Concerned about Overpopulation?

I've heard that the anti-immigrant movement has been renewing its efforts to get more of the environmentalist movement on their side of the immigration issue. Andrea Smith makes some really good points in Chapter 3 of her book Conquest. This is some text i put together for a flier.


Concerned about Overpopulation?

(Excerpts from Andrea Smith’s book Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide)

Since the fertility rates of the industrialized world are stable at replacement levels, population control advocates can devote their time and energy to the burgeoning growth rates in the Global South and immigration issues in the U.S. In effect, women of color, immigrant women, and women from the Global South then become the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of environmental degradation...

Poverty, starvation, environmental degradation, and overpopulation are the direct result of specific colonial practices. When colonization forced women into cash economies, it became necessary for them to have more children in order to raise more cash crops. Also, increased mortality rates that have resulted from the effects of colonialism and structural adjustment programs motivate women to have more children in hopes that some will survive. Over the last 25 to 30 years, structural adjustment programs have cut social services in the Global South, making children necessary for old age security and for helping with womens' increased workloads...

Some populationists say population growth contributes to starvation. Yet there is actually enough food produced in the world to sustain every person at a 3,000-calorie-per-day diet. However, land is used inefficiently in order to support livestock for environmentally unsustainable Western meat-based diets. The same land that is used to maintain livestock for 250 days worth of food could be used to cultivate soybeans for 2,200 days… By cycling our grain through livestock, we end up with only 10 percent of the calories for human consumption as would be available if we ate the grain directly. In addition, food produced in the Global South is often exported to pay off debts to the World Bank rather than used to meet local needs. Consequently, even countries that are stricken by famine export food…Unfortunately, rather than look at the root causes of environmental destruction, poverty, and rapid population growth, population alarmists scapegoat "overpopulation" as the primary cause of all these problems, allowing corporations and governments to remain unaccountable.

Rather than being caused by overpopulation, significant environmental damage is actually caused by the environmentally destructive Western development projects, such as hydroelectric dams, uranium development, militarism, and livestock production. These projects ultimately benefit the wealthy living in industrialized countries, which are responsible for producing over 75 percent of the world's pollution. Development projects also cause unparalleled environmental damage, such as damming programs that flood entire biosystems or projects that rely on massive deforestation. More than one third of World Bank projects completed in 1993 were judged failures by its own staff, with some countries experiencing a success rate of less than 50 percent. Any damage done by indigenous people, peasants, and Global South farmers cannot compare to the damage done by multinationals and the World Bank, so the claim that stopping the "overpopulation" of peasants and indigenous peoples in Global South countries will "save the environment" is baseless.

Furthermore, Fatima Mello of FASE (Federation of Educational and Social Assistance Organizations — a Brazilian environmental and development NGO), notes that in Brazil, a higher density of population in certain areas of the Amazon often helps to stop encroachment by the World Bank or multinational corporations and their environmentally disastrous projects...

As the U.S. extracts resources from the Global South, people naturally follow these resources to the U.S. Yet, some mainstream environmentalists complain that the U.S. is now "overpopulated" by immigrants. Immigrants, Garrett Hardin claims, cause "global warming, species extinction, acid rain, and deforestation. ...Immigration...is threatening the carrying capacity limits of the natural environment." Because of "their excessive reproductive rates," immigrants cause mass environmental damage, "compete with our poor for jobs," and burden the taxpayer through "increased funding obligations in AFDC, Medicare, Food Stamps, School Lunch, Unemployment Compensation, [etc.]...

Again, anti-immigrant environmentalists presume that all people consume equally. But the impact of an immigrant family living in a onebedroom apartment and taking mass transit pales in comparison to that of a wealthy family living in a single family home with a swimming pool and two cars. Much of the environmental decline in this country has nothing to do with population growth or individual consumer choices. For example, in the 1930s and the 1940s, General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil (or Chevron) bought out and dismantled the electric trolley systems in Los Angeles and 75 other cities to create demand for their products...

I often hear pro-population control environmentalists say that the world would be much better off if people just died or that the world needs to cleanse itself of people. Again, this sentiment assumes that people are not part of the world. This sentiment also assumes that all people, not just those with wealth and institutional power, are equally responsible for massive environmental destruction. It is racist and imperialist to look at the people who are dying now from environmental degradation (generally people of color and poor people) and say that it is a good thing that the earth is cleansing itself...