Editor’s note: This commentary is by George Plumb, the executive director of Vermonters for Sustainable Population and the initiator of the report,“What is an Optimal/Sustainable Population for Vermont?”
[S]ince the start of this year’s legislative session there has been much talking and writing about cleaning up Lake Champlain. It started with the governor in his inaugural address and since then, administration officials, legislators, and environmental leaders have joined the chorus for doing something about the worsening pollution of our much cherished lake.
They have cited the causes of the pollution as being approximately 40 percent from agriculture and 60 percent from runoff from impervious surfaces and wastewater treatment.
However, none of these people have addressed the true cause of the water pollution, which is the tremendous growth of the human population in the Lake Champlain basin in recent decades that has resulted in the development of all of these impervious surfaces of homes, building, driveways, roads and parking lots, as well as additional loads on our sewerage treatment plants. Even the other 40 percent of the pollution, agriculture, which nowadays is largely more polluting industrial agriculture, is the result of needing to feed an ever growing population.
On the Vermont portion of the Lake Champlain basin the population has grown from approximately 181,000 in 1960 to 336,000 in 2013 or an astounding 86 percent increase in just five decades. Each person requires about .4 acre of developed land which translates into approximately an additional 70,000 acres of largely impervious land to accommodate this population growth.
Chesapeake Bay is facing similar problems as Lake Champlain. Fortunately a large group of people in that area realize that it is population growth and the resultant development that is the underlying cause of the problem. I recently spoke at the “Growth and Chesapeake Bay” conference at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. It was attended by approximately 200 people. I did a PowerPoint talk on the world precedent-setting report “What is an Optimal/Sustainable Population for Vermont?” in which water quality is one of 16 indicators. At the end of the talk I urged the attendees to have Maryland do a similar report.
What most of our political and environmental leaders do these days instead of trying to prevent environmental problems in the first place is wait until they get really bad and then portray themselves as heroes and say that they will clean up the mess if we will just give them millions of dollars.
Among the several speakers two others were also from Vermont — Bill Ryerson from the international Population Media Center based in South Burlington and Tom Butler from the Foundation for Deep Ecology, who lives in Huntington. All of the speakers at the conference, except one, acknowledged that growth cannot go on forever and still clean up Chesapeake Bay. However, sadly, some of the attendees felt that it was unlikely that growth could be stopped and as a result Chesapeake Bay will not be cleaned up. Is the same likely for Vermont?
We have entered a cultural era where most of our political and environmental leaders and organizations, except for the Vermont Chapter of the Sierra Club, think that we can grow forever and still maintain a healthy environment. However we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, and we have already greatly exceeded those limits. Likewise we cannot have infinite growth in a finite watershed without causing major water problems.
What most of our political and environmental leaders do these days instead of trying to prevent environmental problems in the first place is wait until they get really bad and then portray themselves as heroes and say that they will clean up the mess if we will just give them millions of dollars. This has proven to not work, whether it is reducing the pollution of Lake Champlain, stopping the decline of critical forest cover, or reducing greenhouse gas emissions, again, all caused by population growth.
Vermont’s population size and growth not only impacts Vermont’s environment and water quality it also has an impact on the rest of the Earth as is documented by ecological footprint data, but again you never hear environmental leaders talking about this. As just one example, it takes about approximately one acre of land to feed a person for a year. Because we import approximately 95 percent of our food, when we used to grow most of our own food, this means that we are using some 600,000 acres around the world to feed us and of course that generates pollution from the Midwest going into other areas like the Gulf of Mexico, which now has dead zones.
When the environmental movement began in the 1960s and ’70s, due to worsening environmental problems back then, population growth was at the top of the agenda, as shown in the 1973 “Population Policy Report,” published by the Vermont Natural Resources Council. You won’t find this amazing report on their website but you will find it on the Vermonters for Sustainable Population website along with other important environmental reports. The report said we had to address population growth and Vermont should determine its “carrying capacity,” which was the term used back then instead of “sustainable.” It also made many recommendations on how to address the issue. Unfortunately, a few years after that most of our environmental leaders, being more concerned about raising funds than speaking the truth, stopped talking about population growth, never mind trying to actually do anything about it, and the concerns in that report are coming true.
Are today’s leaders really environmentalists? As even TV news commentator Bill Maher asks in an interview with Alan Weisman, author of “Countdown,” in an insightful and much-needed conversation, “How can you really be an environmentalist unless you are extremely concerned about overpopulation?”
