Population – Population Matters-USA

Environmental groups are only treating the symptoms of overpopulation

Several years ago a friend asked if I would be interested in helping start a population interest group in what became the Sierra Club’s SW Colorado Group. Today the Group is going strong, including leading discussions about possible new mining in the La Plata mountains, learning about the pros and cons of beavers and introducing a local organization that advocates for giving legal status to features of nature.

I remember when the national Sierra Club (SC) had a large, energetic Population Issues Committee. There was an active chat group where we traded information back and forth. Before then, SC published Anne and Paul Ehrlich’s classic book The Population Bomb. Past SC president, Carl Pope, used the term “most overpopulated nation” to describe the USA, acknowledging the huge footprint Americans leave on the environment.

What happened that the SC no longer seems concerned about human population? Journalist and Durango native, Kathleene Parker, may have part of the answer. She wrote that a 2004 Los Angeles Times article gave a clue to this change in policy.

At the end of the 1990s there was a tug-of-war in the SC’s board. People such as Dave Foreman pushed for a strong policy to limit immigration and population growth. Other members had a laisse faire attitude; they won the dispute. They were perhaps helped by a rich donor, David Gelbaum, who gave over $100 million to the SC. He wrote: “…that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

Personally, I am ambivalent about immigration, but passionate about slowing population growth voluntarily.

The current national SC Population Policy starts off stating: “The Sierra Club is a pro-choice organization that endorses comprehensive, voluntary reproductive health care for all. Sexual and reproductive health and rights are inalienable human rights that should be guaranteed for all people with no ulterior motive.”

This sounds pretty good. However, it further states: “This includes policies and positions made in the name of preventing ‘overpopulation’ by ideas and means that include, but are not limited to: zero-growth, population stabilization, family planning as climate mitigation, or promoting women’s empowerment or girls’ education as an indirect means to limit population growth.”

To me, this seems like an attempt to be politically correct by ignoring the basic cause of all the environmental problems that the SC tries to deal with. It is too late to “prevent” overpopulation; overpopulation is already attacking the integrity of our planet, our life support system. Three billion people, more or less, is the maximum human population that can be sustained without causing degradation of our environment. We are approaching 3 times that number!

In the USA we are consuming much more than is sustainable. Yes, consumption is a major factor; people often bring it up. I am tempted to ask these advocates of reduced consumption if their carbon footprint is 2 tons or less; this is what is considered to be sustainable. (The average carbon footprint of people in the US is 16 tons!) I know few people who are trying to consume less. However, I have met hundreds—no, thousands—of people who wish to have control over their family size. Slowing population growth is, indeed, the “low hanging fruit.”

The word “population” seems to be anathema to many people, perhaps because it goes against the biblical admonition “be fruitful and multiply”—and all the religious hang-ups about pronatalism and sexuality. Perhaps it brings up racial and genocidal disasters of the distant past—and also recent and near. We need to get over it and face up to the fact that “we have met the enemy and he is us”. And the more of us, the worse things will get.

©Richard Grossman MD, 2025

British family with 21 children, and the mother pregnant

Elon Musk has stated “…population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Musk is doing his part to prevent collapse—he’s fathered 14 children with multiple women.

Musk is concerned because people are having smaller families and that we’re living longer. Apparently, he worries that there will not be enough workforce to do all the labor that society needs to continue. My interpretation is that he fears that the supply of cheap labor will diminish.

This is reminiscent of the mudsill theory. The “mudsill” is the lowest part of a building, and also refers to the lowest class of people in a society. It is the belief that there always has been, and must be, an underclass to work for the upper classes. This theory was developed by a South Carolina state senator in 1858 as an effort to justify slavery. I fear that Musk and many politicians live in a billionaire’s bubble, and that they believe that the rest of us are needed to support them. They are unaware of the importance of the natural world, let alone the needs and wishes of normal people.

A new magazine for women, Evie, stresses classical femininity vs. feminism. Along with Evie you can get an app “28 Cycle, Period, Wellness” which women can use to predict ovulation—but shouldn’t. It is unreliable at predicting a woman’s fertile time, and should only be used with another contraceptive method. However, Evie’s originators also push “Birth Control Detox”, which contains several expensive herbs. They want you to fear hormonal birth control. I wonder how many subscribers to Evie who use “28” end up with unintended pregnancies.

Much that women have to control their fertility is being taken away. There are many barriers now, including pressure to have more children. They distrust contraception (even though it’s much safer than childbearing). Furthermore, access to safe abortion care is absent in many states—and in La Plata County.

Durango is not immune from these pressures. Planned Parenthood has closed the clinic where I worked for 40 years. A person can get telemedicine services elsewhere and receive the abortion medication by mail. For later or procedural abortions, the nearest clinic is a 4+ hour drive.

In addition to performing abortions for unintended pregnancies, (including some that resulted from rape or incest), PP offered many other reproductive health services for women and men. These included: diagnosis and treatment of infections, prescribing birth control and cancer screening such as Pap smears. All these medical services were discounted in price or free, depending on a person’s ability to pay.

I remember Claire, an older woman, whom I met at PP. She had had a Pap suspicious for cancer and thought she couldn’t pay for a private doctor. At my office I did a procedure at no charge that showed that she had an unusual type of cancer. She had radical surgery in Denver and was cured. Without her Pap at PP she would have died from the cancer.

One of the best times for a woman to start birth control is in the hospital, after giving birth. In addition to placing an IUD postpartum, it is easy to do a tubal ligation after birth by cesarean, if that is what a woman wants. Both of these are not possible at Mercy Hospital because of the pronatalist Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.

Although Colorado is a safe haven for abortion care, La Plata County doesn’t reflect that. In addition, there is increasing social pressure to have children. Perhaps the very worst is that politics, medical care and religion have gotten mixed up, as opposed to the spirit of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” Incidentally, the Bill of Rights says nothing against the president establishing a religion.