Brenda Walker's Wake-up Call:
A C-SPAN Experience
Like many of my environmentally minded friends in Northern California, I read The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich sometime in the 1970s and was appropriately horrified. Human overpopulation became planted deep in my mind as a destructive force, dangerous for the health of the earth. Our little planet is not getting any bigger, while the human race has been expanding like bacteria on steroids. Anyone who was born after 1960 has lived through a planetary population doubling, from 3 to 6 billion. Today's population is unprecedented in human history. We are in unknown territory and very few discuss the implications of the 6-billion-person planet.
But the immigration awakening came on March 19, 1996, and was a true road-to-Damascus experience. The scales fell from my eyes as I watched C-SPAN and heard Rep. Tony Beilensen speak the following words on the floor of Congress:
"Middle range Census Bureau projections show our population rising to nearly 400 million by the year 2050, an increase the equivalent of adding 40 cities the size of Los Angeles. But many demographers believe it will actually be much worse, and alternative Census Bureau projections agree: if current immigration trends continue, the population will exceed half a billion by the middle of the next century."
My jaw literally dropped in shock and horror — I had no idea the situation was that extreme. I felt something akin to a religious calling to become an activist in restricting immigration in order to preserve a recognizable America. I knew that our uniquely influential nation — and therefore the planet — was in serious danger and I had to do something.
Amusingly, my first naive step was to attend a meeting of the local Sierra Club Population Committee. Fortunately, unlike the national organization, the local was a non-politically correct group, with a group that recognizes that overpopulation is bad whether it is global or domestic. But most importantly, I met people who were involved in other, more useful activities.
I set upon a program of self-education, reading as much as I could find about immigration and related subjects. I learned that many of the current crop of immigrants are culturally different in the extreme, and many do not share important American values, including protecting the environment and respecting women's rights and safety. Furthermore, the extremely politically correct insist that assimilation is racism, so immigrants are encouraged to keep the sexism and racist attitudes that they brought with them. While we are bombarded by media propaganda saying that "diversity is our strength," this statement is a mass delusion. Any ideology-free consideration of human behavior shows that diversity — difference in religion, ethnicity, culture and race — usually causes conflict. America is a special place but it is not immune from the negative aspects of human nature.
And today, while immigration-fueled population growth and its associated problems in America of social fragmentation, resource loss, unemployment, declining quality of life, etc. remain a boiling cauldron in my mind, I am not interested in a desiccated planet bereft of elephants and wild places either. Human overpopulation is both a global and national crisis.
Brenda Walker
February 2002
