Why Is Population Growth Seldom Discussed?

[Jim Lane]

86. The US "did our part" is wrong. The US is overpopulated.

Like other developed countries, we've seen the declining birth rate that comes with prosperity. As a result, our natural rate of increase (births minus deaths) is slightly negative.

But in that simple statement you can see two reasons that it's a hard issue to get people to address. First, the US population is still growing, and we're still building new subdivisions where wildlife habitat used to be, but the growth arises from immigration. Therefore, many progressives fear, not without justice, that concern over population stabilization will fuel xenophobia. (It doesn't have to. "Every child a wanted child" would be a great start, with readily available contraception and abortion for the people already here. Instead, we're moving in the opposite direction.)

Second, there's the tendency to look only at population growth as the problem. At current levels, the world as a whole is already overpopulated, and at current levels the US is already overpopulated. Partly because of our prosperity, our population is unsustainably high in terms of resource consumption and carbon footprint.

Incidentally, here's an illustration of the OP's point: In the preceding paragraph, the DU spell checker flagged "unsustainably", even though it's a perfectly valid word. A progressive website isn't even set up to accommodate a discussion of sustainability.