Sorry to take so long to respond - I've been out of town. Anyway, to what you said, Gene:
Whether our own population has stabilized (which is true) is also immaterial because it's the way choose to live as a nation and people are not going to give up their lifestyle in America.
I absolutely agree with you on this. The way we choose to live is paramount, and we are, as you said, a nation of waste. Until we live within lesser means, we will need a continually growing economy to sustain our extravagance, and that probably means a growing population. But these attitudes can change. Europe, for example, has been long known for its opulence, yet has learned to deal with a higher population density by being more environmentally aware. We could do the same, although what I like to refer to as our "cowboy mentality" in the U.S. will make that harder than it has been for Europe. We Americans don't like people telling us what to do, do we?
That said, I think we are better about these things than we used to be. Your points about many places worsening is well taken. But many have improved as well. We've cleaned up a lot of our environmental blunders from the past with initiatives such as the Superfund project (with a pound of cure obviously still not better than an ounce of prevention, but still better than leaving things trashed). Grassroots efforts have burgeoned as well, with organizations such as TU cleaning up a lot of water. Our clean-up does not mean those ecosystems will return to their virgin states, but their improvement is noteworthy. While I certainly won't ever profess to know more about this than you do, Gene, I don't think I'd be going out on a limb by saying that many waterways and watersheds are better now than they were 50 years ago. Now, whether we're gaining or losing ground I don't know - you seem to think we're losing it. And I have no way of arguing against that except to say that I think there's room for optimism regardless.
Not only are we cleaning up a lot of our worst messes, but we're doing a much better job of controlling what ends up in our environment. We've eliminated phosphates from our detergents, lead from our paint, DDT from our sprays, carcinogens from countless products, and on and on. We have certainly applied new understanding of the health impacts of chemicals to environmental improvements. Recently I asked a colleague of mine who's very knowledgeable in the chemistry of fuels and is a passionate environmentalist why electricity is so expensive relative to the coal from which it's made. He mentioned a few obvious reasons having to do with the inefficiencies associated with generating and distributing electricity, and then added - "Do you have any idea how expensive the scrubbers we're using to treat coal emissions are these days?" With that he rolled his eyes and said, "It's incredible how much cleaner our emissions are these days... but it's not cheap." So we ARE doing better on a LOT of things, even if we haven't reduced our footprint to zero.
Another huge improvement is a philosophical one: Environmentalism, long regarded a wacko left-wing idea, is now quite mainstream. The degree of environmental awareness of my high-school students, for example, is far greater than mine was in the '80s as a high-school student. Their efforts may be a bit misguided (they think recycling everything is important but using energy extravagantly is normal and unavoidable), but they have their hearts in the right place. The redneck community, traditionally the worst environmentalists, I find becoming passionate about biofuels because they impact both automobiles and farming, two things they care a lot about. Whether biofuels are a worthy investment or not, the point is that people you'd never expect to care about them are beginning to care about them. So each generation is improving in its environmental awareness, I think.
They now want a constant supply of cheap labor in this country to continue the service sector which is our only industry and thus the open borders concept as espoused by the Wall Street Journal.
We have become more of a service economy, not just in low-end jobs but in our entire economy. Our energy expenditure per dollar of GDP has gone down drastically in the past 3+ decades, and it is projected to continue to fall. When I asked a colleague of mine who teaches economics why that decrease has become so dramatic since the mid-90s, he replied with one word: "NAFTA." While shipping our production overseas is doing little for blue-collar workers in America, we are also incurring fewer environmental costs associated with manufacturing. I'm not saying this is an ideal situation (it's certainly a dirty trick to send your polluting endeavors elsewhere), but it is better for our environment here in the U.S. And our economy still grows, by the way, even as we produce fewer products - weird and unsettling but true.
If we choose to live in small homes and use small cars like they do in Japan would that help? Maybe--- but look around you, we aren't doing that and we never will.
No, our homes aren't as small as they are elsewhere, but they are smallER than they were in the past and are much more energy-efficient, which are good steps. Our residential energy costs climb slower than those in any other sector. Widespread implementation of low-energy lightbulbs make the future look... umm... better. While lightbulbs are not going to solve all of our problems, to be sure, it is actually possible that, with their widespread use, U.S. residential energy costs could actually begin to decline in spite of population increases.
According to the Right Wing the world is not overpopulated because they would like to see everything in concrete and cement (and I'm not referring to you in this group). Because they basically despise most of the natural world and see it as something to be conquered.
No offense taken. I really don't think this is true of very much of the Right Wing, though - perhaps this mindset is limited to those with great power and wealth, which make up the very small percentage of the Right Wing who fund most of the politicians. A more accurate statement might be, "The few people who pick which Republican candidates will get the funding necessary to make them electable would like to see everything in concrete and cement." Take outdoorsmen, for example. Most outdoorsmen are Republicans because Republicans defend the Second Amendment with great zeal. They are not Republicans because they want to see the world in concrete. In fact, they are more likely to be landowners who want to see their farms and forests preserved. But when it feels to them like the fruity liberals want to take away their guns, send social workers to their doors to tell them they can't hit their children, tell them what they can and can't do on with their own land, and even serve them notice that the liberal majority in the Supreme Court has given the government the right to make them sell their property to build strip malls... well, they get understandably itchy with their trigger fingers. These issues are complicated, but many card-carrying Republicans are just Libertarians of a different sort - they defend their rights as zealously as anyone on the opposite side of the spectrum does, and they feel it's their right to do as they please with what's theirs. I'm not saying they're right to think this way, I'm just explaining why someone who cares about the environment might end up voting for a wilderness-raping oilman.
As far as civil engineers go I wouldn't put too much faith in anything they say. These were the guys in organic chemistry who were always trying to blow up the lab (I wish I could say I was kidding on this but I'm not).
What?! A whole field of scientists with a common bias?! That's preposterous.
My point here was just that it is easy for people living in the 'burbs to point a judgmental finger at the cities, when their own environmental impact could actually be much greater than your average urban resident's, just that it's not as noticeable because it's not added to the impacts of millions of others. I mentioned the reduced energy costs when many people live in the same building, but urbanites also own fewer cars, use less land (and less ChemLawn!), use more public transportation (which gets more efficient the larger the population density), live closer to shipping and manufacturing centers... there are many ways their environmental impact is lower. Urbanites also live with a greater appreciation for their waste because its effects are magnified before their eyes on a daily basis - they are better connected to their impact than those in less densely populated areas are. It's a lot easier to ignore one plastic bottle in a ditch than it is to ignore two hundred plastic bottles clogging a street drain.
Please do not misunderstand - I'm not saying that overpopulation is not a problem. I'm just saying that there are ways we can all live here and there are enough reasons to be optimistic. It's dangerous to say that there are "just too many people," because it causes us to despair rather than find solutions and causes us to view people as liabilities rather than as... well, as people. No one is saying environmentalists want to kill others to lower the population (well, unless one were to decide to bring up the 'A' word), but maybe those who feel so passionately that the world is overpopulated wouldn't mind offering themselves as the first participants in a brave new Population Downsizing Project? After all, if the world would have been better off without my having existed at all, then why am I so selfishly continuing to live my life at all? Perhaps that's too drastic, though. Rather than snuff it, I suppose I could always join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and at least save the world from my unwanted offspring so I feel better about myself while I continue to selfishly live my own life. No, it's true - the VHEMT exists. Well, ummm... I thought it existed - now I can't get their website to load. Hmmm... maybe we're making some headway after all, Gene.
-Shawn