It seems that we have three general responses for the deep wounds which need to be healed in our country: 1) find a politically acceptable band aid which won’t fix the problem long term but makes those involved look good 2) Find a suitable cure involving the proper gauze/tourniquet in the way of public policy or whatever is truly required to begin the long-term healing and 3) con-artists who rub salt in the wounds and make them worse while claiming that this snake oil will bring a quick reliable fix.
The latest in the line of rubbing salt in the wound is gobsmacking in its premise. In the US where we are already destroying rivers, draining aquifers, killing off our remaining wildlife and shortening our lives while stuck ever denser housing and freeway construction, there is an excruciatingly horrid proposal on the table to accelerate population growth.
Apparently, author Matt Yglesias has never been stuck in gridlock on an LA freeway, or had to drink the water from a tap in Flint Michigan. He has never seen tents and cardboard boxes of our country’s over 550,000 homeless or seen the news showing how the US is suffering from the effects of climate change with larger, more powerful floods and devastating wildfires. He must be sociologically tone deaf about the millions who have lost their jobs due to automation, the shipping of jobs overseas, all exacerbated by the current pandemic. Against this backdrop of overpopulation-driven pain and suffering, he wants to welcome hundreds of millions more American consumers. According to his upcoming book, I am loathe to mention, he thinks we should think bigger and welcome more population growth until we reach 1 billion Americans -- jobs, wildlife, open space, fresh water, clean air and traffic be damned.
I am hoping he is secretly doing this to start a conversation about a truly sustainable population for the US, which the scientifically sane calculate to be about a third to half of our current 330 million. That could indeed have positive results, but right now it just feels like he is enjoying finding a niche to exploit by rubbing salt in the wound of our over-consuming, overpopulated country.
There is great risk that he will be successful in making this salty con stick to the public discourse so averse to paying any real attention to the whole idea of sustainable US numbers. Based on an older salt- in-the-wound idea, I still hear people say that we could fit the world’s population into the state of Texas as if that has any ecological relevance. I could fit 1,000 rats in my cupboard, but they would be dead by the time the sun rose the next day.
Due to intellectual laziness, lack of ecological education, and a paucity of those predisposed to critical thinking, we have a population full of people who can be susceptible to con-artists, even when their ideas are ridiculous. Thankfully there is already a great deal of pushback on Yglesias’s preposterous pro-growth proposals, consider this one more.