The Small Town Project

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage. — Jacques Cousteau

Image source: The Sustainable Scale Project

Population growth is a big problem. Billions big. The U.N. projects about a 40% increase in world population, from 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion, in the next 45 years. (Figures as of February, ‘05) This, when by most authoritative accounts we’ve already exceeded the population size our planet can sustain for the long term (The U.S. shot past its own carrying capacity some time ago), and are struggling with the most serious environmental problems in human history. (Think loss of the Amazon rain forest, climate change, the Three Gorges Dam of the Yangtze River in China, the rupturing of the ozone layer, huge “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico, and a thousand times the normal level of species loss to name just a few.)

A local community connects to and interacts reciprocally with the larger region, country, and the world in which it exists. While our local population growth is in some measure a result of simple shifts of population from one area or town to another, it is also in part a reflection of national growth. And like the environmental degradation caused by national population growth, our own growth carries with it inevitable environmental consequences. To understand the effects of population growth on one level, we must examine them on other levels as well.

Our actions locally can accommodate population growth, both here and more broadly — or not. In light of the current state of our natural environment and its link with population growth, we should choose not to.

With that in mind I recommend an article on BBC News by Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey. The topic of overpopulation, Rapley tells us, is “So controversial… that it has become the ‘Cinderella’ of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private.”

Indeed, though the topic of overpopulation received a great deal of press in the ’70s, many groups, concerned about the thorny moral and political questions it raises, shied away from it in subsequent decades. Now, my impression is that its undeniable environmental impact is forcing it back into the open, and groups such as the Sierra Club are again taking the plunge and talking about it.

And discuss it we must. Rapley makes clear that any efforts to solve our environmental problems will have at best limited success if we do not also take decisive action to deal with the problem of population growth.

Below is a recent letter to the editor of the Denver newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. It’s from Dave Gardner of Save the Springs in Colorado Springs. It’s an excellent response to the typical growth industry rhetoric, this time concerning “listless” population growth. It reminds me of our recent mayor’s comments to the Sun that Mount Vernon had been “stagnant” until he began pushing for residential development, leading to today’s “vibrant housing market” giving us “the kind of growth we need.”

I recommend Save the Springs as a great informational resource for those interested in pursuing further a rational approach to growth.

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DEPENDING ON POPULATION GROWTH FOR PROSPERITY IS A DEAD-END

This is a letter I sent to the Rocky Mountain News in response to a story about Colorado population statistics. The first paragraph was published in the News on January 2. I thought you might like to read it in its entirety. Feel free to pass it on to anyone who could benefit from some critical thought about population growth and economic development.

In his story about population growth (Colorado ranks 11th in growth, 12/22/05), reporter John Aguilar did our citizens a disservice by labeling our state’s most recent 1.4% annual growth rate as “another year of listless population growth.” [EMPHASIS ADDED] Give Mr. Aguilar a calculator, please! If our population growth were to remain at this listless level (its expected to rise), our state’s population would double to over 9 million by 2055, and would hit 18 million around the turn of the century. A more likely scenario? This doubling will happen in just 38 years if we keep up the average growth rate of the past five years. That would mean 37 million people in the state of Colorado by 2119, and 74.5 million just 38 years later. That will require us to do much more than suck Lake Powell dry. We cannot build enough dams or seed enough clouds to supply water to that population. This listless rate of population growth is taking us nowhere we want to go!

An interesting quote in the story came from state demographer Elizabeth Garner: “There just haven’t been the jobs to bring people here. This underscores the simple truth that we cannot create or recruit jobs in a vacuum. If we steal jobs from other states, we are stealing residents from those states, too. People will move to where the jobs are. So job recruiting and creation is actually causing our state’s population to swell. We should be careful what we wish for. If we are to act responsibly toward the future of our children and grandchildren, we should base our prosperity on more innovative means of economic development. Traditional, archaic economic development will ultimately cost our state billions and billions of dollars due to its impact as a population-growth machine on our natural resources, environment and infrastructure.

Dave Gardner
Founder & Chair, SaveTheSprings

A sustainable approach to our environment & quality of life - for current & future generations
Visit us at www.savethesprings.org

Edwin Stennett’s book — important reading. Growth Education Movement

Not long ago we examined an important Brookings Institution paper by Paul Gottlieb titled Growth Without Growth. Gottlieb shows convincingly that population growth is in no way necessary for a U.S. city to see per-capita income growth. His findings go a long way toward debunking the myth that population growth is necessary for per-capita economic wellbeing.

Edwin Stennett expands on Gottlieb’s finding in In Growth We Trust. This book is a key work on the relationship between sprawl and population growth. I recommend it to anyone serious about studying the issues covered on the Small Town Project.

In it, Stennett reviews the Growth Without Growth paper, then looks at the same question on the level of nations. (pp 61-62) He examines the relationship between rate of population growth and rate of growth of per-capita gross domestic product (as percentages per year) for the United States and 15 western European countries. [1] (The latter data came from U.S. Census Bureau tables.) Using the time span from 1970 to 1998, he finds no significant correlation between the two variables in question. [2] His scattergram shows the individual countries spread essentially randomly around an almost horizontal trendline. Notably, the United States shows by far the most population growth among the 16 countries, yet is only about average in per-capita gross domestic product growth. This is a strong indication that population growth is simply not an important factor in creating or explaining a country’s per-capita economic health. (To be consistent with our series exposing the myths of growth, we can label as “myth #5″ the notion that a country does need such growth.)
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2/22/06 - Note: The article below links to a previous post which I would urge you to read for background information. We can’t predict with certainty how much population growth MV will experience in the coming years, but we know it is well established that, up to a point, human populations tend to grow exponentially. If the rate of MV’s growth continues as it has, or increases (I’ve heard Mike Beimer and other city officials quote a historic rate of 1.5% per year — about right over the last 14 years, while the Mount Vernon Development Corporation anticipates about a 5% annual growth rate.) it will, in time, be markedly greater than most would expect without doing the proper math. No matter the growth rate though, we are still left with the fact that, for the sake of profit, the growth industry has flatly lied to us about the supposed benefits of growth. This is more than clear if you look at the articles here on growth myths. Given that, rather than appease such an industry, for no benefit to anyone other than the industry’s members, I would submit that MV should take a hard, perhaps painful look at the portion of its Comprehensive Plan which advocates population growth as though we “need” it. It may well be that even the bright, informed, and well meaning folks who created the plan, publishing it in 1995, were influenced (as nearly all of us were at the time) by the pervasive growth machine propaganda which tells us we “need” growth. Rest assured, that is the portion of the Plan the growth machine loves to see. Yet as I’ve shown here repeatedly, we are now in an age when, for a variety of reasons, what we need is an end to growth. Whatever the rate of growth, it is completely unnecessary, and is in fact harmful. It is equally unnecessary to let it continue just so a few members of the growth industry can make a great deal of money regardless of the effect on the town, its surrounding natural environment, and the world.

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I promise a “big picture” essay soon. In the meantime, I want to cover one or two prerequisite details and some random items. Let’s start with this:

Some city officials will tell you Mount Vernon’s population has been growing at about a 1.5% rate per year. That may be true. The figure is of course based, though, on past years. (Note that even at a 1.5% growth rate, the math of exponential growth tells us that Mount Vernon’s population would more than triple in 74 years, or about one lifetime.)

Obviously the successful sales of recent and planned developments such as the Wolfe and Stonebrook subdivisions suggest an increasing growth rate. If it goes as planned, Stonebrook alone will bring about 300 new homes, or about 1,000 new residents. The Mount Vernon Development Corporation also anticipates a faster growth rate:

In Mount Vernon, new home construction ensures an expansion of our current population base of 3,800 by nearly 1,050 people in fewer than five years. That estimated figure is over a 25% jump in population!

That jump represents about a 5% annual growth rate. That’s certainly a reasonable estimate considering Stonebrook’s 1,000 added residents as well as the likelihood that, without resistance, other developments will go up soon. But 5% doesn’t sound particularly remarkable, does it? Well, that’s only because we humans lack an intuitive sense of the exponential growth function. To put it in perspective, consider that at that 5% growth rate, assuming a current population of 4,000 (I’ve seen higher estimates, and surely the Chamber’s 3,800 is a bit low.), Mount Vernon’s population will more than quadruple in just 29 years. In the course of 75 years, about one lifetime, a 5% growth rate will create a Mount Vernon population of over 155,000!

We know that any residential growth here is unnecessary and makes no sense as a long term strategy for our towns. Now we know, as well, that projected growth rates, from the quoted 1.5% to the more plausible 5%, mean much more population growth than most of us would guess from the percentage figures alone. Populations tend to grow exponentially, and we have to do the math to see just how much growth that really means.

It’s time on the Small Town Project to take a step back to look at the “big picture,” at how our local growth issues connect with larger scale issues concerning the environment, population growth, and sustainability. I plan to post something soon which looks at those connections, but as a starter, perhaps it’s worth thinking for a moment about this quote from Albert Bartlett, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Colorado, and recipient of the first George Gamow Memorial Lecture Award for his “most significant contribution to the public’s understanding of science.”:

THE GREAT CHALLENGE

Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?

Three stages in the growth of sprawl:

Novak: An early stage of development in a future tract of sprawl.

Stonebrook: A development at a slightly more advanced stage of growth.

Just a bit of exponential growth goes a long way. Typical, well developed sprawl hints at a possible future for our area. Image source: nativeecosystems.org/Jacob Smith and LightHawk

We’ll conclude here our three part series on the myth that “the new developments pay for the old developments.” In Part I we exposed the unwitting admission the growth machine makes in asserting this myth. They can’t spread this notion without admitting that another of their assertions, “Residential development brings in needed revenues,” is untrue. In Part II we demonstrated that the notion, “the new developments pay for the old ones” is indeed a myth, another attempt on the part of the growth industry to bamboozle us so that they might destroy our open spaces and small towns in pursuit of profit. Now we’ll look at what this myth implies about the attitude toward our future held by those who spread the myth.
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