Woke Dems and Enviros Scoff at Original Earth Day Concern: Population Growth

The contemporary "woke" environmentalist establishment -- which is closely allied with the Democratic Party and its progressive goals and narratives -- would be unrecognizable to the activists who founded the green movement a half-century ago.

At the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, activists' top priority was stabilizing U.S. and global population growth. Environmentalists and scientists alike recognized that a constantly growing population would mean more and more consumption and pollution.

Earth Day's founder, liberal U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), spoke out vigorously and frequently against unsustainable population growth until his dying day in 2005. And his concerns were broadly shared by leaders in both parties. President Nixon -- who also created the EPA -- established a bipartisan national Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, chaired by John D. Rockefeller III, which issued its findings in 1972. The commission urged the U.S. government to curb population growth, embrace a stable population, and not increase immigration levels -- which were then running about one-third of what they are today -- all for primarily environmental reasons.

This broad bipartisan consensus on population growth and the environment persisted until about the mid-nineties. A quarter-century ago, inspired by the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development ("Earth Summit") in Rio de Janeiro, President Clinton established a Council on Sustainable Development.

In 1996, that Council's Task Force on Population and Consumption, co-chaired by former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO), concluded that: "reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stabilization and the drive toward sustainability."

A quarter-century on, while Democrats and environmentalists still give lip service to sustainability, they largely ignore or deny that human population growth -- which of course affects the quantity of energy used and carbon emitted -- has anything to do with climate change or America's disappearing open spaces.