More than five decades after the first Earth Day, the Colcom Foundation argues that the occasion’s founding promise has never been fully honored. The 1970 event identified two threats: runaway per-capita consumption and unchecked population growth. Environmental advocacy made significant headway on the first. The second, the foundation contends, was quietly set aside.

The consequences of that omission, in the foundation’s telling, are visible in virtually every environmental metric. The U.S. reduced per-person carbon dioxide emissions by 35 percent from 1970 to 2021, a result of better energy policy and improved technology. But U.S. population grew by 62 percent over that same span. The net effect was an overall increase in national CO2 output of 15 percent. Progress on efficiency was absorbed by growth in the number of people generating emissions.

A Milestone Achieved, Then Complicated

The foundation acknowledges a genuine victory: the U.S. achieved a total fertility rate below the 2.1 replacement level by 1972, and that rate has remained below replacement ever since. Under normal demographic conditions, a sustained below-replacement fertility rate eventually leads to population stabilization. What changed the equation, the foundation argues, was immigration. It became the primary driver of U.S. population growth around 1990, and Colcom Foundation projects that immigration will account for 82 percent of all population growth between 2005 and 2050.

Birds, Land, and the Price of Growth

The ecological costs the foundation documents are concrete. North America has lost 2.9 billion birds since 1970, a reduction from ten billion to seven billion individuals. Wildlife populations broadly have declined about 20 percent since 1970, according to the foundation’s data. By 2020, 1,300 species in the United States were listed as either threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and 23 species were proposed for delisting due to extinction in 2021.

Colcom Foundation’s position is that these trends cannot be reversed without addressing the scale of human population growth. It funds both conservation organizations and immigration-restriction advocacy, viewing each as a necessary component of a coherent environmental strategy one that finally honors the full scope of what Earth Day 1970 originally intended. See related link for additional information.

Find more information about Colcom Foundation on https://www.colcomfdn.org/