Deputy Director's Corner: Is America finally listening?

• Tracy Henke
• June 18, 2015
• NPG
• 0 Comments

If you haven’t read it already, I encourage you to review Paul A. Murtaugh’s strong Op-Ed in The New York Times titled “Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb Argument Was Right.”

Murtaugh, an associate statistics professor at Oregon State, strongly refuted The Times’ recent Retro Report called “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion.“

Thankfully, Murtaugh was green-lighted by the paper’s Editorial Board and they actually published his solid rebuttal. Millions of readers were given the chance to see the real dangers of population growth.

And it seems Murtaugh isn’t the only example of a recent changing of tides when it comes to public opinion on population growth.

California Governor Jerry Brown, recently speaking before the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Board, asked the critical question:

“At some point, how many people can we accommodate?”

This statement is huge news – it is the first time that California’s governor has publicly linked the state’s crippling drought with its rapidly-growing population. NPG has long warned of the dangers of California’s population growth, including the wide-scale distribution of our Forum paper Hurtling Toward 50 Million: California Expands the Welcome Mat for Illegal Immigration.

We can only hope that more elected officials – on the local, state, and national levels – will get the message: our nation is already dangerously overpopulated, and continued growth poses grave risks to our natural resources, environment, infrastructure, economy, and quality of life!

We encourage all NPG members and supporters to Get Involved TODAY!

Contact your elected officials, write your own Op-Eds to local newspapers, distribute NPG publications to your local schools and libraries. Help NPG to spread the word that we must act NOW to slow, halt, and eventually reverse U.S. population growth – while public interest is on our side!

As always, NPG is working hard on our upcoming projects and programs. Currently, we are expanding our efforts to engage our nation’s young people – reaching out to more high schools and colleges across the country to enlist our next generation of NPG activists! I am also exploring opportunities to speak on campus at a number of local universities, in an effort to introduce more students to this critical issue.

In addition, we are enlisting the talents of new experts to author upcoming Forum papers on topics such as: farmland loss, the benefits of a “moratorium” on illegal immigration, America’s vanishing groundwater supplies, and our nation’s chain migration policies.

We appreciate your continued activism and support of NPG. With your help, NPG has become a valued and trusted resource to journalists, researchers, educators, students, and other concerned Americans like you! Together, we will continue our work to slow, halt, and eventually reverse U.S. population growth!