ARTICLES

A Little Lower on the Hog

Sierra Club Debates How to Control Population

BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER

The dichotomies of American politics often break down in interesting ways. For instance, one usually associates calls to curb immigration with "conservatives" and world population control with "liberals;" but, as a current controversy in what many would think a left-leaning institution shows, these issues are not so easily parceled out among political ideologies.

For us born and raised in this state, the Sierra Club and its founder, the naturalist John Muir, are as quintessentially Californian as Big Sur, the San Joaquin Valley, and the Sequoia. The San Francisco-based Sierra Club has long been one of the most, if not the most, influential environmentalist organization. Not only that, it's respectable. If members are called "tree-huggers," they are at least solidly middle class tree-huggers -- the kind of folks you wouldn't mind living next door to. What's more, Sierra Clubbers are decently liberal -- that is, comfortably open and tolerant.

But times may be changing. If insurgents have their way, the Sierra Club may begin to appear less tolerant, if not less liberal. The March 16 New York Times reported that a "dissident group led by Richard D. Lamm," formerly the governor of Colorado, are trying to get the club to advocate controls on immigration into the United States. Lamm and others were running for the club's board of directors, the election to be held in late April. But regardless of the election's results, it is unlikely that the controversy will go away. Many in the club, and increasingly more environmentalists outside the club, see immigration control as an obvious application of one of the Sierra Club's causes: population control.

"This is not a challenge posed by Lamm. He's involved in it because he's running as a candidate supported by a certain group of people," a Sierra Club spokeswoman told me. "This goes way back. We have people on the board already who are part of this group. There's been an immigration debate for years and years. There was a membership-wide vote on what our immigration policies should be back in 1998, and the membership voted to have a neutral policy, meaning they didn't want to do anything about immigration. They didn't think it was an issue we should address."

Jennifer Ferenstein, a past-president of the Sierra Club and a current board member, told me she thought the immigration debate "has escalated as a board debate" since the 1998 membership-wide vote. One can maybe see why. Writing in the February 1, 2004 Denver Post, Richard Lamm claimed "our natural American birthrate will lead to a stable population around 2050." But, he said, "with the current level of immigration, our population will be approximately 500 million, on its way to 1 billion.... What will 500 million Americans mean to our environment? Or 1 billion?" In an e-mail to me, Lamm asked if such a population growth "scenario" would not make every Sierra Club triumph "a pyrrhic victory." "Do you know what one billion people would do to this country? Where would we be alone in the midst of such pressing numbers? How would we nourish our souls? How would we get away from the stink and sprawl of civilization?"

Lamm, it seems, thinks the Sierra Club has thought globally but failed to act locally. "Every organization, he said, "must make sure that its solutions are equal to the magnitude of the problems it seeks to solve. The Sierra Club has a Grand Canyon gap between its goals and its action plan. It cannot get to an environmental [sic] sound America without considering population and immigration."

I asked Jennifer Ferenstein about Lamm's doomsday scenario for America. Does the club agree with it? "The Sierra Club is not the germane question," she said. "The question for the Sierra Club really has to do with protecting the environment; how's the best way to do that? I don't see taking a position of neutrality on the issue of immigration as a position of cowardice or not caring about the effects of in-migration or out-migration, for that matter, on the environment in the United States."

The issue of population, said Ferenstein, "is a broader issue. It's a global issue. I believe -- and the majority of my colleagues on the board believe this too -- that the best ways of addressing the issues of overpopulation and also of overconsumption isn't to point fingers at people who want to come into the United States; but it's to address the root causes. And that has to do with providing global family planning. It means reducing our consumption here in the United States. It means seriously evaluating our globalization practices and whether or not we have simply free trade or whether we have fair trade." Ferenstein said the "real question" for the Sierra Club "becomes what role does the club have in determining immigration policy? Do you want the Sierra Club, and do our members want the Sierra Club, to have to get involved in issues about the constitutional rights of those born in the United States, who maybe came from illegal immigrants? Or with the search and seizure of those people, who may or may not be in this country legally? The social consequences of immigration policy are immense, and the club has made, I believe, a very sensible decision, that the social issues surrounding the issue of immigration far outweigh the numbers issue.

"We're not really into the lifeboat ethics, the idea that we can close our borders and ignore what's going on in other countries."

And the Sierra Club does not ignore other countries. A visit to the population control page on the club's website will acquaint anyone with the club's goals: not only funding for international family planning programs and "sexual health education" for youth, but also support for abortion. The club called on members to join the "March for Women's Lives" in Washington, D.C. on April 25 to voice opposition "to Bush administration policies that deny women around the world access to rights and healthcare." The Bush administration, said the club's website "continues to promote extremist policies that eliminate U.S. funding for international family planning programs, restrict a woman's right to choose, and deny youth access to life-saving sexual health education. The March for Women's Lives advocates for women's rights to health care, access to family planning services, and the right to make decisions about their own bodies -- all of which help to save women's lives and protect the environment." Lamm and his insurgency do not dispute the Sierra Club's current population campaign. In his e-mail to me, Lamm said, "I believe that it is necessary to stabilize population world wide and in the U.S. The biggest issue facing humanity is sustainability. How do we leave a decent planet for our children and grandchildren?"

But some in the Sierra Club think that racism lurks behind Lamm's advocacy of sustainability. The Sierra Club's executive director, Carl Pope, according to the New York Times, said Lamm's supporters were "in bed with racists." Jennifer Ferenstein told me that while she does not think Lamm or any of the anti-immigration candidates for the board are racist, "there is a clear sense that there's a heightened outside interest in our election, and that different groups with very, very different agendas than what the Sierra Club has traditionally had, have some racial motivation in being interested in our election."

Suspicion about Lamm and other anti-immigration candidates is exacerbated by the fact that they have only recently joined the Sierra Club -- in order, it seems, to run for the board. Lamm himself, though a member in the 1950s and '60s, did not rejoin the club until last November. Too, Lamm has written against immigration not only from the environmental prospective, but from its effects on national security and the availability of jobs and good wages for American citizens. Is Lamm's chief concern immigration and not environmental protection? "Both. Environmental." Lamm told me. "But I believe the first line of defense against terrorism is the border."

The Sierra Club is not the only environmental organization witnessing an increasing interest in immigration control. "It's not completely respectable yet, but it's respectable enough that people talk about it pretty openly," said Robert Waldrop, who hosts a well-known website on Catholic social teaching, www.justpeace.org. No stranger to the environmental movement, Waldrop is a member of the Sierra Club ("the local Sierra Club pays for me to have a membership," he said). "I subscribe to some Green Party listserves and some environmental listserves," said Waldrop, "and [immigration control talk] is pretty prominent there. I moderate this 'Running on Empty' group that has about 1500 subscribers -- we've added like a thousand subscribers in the last three months. There's a lot of sentiment among people who are concerned about oil depletion to limit immigration to the United States because of the energy issues and things like that."

But though a member of the Sierra Club, Waldrop (who also runs the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker in Oklahoma City) is not sympathetic to population control. Among environmentalists, he said, "there may be a realization that we are living beyond our means, and that for people everywhere to have a just lifestyle, the rich and powerful are going to have to live a little lower on the hog. The easiest thing is to do something about the additional people rather than the exploitation and unjust lifestyles."

For Waldrop, threats to environmental sustainability arise mostly from "the amount of resources that we consume in the wealthy countries; and then it's also a matter of unjust international structures that basically function to centralize wealth, to take it from the majority of people and give to those with access to political power here and elsewhere."

Waldrop, here, echoes the words of Pope John Paul II in his address for the World Day of Peace in 1990. "It must be said that the proper ecological balance will not be found without directly addressing the structural causes of poverty that exist throughout the world," said John Paul. "Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these attitudes cause. Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a few."

Exploitation of the poor in developing countries also leads to the problem of immigration, according to Mark Zwick of Casa Juan Diego in Houston, a Catholic Worker house dedicated to helping undocumented immigrants find housing and work. "The root causes of immigration are poor wages and the maquiladora system [a system of foreign-owned industries in developing countries], so we need to try to rectify that," said Zwick. He used Honduras as an example, where, a few years ago, said Zwick, companies were paying 14 cents an hour. "If they raised that up to 20 some cents an hour, they could live in Honduras, whereas at the rate of 14 cents an hour they couldn't live. So I'm saying that a better investment of the energy of the members of the Sierra Club would be to convince companies to elevate the wages ever so small in comparison to what we receive [in the United States]. That's a very efficient way to inhibit immigration."

Free trade agreements, said Zwick, have had a dire effect on the economies of Latin American countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement, he said, "pretty much opened up the gates of Mexico to our crops and our produce and ran the small farmer out of business in Mexico." And matters will only grow worse. "Even more tragic," he said, "is that jobs are moving out of Mexico to China because they can make things cheaper and allow stores like Walmart to compete better in terms of the market price." In China, said Zwick, companies can get away with paying workers 67 cents a day. The situation, said Zwick, is "full of ironies."

And one more irony (and maybe one less dichotomy) -- the economic policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund embrace goals the Sierra Club supports while promoting the globalizing economic policies it condemns -- policies that exacerbate the problem of immigration, which the likes of Richard Lamm seek to limit. "The World Bank and International Monetary Fund," said Zwick, "undercut the economy [of developing nations] so much, with the loans and the interest on the loans, and have made life very difficult for them. At the same time, they have put restrictions on governments getting the money, and that is the development of family planning." *

SIDEBAR

LESS BY ONE-HALF A CHILD

Under-, not over, population, may be the threat of the future, according to a report issued by the United States Census Bureau. According to the March 22 report, "Global Population Profile 2002," the number of people (74 million) added to world population in 2002 was significantly lower than the 87 million added in 1989-90. What's more, the world population growth rate in 2002 was 1.2 percent, down from the 1963-64 birth rate of 2.2 percent. The bureau's brief states that its "projections show this slow-down in population growth continuing into the foreseeable future. Census Bureau projections suggest that the level of fertility for the world as a whole will drop below replacement level before 2050."

The brief further states that "in 1990 the world's women, on average, were giving birth to 3.3 children over their lifetimes. By 2002 the average was 2.6 -- less than one-half of a child more than the level needed to assure the replacement of the population." According to a March 24 LifeNews.com report, the United Nations Population Division in December 2003 projected that world population would decrease from its current 6.3 billion to 2.3 billion by 2300.

What is the cause for declining worldwide population decline? The U.S. Census Bureau ascribed it to the AIDS epidemic and lower fertility rates, caused, in part, by increased contraceptive use.

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