Urgently Needed Now: A National Policy to Reduce U.S. Population (An NPG Position Paper)

• Donald Mann
• July 28, 2014
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
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Introduction

Thirty four years have passed since, in 1980, NPG published a 62 page booklet that I had written titled, Urgently Needed Now: A National Policy to Reduce U.S. Population. In that small booklet I tried to explain why we at NPG believed that such a policy was urgently needed.

NPG was founded in 1972 when our U.S. population was 210 million. It is now 318 million, an increase of 108 million in roughly four decades, or an average increase of some 2.5 million per year, or 25 million each decade. By any measure those are huge increases.

In 1972, with a population of 210 million, we believed that our country was already vastly overpopulated in terms of the long range carrying capacity of its environment and resources.

We believed then, and still do, that our population should not be allowed to exceed 150 million, in order to create an economy that would be sustainable for the very long term, and afford an adequate standard of living for all in a sound and healthy environment.

To reach that goal it was obvious that we would need a transition period of negative population growth, that could be achieved by a slight and temporary reduction in our fertility rate, but chiefly by limiting legal immigration, and reducing illegal immigration to near zero.

Unfortunately, or even tragically, we have not yet succeeded in convincing our policy makers in and out of government of the urgency of taking the course of action that we so strongly recommend, that involves halting and then reversing our population growth, until our population can be stabilized at a sustainable level.

It is now projected that, if present trends are allowed to continue, our population would reach 400 million or more by mid century. That would mean that in only 3.6 decades, from 2014 to 2050, our population would have increased by a staggering 82 million! That senseless and disastrous growth would result almost entirely from mass immigration, both legal and illegal.

The following are four chapters taken from the 16 chapters in the booklet, together with a quotation by Sir Julian Huxley who was a member of our original Board of Advisors, and was always very supportive of our efforts. We were extremely grateful for his support.