Some say it's the elephant in the living room that few conservationists want to talk about, let alone tackle: Too many people, too few resources.
Environmental and conservation groups spend millions of dollars and huge personal effort trying to limit human damage to the planet, yet they have been slow to address population, said Jim Baird, director of the Izaak Walton League of America's Sustainability Education Program.
"The league's policy for years has been that there's a direct link between population and the environment. The goal has to be to stabilize global population," Baird said.
To that end, league members support expanding sex education and birth-control opportunities in Third-World countries, and at home they remind people that population affects their lives and outdoor passions every day.
Baird will be in Duluth, Brainerd, Minn., and Alexandria, Minn., this week trying to sell the idea to hunters, anglers, outdoor writers and environmental groups that population growth and efforts to curb that growth are down-home, real-life issues worth addressing.
"We focus on making fertility and contraception education available to people to let them make the choice on when and how they a have a family. But even that has become so politicized," Baird said. "And then there are the institutional barriers. Like the fact Viagra is covered (by some insurance policies) but the (birth control) pill is not."
Until the U.S. and the world control burgeoning population growth, it may be impossible to solve the most pressing environmental issues, such as wetlands destruction, forest sustainability, global warming, and declining water quality and water availability, Baird said.
Focusing on people's behavior and its effects is only half the problem, he said. The other half is slowing the growth in the number of people.
"CO2 emissions per capita are actually going down a little. The problem is, we keep adding more and more people, so overall emissions keep going up," Baird noted. "There's a fixed, finite amount of resources available on Earth. We're running out of wild places. It's time to start making the link between the number of people and our environment."
Baird said hunters, anglers, hikers and campers are some of the first people to be hurt by increasing population: More highway congestion to leave town. More cabins and condos on favorite lakes and streams. Crowded public hunting land and waters. No-trespassing signs and vacation homes sprouting up across the north woods. More noise, more light, less open space.
And it's not just the inconvenience but the effect those additional people and development have on water quality, wetlands, forest growth and wildlife.
Moreover, there's more demand on natural resources, agriculture and more burning of fossil fuels, causing more pollution.
Shawn Perich, a Duluth native and a North Shore outdoor writer, will help Baird spread the group's message in Minnesota. Perich, an avid trout angler, has watched as increasing population and development have damaged or killed his favorite streams, such as Miller Creek and the lower Poplar River.
Even Perich's remote Hovland, Minn., home, in one of the state's most pristine regions, is being encroached by rampant recreational housing development.
"As I write the obituaries for trout streams, however, it becomes apparent the continuing press of population is the underlying challenge," Perich writes in an Izaak Walton League essay. "The old North Shore -- remote, wild, unpeopled -- is nearly gone... I've faced the sad reality that the North Shore's wild resources are diminishing. Everything here that really matters to me will always be less than it used to be."
Perich said the problem in Minnesota is that more people are wanting a slice of the north woods pie -- homes on lakes or cabins in the woods.
"It's happened so fast and is so obvious, I don't know how people can't be concerned," Perich said Friday. "The problem is, we're not doing anything about it."
The U.S. is growing at a rate of 1.3 percent per year, the highest rate of any developed nation, Baird noted. Most of that is through immigration, an issue almost no environmental group, including the Izaak Walton League, has been willing to tackle. When factions in the Sierra Club tried to make immigration an issue the group nearly split apart.
"The Ikes don't have a stand on immigration; that's not our issue," Baird said.
The U.S. population now stands at 297 million people, double what it was in 1964 when the last baby boomer was born, the U.S. Census Bureau reports.
Global population is 6.5 billion, nearly triple what it was in 1950. We're adding 72 million additional people to the planet every year.
By 2050, the world will add another 3 billion people, the Census Bureau projects.
In Minnesota, in just another 15 years or so, the Twin Cities will add another million people. And while northern cities are expected to grow only a little, rural areas near lakes and forests will seedouble-digit annual population growth, the Minnesota state demographer's office reports.
The meeting on Tuesday will include a video called "Finding Balance: Forests and Family Planning in Madagascar," a short film that examines an innovative program approach that combines conservation, sustainable development and reproductive health in an effort to save the last forests on Africa's largest island.Duluth News Tribune
