched Future
Ignoring U.S. Population Growth Threatens the Environment and Social Services

While the country and the Congress debate our future direction in reversing global warming and providing health care to all Americans, policy-makers and the public alike continue to ignore the major impact of our rapidly expanding population. The United States’ population is now over 306 million and is growing at the net gain of one person every ten seconds. By 2050 the U.S. population is expected to reach 438 million. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the United States is the only developed country that significantly contributes to global population growth.

Some theorize that current over-population and on-going rapid population growth are issues the human mind cannot cope with due to their overwhelming implications -- and are therefore subject to psychological denial tactics by both individuals and societies.
Yet we already see the climate change impact of over-populating the planet as greenhouse gases pour into the atmosphere, arable land is consumed by urban expansion and safe, healthy water supplies are harder to find.

Water serves as a prime indicator of the population problem. Water wars already occur in the Southwest. By 2050, climate change is expected to cut short winters which will reduce one-quarter of the snow pack in the Sierras, dramatically diminishing water availability in Western States. Proposed solutions include harvesting stormwater to collect 400,000 acre-feet of water per year, enough to supply two-thirds of Los Angeles’ annual water use. Still, the amount of water available will drop by 74% per person in the U.S. by 2050.

Population growth means the United States will have to revamp social systems such as healthcare and education. Conservative analysis shows the increases to U.S. population increases health care costs by about $2,700 per person per year. Adding 138 million people by 2050 could easily add $350 billion dollars in health care costs in that year alone! As we attempt to address the shortfall in healthcare today and find ourselves overwhelmed by the financial burden, you have to wonder how we are going to care for all of these people. But have you heard one mention of the costs of population growth in the health care debate?

With education resources strained in almost every state, the influx of new students will further stress already overloaded systems. It is critical that we understand the aggravating factors contributing to these problems and address them immediately.

How can we bring U.S. population growth into the discussion of critical issues such as climate change and healthcare? Why has over-population been denied attention by policy-makers and the public alike? Where will the U.S. get enough clean water to supply its mushrooming population? Who will pay for the impact of population growth on basic social services such as education?

US targets population growth, urges women's power

US targets population growth, urges women's power

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Source: Associated Press Worldstream
Author: EDITH M. LEDERER

WASHINGTON -- The new U.S. ambassador for global women's issues pledged Thursday the Obama administration's "deep commitment" to a U.N. blueprint aimed at slowing the world's population explosion and empowering women.

At the heart of the more than 100-page action plan adopted at the U.N. population conference in Cairo, Egypt, 15 years ago is a demand for women's equality through education, economic development, access to modern birth control and the right to choose if and when to become pregnant.

Underlying the conference was the record growth in global population and research, which shows that educated women choose to have fewer children. In 1994, when delegates from 180 countries met in Cairo, the population was 5.7 billion. According to the latest U.N. estimates, it will hit 7 billion early in 2012 and top 9 billion in 2050.

The U.S. ambassador, Melanne Verveer, said President Barack Obama's decision to contribute $50US million to the U.N. Population Fund for family planning, an increase of more than 100 percent over the last U.S. contribution, in 2001, "will send an unambiguous signal to the world that the U.S. supports the Cairo Platform for Action."

The Bush administration cut off money to the fund because of claims, denied by the U.N. agency, that it supported forced abortions and sterilizations in China.

Verveer, former chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was first lady, spoke at a luncheon honoring Dr. Nafis Sadik on her 80th birthday.

Verveer praised the Pakistani obstetrician-gynecologist for framing "the vision" of the Cairo plan that linked development, human rights, women's rights and reproductive health for the first time.

Sadik, a former head of the U.N. Population Fund, was secretary-general of the Cairo conference.

"I wanted to come here today to clearly reiterate the renewed and deep commitment of the United States government to the ... Program of Action, and the Obama administration's steadfast determination to continue to work with other governments and NGOs to meet the goals we have set," she said.

Clinton, now secretary of state, told a conference of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in Houston last month "that reproductive rights and the umbrella issue of women's rights and empowerment is going to be a key to the foreign policy of this administration." She stressed the link between women's rights and democracy.

"A society that denies and demeans women's rights and roles is a society that is more likely to engage in behavior that is negative, anti-democratic and leads to violence and extremism," she said after receiving the federation's Margaret Sanger Award named for its founder for her work on behalf of women's health and reproductive rights.

Tim Wirth, who led the U.S. delegation at the Cairo conference, called the Program of Action "a revolutionary document" because "it really is ultimately about the transfer of political power."

"That's why it's been so difficult," said Wirth, who is now president of the United Nations Foundation. "That's why it's been so controversial. There's a finite amount of political power in the world and what this document did in so many ways was to transfer a lot of political power from men to women."

Sadik, taking up the point, thanked Verveer "for capturing the spirit of the Cairo message" and expressed hope that she would convey to the Obama administration "how important it is to transfer power really to women equally no more, no less and to take away the power from men who have much more, and not what they actually deserve."

"So I hope that will be the message," she said. "Equality is the name of the game and our real message."

Sadik, who currently is a special representative of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on HIV/AIDS and global health issues, said 15 years after Cairo the first thing that needs to be done is "shed the baggage" that the Bush administration "put on us ... so unnecessarily" and move forward.

"I hope that the U.S. diplomatic policy, defense policy and development policy are all going to focus on the rights of women and make that the underpinning for anything else that they may do in a developing country," she said.

"We need urgently to increase family planning and reduce maternal mortality," Sadik said. "It is, frankly, a crime against humanity that half a million women are allowed to die every year as a direct consequence of pregnancy."

She also decried "the distortions of religion" that deny women their human rights and "bigots" who fall back on cultural values to deny rights to girls and women especially on matters of reproductive and sexual health.

In Sadik's honor, the United Nations Foundation, which sponsored the lunch, announced that it was establishing a fund to help some of the more than 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world.

Paradise Lost: Case Study of Limited Resources and Population Expansion

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/09/off_road_warriors/

ATVs having nowhere to ride on Cape Cod is one of many problems that have worsened after decades of growth and development (“Off-road warriors,” 5/9/09). In fact, the Cape is one of the best places in the U.S. to observe the effects of rapid population growth. What once was an isolated and untamed place to vacation and experience vast natural beauty has become an extension of the Greater Boston suburbs, with its housing, retail shopping, and endless traffic.

There are irrevocable costs that come with our society’s relentless promotion of growth. The story behind the ATV article is that in many ways parents today cannot provide to their own children the lifestyle they once enjoyed. Unless we learn to live sustainably, with smaller families and a stable population, our children and future generations will miss out on an ever-increasing list of life-enhancing experiences.

Americans also should question the paradigm that communities must always be growing in order to enjoy a better quality of life. Indeed, the opposite is oftentimes true with the attendant higher taxes, housing costs, traffic congestion, and the incessant loss of open spaces.

Henry Barbaro

NECSP Board Member

America On The Brink -- A New Book

AMERICA ON THE BRINK: THE NEXT ADDED 100 MILLION AMERICANS

By Frosty Wooldridge

Published April 27, 2009; Available 1-888 280 7715; Barnes and Noble; Borders; www.barnesandnoble.com ; www.borders.com ; www.Amazon.com In London, England contact: www.authorhouse.co.uk

"Eye-opening, incisive, brilliant! The US has the fastest growing population of any industrial nation, and one of the world's highest consumption rates. Water, topsoil, forests, fish, petroleum...the more of us, the more pressure we exert on our environment. Many discuss our personal consumption patterns, but few dare talk about the underlying crisis of population growth. Wooldridge is one of the few courageous voices warning us about the implications of our current direction, and informing us what we can do to change course." Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything

"Electrifying reading! This is a veritable cannonade of a book. Wooldridge targets the people and institutions, from the President on down, who refuse to look at the consequences of population growth in the modern era. His focus is on the United States, but his range is the world. He fearlessly addresses issues that politicians fear to mention, such as the effects of mass immigration on our population future and our social systems. He engages to force population issues into our local and national political decisions." Lindsey Grant, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Population.

"The environmental community may be outrageously AWOL on the important subject of population, but not Frosty Wooldridge. Read this book!" Richard D. Lamm, Governor of Colorado 1975- 1987

"Wooldridge's powerful indictment of our political leaders for failing to address U.S. overpopulation should be required reading in classrooms and boardrooms. To mindlessly add 100 million more people to our nation's population in the next 30 years will put the United States economy and social order at further risk. His challenge needs to be addressed on individual, national and international levels before it's too late." William B. Dickinson, The Biocentric Institute

America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans--injects a whole new dynamic facing the United States in the 21^st century. While national leaders at every level ignore accelerating consequences, immigration-driven hyper-population growth will become THE single greatest issue facing America in the years ahead. By adding 100 million people by 2035, every crisis facing Americans today accelerates in harsher consequences--whether it is water shortages, climate change, energy scarcity, dwindling resources, gridlock, air pollution and a decline of quality of life. Wooldridge compellingly states the obvious fact that the U.S. cannot continue population expansion indefinitely. He offers Hobson’s Choice as a final result of mass denial. If the U.S. adds another 100 million people via immigration, it faces two doors: if the country picks door # 1, this civilization walks over a cliff. If it picks door # 2, it walks into quicksand. Once that 100 million people manifest, no one, no matter what their race, creed or color—escapes. Americans will endure water shortages, energy problems, crowding and a much diminished standard of living. The American Dream will no longer be available. However, he offers concrete ways to change the future. In all great social change, it takes a ‘conscious shift’ that leads to a ‘critical mass shift’ and finally, a ‘tipping point’ whereby a civilization turns toward a sustainable and viable future. It’s up to each citizen and leader to make sure that ‘tipping point’ occurs. The fate of this civilization hangs in the balance.

America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans

By Frosty Wooldridge

Publisher: Author House www.authorhouse.com, Price: $17.99

ISBN # 978-1-4389-6074-6

219 pages, 41chapters

Order Phone number: 1-888-280-7715 credit card or check

It will also be available on www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com

within a few weeks.

Radio, TV, newsprint: for complimentary media copy, call Yvona Doane: 1 888 519 5121 Ext. 5299

Author Contact: www.frostywooldridge.com

The Great American Garbage Patch

The Great American Garbage Patch

http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty463.htm

By Frosty Wooldridge

In my 40 years traveling around this planet, I discovered human beings respect nothing anywhere in the world. No matter how beautiful, no matter how pristine the location and no matter what country—human beings toss their trash everywhere. They inject their chemicals into the land, air and water. They throw their rubbish into rivers, lakes and streams.

In my forty years of Scuba diving around the world, I’ve seen our pristine lakes and oceans turn into trash cans for humans. Millions of tires, nets, plastic, glass and metal containers roll around the ocean floor like ‘creatures’ out of place.

As recently exposed on Oprah, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” twice the size of Texas, features three million tons of plastic debris floating around the Pacific. In some places, it reaches 60 feet thick. It kills millions of marine creatures annually. It’s not just the Pacific, 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of all our oceans and seas! That figure is correct!

While riding my bicycle around the world or climbing mountains, I have seen humans toss soiled baby diapers into pristine pools, fjords and rivers. On Mt. Everest, known as the “Earth Mother”, climbers have left tons of trash and garbage on her flanks in their efforts to reach the top. At the base, climbers have turned the area into a sewage pit.

Most large rivers running out of industrial nations feature raw sewage that creates ‘dead zones’ like the 10,000 square mile one at the mouth of the Mississippi River to 27,000 square mile dead zones in the North Sea. How big is that? That’s the size of North Carolina.

Instead of changing their ways, humans continue adding more trash upon the trash with no end in sight.

In a sobering expose’ Mother Jones featured a brilliant piece by world famous author Bill McKibben. He also wrote a ground-breaking book: The End of Nature. I highly recommend reading his books.

“Waste not, want not” by Bill McKibben, Mother Jones/May-June 2009 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/05/waste-not-want-not

“Once a year or so, it's my turn to run recycling day for our tiny town,” McKibben said. “But it's also kind of disturbing, this waste stream. For one, a town of 550 sure generates a lot—a trailer load every couple of weeks.

“More than that, though, so much of it seems utterly unnecessary. Not just waste, but wasteful. Plastic water bottles, one after another—80 million of them get tossed every day. The ones I'm stomping down are being "recycled," but so what? In a country where almost everyone has access to clean drinking water, they define waste to begin with. In fact, once you start thinking about it, the category of "waste" begins to expand, until it includes an alarming percentage of our economy. Let's do some intellectual sorting:

“There's old-fashioned waste, the dangerous, sooty kind. You're making something useful, but you're not using the latest technology, and so you're spewing: particulates into the air, or maybe sewage into the water. You wish to keep doing it, because it's cheap, and you block any regulation that might interfere with your right to spew. This is the kind of waste that's easy to attack; it's obvious and obnoxious and a lot of it falls under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and so on. There's actually less of this kind of waste than there used to be—that's why we can swim in most of our rivers again.” Or to correct McKibben, at least 53 percent of them!

“There's waste that comes from doing something that manifestly doesn't need doing,” said McKibben. “A hundred million trees are cut every year just to satisfy the junk-mail industry. Or think about what we've done with cars. From 1975 to 1985, fuel efficiency for the average new car improved from 14 to 28 miles per gallon. Then we stopped worrying about oil and put all that engineering talent to work on torque.”

While we Americans run through our busy days, mountains of trash accumulate worldwide by our singular activities.

McKibben said, “Chris Jordan is the photographer laureate of waste—his most recent project, "Running the Numbers," uses exquisite images to show the 106,000 aluminum cans Americans toss every 30 seconds, or the 1 million plastic cups distributed on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the 2 million plastic beverage bottles we run through every 5 minutes, or the 426,000 cell phones we discard every day, or the 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags we use each hour, or the 60,000 plastic bags we use every 5 seconds, or the 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, or the 170,000 Energizer batteries produced every 15 minutes. The simple amount of stuff it takes—energy especially—to manage this kind of throughput makes it daunting to even think about our waste problem. (Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that population is at the root of our troubles, remind them that the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average, say, Tanzanian consumes in a year. Population matters, but it really matters when you multiply it by proximity to Costco.”

I have read where Americans use 90 billion plastic and paper bags annually. (Source: Sierra Club) But I’ve also read that the total number of plastic bags for humanity exceeds 386 billion annually. All go to the landfill, or, as you can verify daily—all over the landscape.

“Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than 1 percent of our solid waste stream,” We toss 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean. And—oh, forget it.”

McKibben covers waste from many corners, but then, he covers the waste of our two wars and military waste.

“Want to talk about government waste?” said McKibben. “We're going to end up spending north of a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, which will go down as one of the larger wastes of money—and lives—in our history. But we spend more than half a trillion a year on the military anyway, more than the next 10 nations combined. That almost defines profligacy.

“We landed on a continent with topsoil more than a foot thick across its vast interior, so the fact that we immediately started to waste it with inefficient plowing hardly mattered. We inherited an atmosphere that could buffer our emissions for the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution.

“But our margin is gone. We're out of cash, we're out of atmosphere, we're out of luck. The current economic carnage is what happens when you waste—when the CEO of Merrill Lynch thinks he needs a $35,000 commode, when the CEO of Tyco thinks it would be fun to spend a million dollars on his wife's birthday party, complete with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David peeing vodka. The melted Arctic ice cap is what you get when everyone in America thinks he requires the kind of vehicle that might make sense for a forest ranger.”

McKibben makes sense! He’s brilliant! So why am I pulling my hair out by the roots? Why do I ride my bicycle along highways with an endless stream of trash? Why do I see fast food, beer and pop bottles littering America’s rivers and lakes? Why do humans create and inject ever more deadly chemicals into the environment annually? How can Americans remain mind-numbingly apathetic to mountains of debris covering North America?

How about the ones of us that care? Let’s create incentive laws to encourage the ones that don’t care—to pick up after themselves. How about a 10 cent national deposit/return law like Michigan’s. I have bicycled the entire ‘mitt’ of Michigan and never picked up one plastic, can or bottle container. Why? Because no matter who tosses their container litter, an armada of kids picks up everything for the financial reward. It’s time for America to take responsibility for cleaning up America. Let’s stop the waste stream by engaging a “National Recycling Policy”.

The original people of this continent, living here thousands of years, maintained a pristine environment. New arrivals from Europe trashed North America inside of 150 years. That’s unreasonable and immoral. It’s unconscionable! Let’s change ourselves toward a more responsible society.

No Joy In Mudville -- Swine Flu and The Human Future

The reality that inspired that old saying, “nature bats last” is making an uncomfortable and terrifying trip around the planet this week.

As the swine flu threatens a global pandemic, we are brought face to face with the innate and irrevocable power of our Earth’s global ecosystem to self-regulate. It’s nature’s version of the U.S. Constitution -- a system of checks and balances where no one entity is more powerful than the other. When operating correctly, this system produces balanced outcomes that limit the fecundity of any one species in order to ensure the viability of the whole system.

We are used to understanding this dynamic – and far more comfortable observing it -- when it applies to rabbits on the tundra, moose on an island, or bacteria in the Petri dish.

Now, however, this target is us! And we don’t like it one bit.

From the human perspective, the swine flu is something that rightly needs to be defeated and destroyed. But we should also see this unfolding event as an opportunity to remember that we are neither omniscient nor omnipotent on this planet. Our normal operating perspective, especially in the U.S., is that we have fundamentally conquered nature and partitioned ourselves as an elite species not subject to Earth’s forces. This means our economy can abuse our environment without penalty and our populations can increase forever.

Yet now -- as our fellow citizens begin to fall sick and die -- rather than gracefully partitioned, we begin to realize we may actually be quarantined!

On a planet that is asked to support a quarter million more humans every day (225,000) and 82 million more per year, can anyone be surprised that nature is reminding us of her prowess? Most serious ecologists have been saying for decades that the planet is over-populated by billions. And, most serious environmentalists already know that human population must be stabilized to have any shot at global sustainable development

As this terrible tragedy unfolds, isn’t it time to have a conversation about planetary sustainability and the fundamental role population stabilization must play in achieving it? Without serious discussions of this sort, it’s almost certain that nature will continue to bat last – but it will be humanity that ultimately strikes out.