Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2269

8/7/06
U.S. population growth and its effects on our environment must be addressed, experts say

The United States – population nearly 300 million – and its neighbors light up the night in this view from space.
Look at the top-priority campaigns of the nation's big environmental groups and you'll find endangered animals, pollution and global warming.

What's largely missing are high-profile, domestic initiatives that tackle what many conservationists agree is a chief source of these and other challenges: U.S. population growth.

The environmental establishment has mostly abandoned talking about the nation's growing populace, particularly as it relates to immigration. The topic is dogged by internal squabbles, divisive politics and a desire to avoid ethnic discrimination.

One result is that ecological factors are rarely mentioned in the current effort to establish a new immigration policy. The debate mostly centers on economics and national security.

Graphic:

Populations soar
“People have been avoiding it like the plague,” said U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad, a hawk on illegal-immigration issues.

“(Environmentalists) will sidestep major challenges to what their stated goal is because it may end up stepping on political friends' toes,” he said. “They have credibility problems when they are willing to look the other way.”

Leaders of big-name green groups said they focus their energies on a larger issue: global population growth.

“Some people ... want the Sierra Club to have a position that is more U.S.-centric,” said Stephen Mills, the club's international program director in Washington, D.C. “We feel that the entire planet is worth protecting, not the U.S. over anywhere else.”

Gaining attention
The United States is the world's third-most populous country, after China (1.3 billion people) and India (1.1 billion). The nation's population has nearly doubled since 1950, and the count is expected to hit 300 million in October, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2050, the figure is projected to top 419 million.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20060806-9999-1n6pop.html

noillegalimmigrationannie · Joined: 15 Aug 2006 Posts: 11

The Sierra Club and other high profile environmental groups should be ashamed of themselves for not taking on the illegal alien invasion crisis.

America and Americans cannot solve the overpopulation crisis' of all the third world country's, their overpopulation, polution and environmental crisis'. Not only this, but we shouldn't have to.

Allowing the millions of legal immigrants in every year as well as our governmentals failures to secure our borders and stem the flow of illegal aliens, hurts our country and doesn't help their countries either because then they have an escape valve and continue on with their irresponsible breeding and ignoring their country's inept and corrupt governments.

Let the citiziens of these countries practice birth control and responsibility and stop using the USA and other rich (or former rich nations) as teats.