Little Known Presidential Population Leadership
- Otis L. Graham, Jr
- January 19, 2013
- Forum Papers
- Forum Paper
- 0 Comments
Presidents Bush II and Obama have steered Sustainability at the Federal level into eight years of inactivity followed by a CEQ-coordinated reporting process requiring federal agencies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainability outside Washington has become a Big Tent containing many good or good-sounding things, but now has (in the U.S.) nothing to do with capping or reducing population numbers. So Bush II and Obama seem to have ended a long-running presidential book-writing policy-revising project, in Obama’s case possibly without fully understanding the policy potential of this new Sustainability framework.
It is a large puzzle why Population Stabilization Policy slipped off the national agenda, not in response to a reversal or ebbing of the demographic trends that activated it, but as the 2 billion humans of 1930 became 4 billion by 1975 then 5.2 billion by 1990 projected to rise to between 7.8 to 12.5 billion by 2030 – a human crowd trying to cope with the multiple-stresses of global warming.
I expect Population Stabilization Policy to come back into the agenda of the White House and Congress with the global turmoil ahead of us all. Bet me on it, Julian Simon.
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Graham was Professor Emeritus of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the author or editor of more than fifteen books, including “Debating American Immigration, 1882-Present” (with Roger Daniels) and “Environment Politics and Policy, 1960s to 1990s”.
