Re: NANFA-- bumper sticker

Bruce Stallsmith (fundulus_at_hotmail.com)
Wed, 01 Mar 2000 14:05:44 EST

U.S. population is on the rise, at a rate of about 0.8%/year, mostly because
of immigration, legal & illegal. Without immigration it would still rise at
about 0.2%/year because of twists in our ethnic mix (i.e., those who have
recently immigrated here tend to have a higher birth rate than native-born
Americans). Countries like Italy, Hungary and Russia are losing population
because of a sharp drop in the birth rate, and in Russia average life
expectancy is dropping as people drink themselves to death (not even
including heightened exposure to radiation, general air pollution, and a
slew of poorly handled industrial toxins).

American population is usually modeled to stabilize sometime midcentury,
maybe around 280-290 million compared to the current 260+ million.

I personally feel of two minds about American population; on the one hand I
think we'd be better off with under 100 million, and on the other I think
much of recent immigration has helped the country in some ways. I have a
deep abiding fear that 6 billion people on the planet is too much, and
something will have to give (such as viable ecosystems).

We've all seen development spread in ways that make us cringe. In the past
decade I've seen housing spread across the island of Nantucket like a
plague, so that seasonal population in the summer approaches 50,000 compared
to a winter population of 7,000. People are willing to spend hundreds of
thousands of dollars on vacation houses there, an unfortunate side effect of
the bull market on Wall Street. Everyone wants to be able to stay there in
luxury, but almost everyone also wants the island to remain as open and
pristine as it was 40 years ago. It don't work that way, of course.

And I still try to be an optimist.

--Bruce Stallsmith
Huntsville, AL

>Actually, the population of the United States...according to the last
>figures I was given in Geography class...is on the decline. So are those
>in many of the modern "western" nations. Your so-called "third
>world" areas are those experiencing explosive and environmentally lethal
>population growth.
>
>Luke

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