For education purposes only

The Denver Post August 30, 2000

'Growth debate offers choice ranging from A to B' By Al Knight, Denver Post Columnist

Aug. 30, 2000 - How did the ongoing public debate over "controlling growth" become so limited, offering as it does just two well-worn and utterly familiar points of view?

The first is that there is little to be done about growth except to get used to it. The second is that growth must be managed by applying restrictive zoning and planning policies that will magically channel growth in the "right" places while not completely destroying traditional concepts of private property rights.

Put another way, the public is presented with two options, more growth or what is quaintly dubbed "smart growth."

Notice the absence of some other perfectly reasonable points of view, like "no growth" or "sharply reduced growth."

Those points of view used to be on the table, used to be a part of any discussion of population-growth issues, but they have disappeared into the mist. Why?

The answer can be found in a refreshing article in the Pennsylvania State University Press Journal of Policy History. The authors, Roy Beck and Leon Kolan kiewicz, describe in detail how it came to be that the American environmental movement has all but abandoned its support for stabilizing U.S. population. They also describe how immigration, both legal and illegal, has come to be a taboo topic, too laced with racial overtones even to be discussed, and how the U.S. media have re-enforced the notion that population simply can't be controlled.

As recently as the 1970s, most environmental groups were on record urging a stabilized population. The reasoning was quite straightforward. Damage to the environment, they said, can be reduced in only two ways. The impact of each individual can be lessened or the number of total individuals can be reduced. Makes perfect sense. What doesn't make any sense is to do little or nothing to reduce the impact of an individual while allowing the number of individuals to increase. Yet that is what is taking place.

Total population growth, 70 percent of which is driven by immigration, is wiping out any advances that have been made in lessening individual environmental impacts.

The U.S. Census Bureau says current trends will continue and predicts a total head count of 400 million in the next 50 years. Meanwhile, environmental groups that once talked of stabilized population by 1990 have accepted these numbers as a kind of inevitable fate and prattle on about conservation of resources as though nothing has happened.

Beck and Kolankiewicz point out that Zero Population Growth, another oncezealous group, now seems focused on population problems anywhere but in America. That group is interested in the empowerment of women, international family planning funds, and the like.

As for immigration issues, they have largely been put off-limits by two factors. For one thing, the new immigrants contain far lower percentages of non-Hispanic whites, so every discussion of the issue plunges the participants into a discussion of race and ethnicity.

Years ago, the Rockefeller Commission heard virtually everything there was to say about race and immigration from two witnesses,Jesse Jackson and Manuel Aragon. Jackson's community was suspicious "of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or leveling off our population growth," he said. "Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce."

Aragon said, "What we must do, is to encourage large Mexican-American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed."

Comments like these have been enough to send once tough-minded politicians to the sidelines, never to return to the discussion of immigration.

No explanation can be offered for the current constricted debate over growth, however, without a word for the media, which has chosen to discuss growth without ever mentioning immigration.

A University of Southwestern Louisiana professor conducted a study of news coverage of urban sprawl, endangered species and water shortages, and found that of 150 news stories on those issues, just one mentioned that part of the solution was a stabilized U.S. population.

This revelation should surprise no one. At a meeting on urban sprawl in Tennessee, media representatives flatly stated that as far as they were concerned the spectrum for discussion was limited to "more growth" and "smart growth."

No wonder there is such a sense of unreality hanging over those endless local forums on "managing growth."

People instinctively know, as do Beck and Kolankiewicz, that these will remain largely futile political exercises until someone asks and answers the question, "Where are all these people coming from?''

Al Knight is a Denver Post columnist and editorial writer.

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), September 01, 2000