U.S. population milestone not cause for a celebration

If the U.S. Census Bureau predictions are correct, something special happened this morning…. If the U.S. Census Bureau predictions are correct, something special happened this morning. Some people died. Some were born. Some immigrated, both legally and illegally. And somewhere around 7:46 a.m., the population of the United States reached the 300 million mark.

According to the Bureau’s website, the United States currently registers a new American birth every seven seconds, a death every 13 and a new person from net migration every 31. That equals out to a frightening statistic: every 11 seconds, the United States’ total population increases by one human.

It’s not frightening because we’re running out of space. As CNN.com’s Sunday report points out, with only 84 people per square mile — compared to 300 in the European Union and almost 900 in Japan — we’ve got some land to work with. It’s also not frightening in a Malthusian catastrophe sense — at least not domestically. According to a 2005 American Obesity Association report, a whopping 64.5 percent of Americans over the age of 20 are overweight. That’s not to mention the 30.6 percent of us who are obese, as cited in a Medical News Today article last September. We’re not exactly having trouble getting enough food.

What’s frightening is when we start thinking on a global scale. The fastest growing industrialized nation (that’s us!) is also the most wasteful. According to the Sierra Club’s Web site, although the U.S. makes up less than five percent of the world’s population, we’re responsible for about a quarter of global consumption.

“The natural resource base that is required to support each person [in the United States] keeps rising,” New York University research scientist Carlos Restrepo told CNN.com. “We’re heating and cooling more space, and the housing units are more spread out than ever before.”

Our 300 million lives of relative leisure come at a heavy cost to the rest of the world that is already facing its own population problems.

According to the Global Footprint Network, an international organization measuring the Earth’s sustainability, the carrying capacity of the planet can be measured in “global hectares,” or “hectares of biologically productive area with world-average productivity.” The Network determined Earth’s “biologically productive area” to be about 11.2 billion hectares — and the 2002 human demand on the planet to be “13.7 billion global hectares.”

Yep. You read correctly. If the Global Footprint Network is correct, we’ve already exceeded global biocapacity years ago.

The world might be able to produce enough raw calories to keep our country happily plump, but is it the right kind of food? If the entire U.S. population wanted — and could afford — healthier organic produce, do we actually have enough resources to provide it? What about the rest of the world’s needs? Why aren’t we thinking globally?

Last Wednesday’s New York Times editorial on the whole ordeal claimed “growth and vitality are the same thing,” reassuring readers that “our population issues have mysterious ways of working themselves out.” But at the Oct. 5 “300 Million Americans and Counting” symposium in Washington, D.C., research director of the Center for Migration Studies and former director of the Population Division at the United Nations Secretariat Joseph Chamie had a different take. His keynote speech “Is Growth the Only Option?” answered itself: No.

“We don’t have to have population growth in order to have economic growth,” Chamie said, citing Japan as an example, on a webcast hosted by the Population Reference Bureau. “For most of human history there wasn’t that much population growth and they did quite well.”

Maybe increasing our country’s population isn’t something to be celebrated.

It’s also not an excuse to point fingers at immigration. That’d be missing the root of the problem, especially when our country is primarily made up of immigrants. Immigration might increase the population of the United States, but thinking of population in terms of individual countries is a mistake. We’re all sharing the same biosphere here, and when it comes to population on a global scale, growth does not equal vitality for any form of life regardless of location.

Chamie concluded with four predictions for the United States’ imminent future: fertility will stay around replacement, immigration will remain a major growth factor, our population will continue to age, and in another thirty-five years we’ll be talking about 400 million Americans.

Watching the U.S. Census Bureau homepage’s U.S. population clock hit the 300 million mark is frightening, especially if we force ourselves to think globally in terms of our country’s consumption. But what becomes more frightening is the world population clock below. That’s the one we should all be paying attention to — and it’s ticking a lot faster.

If you feel like it’s getting kind of crowded here, e-mail Lisa at lib2@pitt.edu.