And Then There Were 300 Million
by Giulianna LamannaThis article was posted on October 17, 2006, at exactly 7:46 a.m. ET—the same time that America’s 300 millionth baby was born. Our country joined the ranks of India and China as one of the few countries (and the only first world one) to have 300 million residents or more. For us “unreconstructed Malthusians“1 who fail to see how overpopulation is a “cause for celebration,” as “[t]he United States is a dynamic, prosperous, thriving society and growth is necessary to keep it that way,” environmental concerns are inevitable.
Every 7 seconds in America, someone is born. Every 13 seconds in America, someone dies. Every 31 seconds in America, a new immigrant arrives. The result? America’s population is growing at a rate of one person every 11 seconds—and you can even watch it happen. The United States’ population, like the world’s population, has followed a classic exponential growth curve:
Each 100 million has been added more quickly than the last. It took the United States more than 100 years to reach its first 100 million in 1915. After another 52 years, it reached 200 million in 1967. Less than 40 years later, it is set to hit the 300-million mark. Within another 37 years, we are projected to pass 400 million.2
But overpopulation is just part of the problem. It’s not just that there are too many people in America; it’s also that there are too many people living like Americans.
In many ways, Americans have mitigated the impact of their increasing presence on the land. Since reaching the 200 million mark back in 1967, they have cut emissions of major air pollutants, banned certain harmful pesticides, and overseen the rebound of several endangered species. Despite using more resources and creating more waste, they’ve become more energy efficient.
The danger, experts say, is that the US may simply have postponed the day of reckoning. Major environmental problems remain, and some are getting worse - all of them in one way or another connected to US population growth, which is expected to hit 400 million around midcentury. Some experts put the average American’s “ecological footprint”—the amount of land and water needed to support an individual and absorb his or her waste—at 24 acres. By that calculation, the long-term “carrying capacity” of the US would sustain less than half of the nation’s current population.
“The US is the only industrialized nation in the world experiencing significant population growth,” says Vicky Markham, of the Center for Environment and Population, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization in New Canaan, Conn. “That, combined with America’s high rates of resource consumption, results in the largest … environmental impact [of any nation] in the world.”3
If that wasn’t enough, check out this graph. It seriously looks like the U.S. is giving the world the middle finger. Which, come to think of it, isn’t too far off-base.
So who is this baby? Since this article wasn’t actually written at 7:46 a.m., it’ll have to just review the educated guesses. Demographer William Frey predicted that “it’s going to be a Latino baby boy, born in Los Angeles to a Mexican immigrant mother.” His reasoning, of course, was based on statistics: “about half of U.S. population growth is due to Hispanics, the biggest gains in the Hispanic population are in Los Angeles, more boys are born than girls and the U.S. population is growing more due to natural increase than through immigration.”
However, it isn’t always predictable, as Robert Woo, the 200 millionth American, can attest to: “The demographers will tell you I clearly didn’t fit the statistics of what … the 200 millionth should have been. … It’s such a diverse country that it would be impossible to find a typical or average state, town or neighborhood that would represent the country—trying to identify an individual would be just impossible.” Frey agrees: “In theory, it could be anybody who crosses a border, who comes off a plane as a new immigrant or is born anywhere in the United States but if you have to put the odds on high probability, I would say my guess is pretty good.”
Whoever it will be, Gerber is ready to pounce on the kid with a massive advertising campaign, complete with a “300 millionth American sweepstakes.” My bet is that, boy or girl, the CEOs are all wishing for a pretty, photogenic one. I have no doubt that any number of John Gibson worshippers are wishing for a white one—a Hispanic child would be too ominous a vision of the future. This event, after all, is occurring under the cloud of the recent immigration debate, and many closeted and not-so-closeted racists have been expressing displeasure at the changing demographics of America.
So let me be the first anarcho-primitivist blogger from Pittsburgh (take THAT, Kevin Tucker!) to welcome the 300 millionth American, and apologize for the shitty world you’re being born into. Seriously, it sucks a lot of ass.
Our world doesn’t mean to be shitty, it’s just drawn that way.
Comment by Rory — 17 October 2006 @ 10:14 AM
Isn’t racism part and parcel of tribalism? What is wrong with feeling a strong sense of kinship with those that look the same as you and don’t have stupid religious rites? Is there an evolutionary explanation for the reflex of disgust? the natural recoil one gets were they to see a family member’s head split open by an axe, or the sense of built in revulsion we have at a sudden glimpse of a maggot ridden corpse? i posit that things like this are built in so we do not eat bad meat or something like that. Anyway I am not racist in the cultural sense of holding a belief that whites are genetically superior to any other human, but I will say if I could live in a band/tribe in a non civilized fantasy like situation, i’d certainly want all the others to be white like me. The reason being I am not sexually attracted to, well excluding blacks, my ex girlfriend was half black, i am not attracted to asian faces, and i find certain europeans with dark circles under their eyes ugly, and I don’t like looking at indian people, simple as that, I don’t think I shouldn’t have to compete in the job market with all races, i am not in the least disgusted with all having a vote in government, but after all this, I would prefer to simply trade and engage in diplomacy with other races, I do not want a ‘debate’ about wearing the muslim veil to be part of my local community, i do not want any religious people anywhere near me, and I do not wish to told that diversity is to be valued above what i consider to be my brethren and kind, if i was blind, i guess it would be different, but i would still want to only hear accents that i have when i go to the store, when i am watching the news i would be prepared of course to take an interest in all the cultures and peoples, from a distance, and in travel, in the end i think this is all natural the way i feel, and i must stress this is just my preference, the odd tourist at the store speaking a language which sounds obtuse and coarse and breaks my quiet enjoyment of my own accustomed environment would be ok, but when I commit the crime of staying living in my place of birth, and slowly i become a minority, that tells me that my tribe, my kind, has not stood up for itselft and held its territory, or it tells me that i should have been born into a situation where everyone i knew moved around and it did not matter where we were we were still together that is all that mattered, anyway that would be better for avoiding radon indoor air pollution anyway wouldnt it but i digress what i am trying to say is i do not harbor race hate, just quiet comfort and enjoyment of the environment i prefer to move in and was raised in, i am very very interested in the global community, but not in anything in between, when it is time to engage with the other tribes it is time to engage, and messengers and representatives would be sent, and scholarship at a distance is quite interesting and fulfilling too, but i do not in the slightest wish to see the gradual whittling away of the tiny bit of group identity i was born into and have grown up with, with every passing year in the “pluralistic diverse tolerant” model, my world look more and more alien to what have been used to and more importantly comfortable with, and less importantly what i consider aesthetically pleasing, i care if world powers are clashing, if endocrine disruptors are poisoning the entire food chain and making humanity sterile in some sick chemical castration scenario, i care that we need mechanisms to reach in and force other countries not fuck the environment and more importantly the genome, i care if some new groundbreaking research is going on in japan, i care if a sarin gas attack in a subway occured, only because that is an interesting weapon, and a bold attack, but i could not give a shit about some meulling arab fat widow screaming to the sky of her 18th son’s pine box in gaza, as i know it is thier own fucking fault for being a society of deluded insane religious fucks, and I see no value in any life that revolves around being a slave to a god that doesn’t exist apart from to till the soil that stocks my supermarket, and even then it is only of marginal use, as a matter of fact I fucking hate society and fucking expectations on me to succeed in this world by engaging with thousands of people i don’t give a fuck about, i would go and farm a plot in the mountains if my friends and family were all dead and there was no one to judge me for dropping out of college and not spending decades in a cubicle researching what i find very interesting, but evoltionarily know is so trivial, anyway i would also like to posit the idea of dolphins and bonobos raping eachother, i can tell you that if I was living 300,000 years ago, and I was out hunting, and some piece of ass gave my naked ape ass a boner, i’d fucking take what was mine for the taking as a stronger being, the only natural love is for parents and siblings, the idea of romantic love is totally a cultural construct and no one wants to have to suck up to your partners fucking parents or impress them or even give a fuck anyway i digress again, thought is your enemy, the moment you repeat that that is not yours you have become the follower of someone, I can tell you it is only natural when you know the reality of the threat to my comfort in the future that the religious world represents read Sam Harris, I am so fucking tired of all this shit, the happiest man on earth has live alone in a cave for the last 20 years and im done
Comment by Man — 18 October 2006 @ 12:48 PM
Man,
There are these really interesting things in the English language called puntctuation, grammar, and sentence structure. Maybe your wack ass racist diatribe would make more sense if contained any or all of those things.
Comment by Rory — 18 October 2006 @ 1:42 PM
Man started off all right; tribes are ethnocentric (but not racist—see my comment here), but he then quickly went into a wild diatribe that illustrates one thing very clearly…
Man, in the real world, diversity is the only form of strength that matters. Your community will be weak, sickly, and poised on the brink of extinction. With such a disgust for anything not themselves, I can’t say I’m terribly upset at the fact that your community is unlikely to survive the next 100 years.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 October 2006 @ 1:54 PM
Holy crap. Like 75% of that was one sentence. And not one of those Victor Hugo technically-grammatically-correct-but-still-annoying-as-hell type long sentences, either.
Though this particular portion explains a lot:
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 18 October 2006 @ 2:30 PM
This portion as well, explains much:
i can tell you that if I was living 300,000 years ago, and I was out hunting, and some piece of ass gave my naked ape ass a boner, i’d fucking take what was mine for the taking as a stronger being
Comment by misanthrop — 23 October 2006 @ 9:20 AM
Wow. I missed that part.
But then I stopped reading halfway through.
Comment by jhereg — 23 October 2006 @ 9:58 AM
Yeah, so did I. But that is an excellent way to get yourself beaten to death by the young lady’s clan. You may be stronger than her, but that’s not the question you should be asking—what you should be asking is, are you stronger than her entire family? Because that’s who you’ll have to answer to.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 October 2006 @ 10:34 AM
Misanthrop,
Yeah, that’s the one that caught my eye, too. But really, it’s amazing how many people there are on the web who are doing this kind of pseudo-anthropology, even (for example) among the ‘celebrities’ of the Peak Oil movement (which is in no way supposed to imply that I am denying the very real problems that we are already starting to face due to Peak Oil). Granted though, that post was a somewhat extreme example…
Comment by Hasha — 23 October 2006 @ 12:41 PM
With gorilla gone, is there hope for Man?
Might be fun for a little while… But if the bone of Man rises exclusively for bestial necrophilia - Thaaaat’s all folks!, definitely within a generation…
Comment by JCamasto — 23 October 2006 @ 11:06 PM
Hasha, I once read one of the sociobiology ‘celebrities’ you may be referring to say that he had ‘never heard of’ E.O. Wilson… the founder of sociobiology and author of the text of the same name! This is indicative of the cartoon pop-sociobiology that dominates Peak Oil etc. forums. It is as if people have some natural inability to read of these matters at all accurately-seeing what the author is actually saying- let alone critically. This inability applies to both critics and supposed ’supporters’, but is of course much more embarrassing with the latter. At least when anyone actually realizes complete rubbish is being spoken.
Comment by Eric — 25 October 2006 @ 11:53 PM