POPULATION: Thinking Outside the Box – Environmental scientist investigates if politics is concealing ‘America’s greatest environmental issue’. [archive] This is a book review of Pandora’s Green Box by Paul Clark.

I am delighted to see the appearance of a new book on America’s disastrous and unsustainable immigration-driven population growth by a fellow environmental scientist . . . Clark is a professional environmental scientist with 10 years of experience in the field, a bachelor degree’s from Towson University in Maryland, and a Master’s in Environmental Science from Johns Hopkins University. His master’s research at Hopkins focused on the impacts of population growth on America’s natural environment. . . .

The book is divided into two parts or segments: population and the environment in the United States, and the effects of politics on the population issue in our country. His concluding chapter — “America’s Greatest Environmental Challenge” — answers the question that he raises at the outset: Is politics concealing the most important environmental threat our country faces early in the twenty-first century?

Roy Beck and I came at this question from a somewhat different angle at the outset of the new millennium 16 years ago in our 2000 paper, “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998): A First Draft of History,” published in the scholarly Journal of Policy History. Paul Clark’s book represents, in essence, a second draft of this unhappy history. With regard to immigration, he reaches conclusions consistent with our own, but expands upon them, provides much additional documentation, and covers the more recent, wholesale neglect of the population cause by the so-called environmental movement, or what Beck and I termed less enthusiastically, the Environmental Establishment.

Sadly, the situation has only gone from bad to worse. In 2000, Beck and I documented “the virtual abandonment by national environmental groups of U.S. population stabilization as an actively pursued goal,” and called this “perhaps the most striking change” in the environmental movement since the era of the first Earth Day in 1970. But in recent years, as documented by Clark and others, environmental elites are no longer just ignoring U.S. population growth because of their squeamishness about publicly acknowledging the need to reduce immigration if U.S. population growth is ever to be tamed. Now, in effect, these environmentalish posers have actively endorsed endless U.S. population growth by shilling for “comprehensive immigration reform.” This misnamed “reform” is an environmental travesty that would grant amnesty to many millions of illegal aliens and double future legal immigration levels.