Population Toxification, Part I

How we learned not to talk about human numbers

A few years ago I attended a carbon tax panel in Manhattan, the goal of which was to brainstorm ideas for reducing the carbon footprint of Americans. After the event was over, I pressed one of the panelists, Denis Hayes, the coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970, who had alluded during the discussion to a troubling development in American environmentalism at the turn of the 21st century. On the matter of overpopulation, he said, a green silence prevailed. I asked Hayes whether he thought the United States was overpopulated. His reply was refreshingly honest. An American as a per capita unit should be defined, ecologically and environmentally, he said, as always having a rising footprint – and therefore we should have fewer Americans. “To be American is to be wasteful,” Hayes told me, and it’s “mighty difficult to get Americans to stop being wasteful.”

Read the full article here.