Charles Freeman’s withdrawal from his appointment as head of the National Intelligence Council has attracted a great deal of comment. But the most amazing parts of his statement are the least commented on. To wit:

I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country.

This is a rather unvarnished statement of disloyalty. Indeed, Freeman’s comment bears more than a passing resemblance to Pat Buchanan’s famous comments on the neoconservatives who engineered the US invasion of Iraq on behalf of Israel:

They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.

And in case anyone missed it, Freeman made the accusation of disloyalty twice more:

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government — in this case, the government of Israel. …

I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.

And yet, coverage of the Freeman withdrawal in the mainstream media has ignored these allegations. (In fact, as Andrew Sullivan noted, the MSM basically ignored the issue entirely.) The Washington Post article (posted also at the Los Angeles Times website) summarized the situation by saying only that “Freeman had come under fire for statements he had made criticizing Israeli policies and for his past connections to Saudi and Chinese interests.” It quoted Freeman’s statement that he did not believe that the NIC “could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack” but left out the rest of Freeman’s sentence: “by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country.”

The Post’s editorial on the subject bordered on the bizarre, claiming that any suggestion that the Lobby was behind the failed appointment was nothing more than a “conspiracy theory.” Please!

The New York Times article included some of Freeman’s very negative comments on the Israel Lobby, but also included the denial of any influence by a spokesman for AIPAC:

Mr. Freeman blamed pro-Israel groups for the controversy, saying the “tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.”

Joshua Block, a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, said Tuesday that his organization had not taken a formal position on Mr. Freeman’s selection and had not lobbied Congress members to oppose it.

Again, no mention of disloyalty. And although both the New York Times and theWashington Post took Block at his word in denying AIPAC’s involvement, Block was lying through his teeth. According to Stephen Walt, despite claiming that it had no role in the affair, AIPAC “leaned hard on some key senators behind-the-scenes and is now bragging that Obama is a ‘pushover.’”

But even Walt’s blog skirted the disloyalty issue. (In my review of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, I criticized them for going soft on the disloyalty issue.)

The only mention of the disloyalty issue I have been able to find in the MSM is Melanie Phillips’ column in The Spectator (London) titled “Exit, Spraying Venom.” Phillips quotes Freeman’s “passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country” comment, describing his comments as a whole as a “gross libel against American Jews, through its false and malevolent accusation of untoward and uniquely powerful and damaging political power.” Phillips concludes:

Given the unhinged hatred towards Israel and the Jews coursing through the west, which was given rocket fuel in the US by the Walt/Mearsheimer travesty which invested Jewish conspiracy theory with a wholly spurious aura of academic respectability, it was inevitable that if Freeman bit the dust the Jews would be blamed.

Wow! Clearly Phillips is the one who is unhinged. But not for the first time. She has been quoted as believing while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.”

In making his charges of disloyalty, Freeman’s comments must be understood as indicting not only the usual suspects, such as AIPAC and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum (current home of Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC operative who is being tried for espionage on behalf of Israel and was the first to flag Freeman’s appointment). Minimally, Freeman is also indicting the Jewish Senators and Congressmen who pushed hard on this issue. (Non-Jewish politicians like Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, who took up the Lobby’s cause in Congress, are guilty of nothing more than mundane things like subservience, cowardice, and the desire to be reelected.) The Jewish names mentioned most prominently in the Congressional campaign against Freeman have been three Zionist stalwarts:Sen. Charles Schumer, Rep. Steve Israel and Sen. Joe Lieberman.

It is noteworthy that Schumer and Israel expressed their complaints to Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff. Emanuel has been described as “a fierce partisan of Israel” who volunteered to aid the Israel Defense Force during the 1991 Gulf War. He was doubtless a sympathetic ear.

[adrotate group=”1″]

One wonders why the ADL has not made a statement on Freeman’s comments. It may well be that the entire organized Jewish community hopes for a quick death for this incident — the less said the better at this point. This same logic would explain why the disloyalty issue is not discussed in the MSM: Disloyalty is a very grave charge that the goyim shouldn’t even be thinking about. As Steven Waltpoints out, lobbies live in the dark and die in the light of day. It’s hard to imagine Abe Foxman complaining that Freeman’s accusation of disloyalty is yet another anti-Jewish canard when it’s not very difficult for even the most braindead among us to see that there is a whole lot of truth in it.

It is important to realize the gravity of the charge of Jewish disloyalty. It is a charge that has repeatedly surfaced throughout Jewish history beginning in the Book of Exodus where Pharaoh says: “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are too mighty for us; come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there befalleth us any war, they also join themselves unto our enemies, and fight against us, and get them up out of the land” (Exod. 1:9–10).

The first example I am aware of in American history was the successful campaign by Jewish organizations to abrogate a trade agreement with Russia during the Taft Administration in 1911. In promoting the bill, Jewish spokesmen favored formulations in which the problem was couched as an American problem rather than as a problem for American Jews (even though the difficulties for American Jews were only a pretext for a campaign that was actually directed at changing the status of Russian Jews).

Similarly, as I noted in my last column, Jews around the world have been advised to frame the Iranian threat to Israel as a global problem, not simply as a problem for Israel.

The charge of disloyalty stems from a very simple fact: Jews sometimes have interests as Jews that are not the same as the interests of the society as a whole.And because the organized Jewish community has often had power far beyond its numbers, there is a very real possibility that Jewish influence would compromise the interests of the society as a whole. We have already seen this in the successful neoconservative promotion of the war in Iraq —  the focus of Buchanan’s ire (and by now proved beyond a shadow of a doubt with an avalanche of other treatises on the subject). Of course, right now, the conflict revolves around Israel and the “existential threat” it sees in Iran.

The interesting thing now is what will happen to Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the Director of National Intelligence and the person who appointed Freeman.  Blair not only defended Freeman to the bitter end, his stated views on Iranian nuclear capability are very much opposed by Israel (and hence the Israel Lobby). On March 10, Blair noted that  “The overall situation — and the intelligence community agrees on this — [is] that Iran has not decided to press forward . . . to have a nuclear weapon on top of a ballistic missile.” This conflicts with the Israeli perspective. In commenting on the disparity in views, Blair stated that “the Israelis are far more concerned about [Iran’s nuclear capability], and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things from their point of view.”

Blair is implying that the Israeli and the American views are not the same. Horrors! This is doubtless a grave offense in the eyes of the Israel Lobby — a group that seemingly cannot even imagine that Israel and the US may have different interests.

Clearly, the Lobby still has some work left to rid the government of people with ideas that differ from theirs. But they expended quite a bit of energy and credibility with the heavy-handed tactics they used in torpedoing Freeman and enforcing their version of foreign policy orthodoxy. Their next battle may be even more difficult.

The good news is that the machinations of the Lobby are more open than ever. The vast majority of the debate happened on the Internet. The MSM was late in reporting it, and in the end it left out critical details. This is yet another nail in the coffin of the credibility of the MSM, and it means that people who are serious about understanding current events are going to rely even less on it. People will read the New York Times not for “all the news that’s fit to print,” but to try to understand why the Times left out what it did. Sadly, this indictment of the MSM also applies to mainstream conservative pundits such as Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh.

It is noteworthy that, as J. J. Goldberg has pointed out, the Obama Administration has initiated foreign policy positions that are quite different than the Bush Administration, including high-level negotiations with Syria, approving the dialogue between the British and  the political wing of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and steps that might be interpreted as a more conciliatory approach to Iran.Already, Zionist hardliners like Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America are up in arms about Hillary Clinton’s “troubling transformation.”

While it is too early to see where this is heading, whatever happens is going to be all over the Internet. That is a major problem for the Lobby — and one that will only get worse in the future.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

Any group that expects to survive into the long term future should be aware of current trends and how they will influence the group. Jews take such planning quite seriously. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute has assumed the role of long term planning for the Jewish people, not only in Israel but also the Diaspora. The JPPPI is an independent think tank that reports to the Israeli government and has close ties with other Jewish organizations. Its mission is “to promote the thriving of the Jewish people via professional strategic thinking and planning on issues of primary concern to world Jewry. JPPPI’s work is based on deep commitment to the future of the Jewish people with Israel as its core state.”

The chairman of the Board of Directors of JPPPI from 2002 until early 2009 was Dennis Ross — the same Dennis Ross who has played a major role in US policy in the Middle East in the Bush I and Clinton administrations and was director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — a hard-line pro-Israel lobbying group. Ross gave up his position with the JPPPI after he was named as the Obama administration’s top envoy to the Middle East, a position where he will be able to influence policy on Iran and other issues deemed vital to Israel. (Ross remains a “Consultant” at WINEP.)

It is noteworthy that no one complains when Ross is appointed to such an important US foreign policy position despite his close ties to Israel and the Israel Lobby; but there is major hysteria when people point out that Charles Freeman (Obama’s nominee for the head of the National Intelligence Council) has an association with a group funded by Saudi Arabia.

The JPPPI’s report Facing Tomorrow 2008 is a sort of State of the Union document for Judaism — a description of the state of Judaism and what challenges are on the horizon. In scope and intention, it reminds one of the National Policy Institute’s report “The State of White America.”

Not surprisingly, there is great concern about Iran as an “existential threat” — presumably a major area of interest for the former chairman of JPPPI’s Board of Directors in his new position in the US State Department.

The Jewish people must, as the highest priority, develop an appropriate response to the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel and to global stability as a whole. While there is no ambiguity about the need to do so in Israel, it is necessary to mobilize Jewish opinion around the world as well. The American Jewish community cannot be intimidated either by a post Iraq syndrome in the United States, or by the false and pernicious allegations of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, or former President Carter.

Jews around the world are encouraged to mobilize to combat the threat to Israel represented by Iran. The assumption is that Jews have common interests as Jews no matter what country they happen to live in. One is reminded of other eras when Jews have put up a unified front against a particular country because of specific Jewish interests. For example, the organized Jewish community opposed Russia from 1881 to 1917 — a position that led to charges of disloyalty in several countries.

One might think that such a view would leave Jews in the Diaspora open to the charge of disloyalty, but the problem is easily finessed: Jews in the Diaspora are told to frame Israel’s concerns about Iran as a global threat, not simply as a threat to Israel.

The report advocates putting pressure on China, Russia, and moderate Arab states in order to develop the widest possible coalition: “For instance, currently, the US negotiates with China, bilaterally and multilaterally on both currency issues and on Iran, without linking the two issues. Perhaps they need to be linked.” The message is that Jews in the US should pressure the US government to use any leverage it has with China to develop a coalition against Iran.

The report is quite clear that the influential writings of former President Carter and professors Mearsheimer and Walt are major obstacles.  As I have noted before, these critics of Israel are important because they are associated with elite institutions, and their critique is sober, factually based, and constitutes a moral indictment of Israel. We can expect more attacks on these figures in the future.

Relatedly, the report recommends that Diaspora Jewry do its utmost to undermine the moral critique of Israel. Jews must combat portrayals of Israel as a state that is “colonialist, violates human rights, and engaged in unacceptable behavior that could be described as Apartheid and even Nazism.”  Diaspora Jews should also combat charges of dual loyalty.  Amazingly, despite the assumption of common Jewish interests no matter what country they live in, without any sense of irony the report notes that Dennis Ross — Exhibit A on the dual loyalty issue — will soon be publishing a book on these issues.

And Ross isn’t the only high level American diplomat involved in this report for an Israeli think tank: Stuart Eizenstat is the author of a major section on “Mega-Trends in the Next Five Years which will Impact on World Jewry and Israel.”

The situation is exactly the same as the involvement of prominent American neocons (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David and Meyrav Wurmser) in the notorious “A Clean Break” report for an Israeli think tank. This report, which advocated regime change in the Middle East by many of the architects of the American invasion of Iraq, was also presented to the Israeli government.

There is deep concern about Jewish identification, marriage, and fertility. Jews have the lowest birth rate in the world (1.5–1.7). In the Diaspora, “there is a slow, steady, seemingly inexorable decline in an already diminished population.” In Israel, the Jewish population is increasing but the Arab Israelis and Palestinians are increasing faster. “Between the Mediterranean and the Jordan Sea, there may be a majority of Palestinians by mid-century. Time is not on Israel’s side.” Nevertheless it is important to “Ensure that the borders of the State of Israel guarantee a clear Jewish majority.”

The solution is to encourage fertility not only by aiding and promoting Jewish births, but by funding programs that strengthen Jewish identification:

Massive investment should be undertaken to improve knowledge and transmission of Jewish identity through expanding existing and new networks of Jewish schools, and the best forms of informal education such as Birthright, camps, youth movements, adolescent education and adult education.

All of these policies would be viewed as unvarnished racism if adopted by Europeans or the European Diaspora.

The report on geopolitical trends by Stuart Eizenstat is quite blunt, noting the decline of the West and the emergence of a multipolar world with the rise of China and India. Israel must ready itself for a world no longer dominated by the US, but Eizenstat projects that the US will be primus inter pares for at least another generation. There is also concern that because of the debacle in Iraq, the US will not be willing to provide the “unconditional support” for Israel that it has in the past.

[adrotate group=”1″]

A similar JPPPI publication is its Report 2008. This report makes many of these same points asFacing Tomorrow 2008 but also analyzes the position of Jews in the US. It is quite frank on Jewish power and the status of American Jews. Jews are important political players in the US. Despite their relatively small numbers, Jews are important in part because of “the economic resources they bring to bear on the candidates of their choices … [and] their prominence in American culture and society.” Well said.

Moreover, the Report notes that

while Jews tend to be wealthier than most Americans, they identify their long-term interests with liberal policies, and are regularly moved by the perception that the Democrats are the standard bearer of a number of traditionally Jewish ethical concerns. (This latter contention is of course  profoundly contested by Jewish Republicans, among whom are to be counted a large number of leading Jewish thinkers and intellectuals.)

The idea that Jewish support for liberal causes stems from ethical concerns is profoundly problematic from other perspectives as well. The ethical hypothesis is ludicrous given that American Jews also support a racialist, apartheid, expansionist Israel. (See here for a discussion of Jewish ethics as fundamentally about what is “good for the Jews.”) Indeed, the Report notes that because both Democrats and Republicans are committed to Israel, Jewish voting is more determined by other factors. In other words, since there is no disagreement in American politics regarding unconditional support for Israel, Jews are free to vote their other ethnic interests — in particular the disestablishment of white America.

My view is that the Jewish commitment to liberal politics and the Democratic Party stems from their fear of and animosity toward an America dominated by white Christians. As Elliott Abrams has stated, the American Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts” (p. 86).

It may indeed be rational for Jews to seek a rapprochement with white America, given that non-white minorities, especially Muslims, are unlikely to share the Jewish commitment to Israel. But the main stumbling block remains a psychological one: Can activist Jews overcome their gut feelings of hostility toward the West?

Indeed, although not mentioned in the Report, the summary presented to the Israeli cabinet recommended “Enhanced ties between Jewish communities and the Hispanic and Afro-American communities in the US.” Implicitly, the idea is that just as Jews must prepare for the emergence of China and India as world powers, Jews must be prepared for the decline of white America.

Of course, it is no secret that the organized Jewish community has spearheaded the mass immigration of non-whites and that they have have forged close ties with blacks, Latinos, and other minority groups in the US. As I noted elsewhere:

In recent years Jewish organizations have made alliances with other non-white ethnic activist organizations. For example, groups such as the AJCommittee and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington have formed coalitions with organizations such as the National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). A prominent aspect of this effort is the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, co-founded by Rabbi Marc Schneier, President of the North American Boards of Rabbis. The Foundation is closely tied to the World Jewish Congress which cosponsors the Foundation’s Washington, DC office and several of its programs. Typical of the Foundation’s efforts was a meeting in August, 2003 of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Jewish Congressional Delegation, and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus; the meeting was co-sponsored by the World Jewish Congress. The Foundation’s many programs include organizing the Congressional Jewish/Black Caucus, the Corporate Diversity Award, given to “a major Fortune 500 company committed to building a diverse work force,” the Annual Latino/Jewish Congressional Awards Ceremony, the Annual Black/Jewish Congressional Awards Ceremony, and the Annual Interethnic Congressional Leadership Forum. The latter project organizes an annual meeting of the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the World Jewish Congress, and the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.

Quite clearly the various non-European ethnic groups are developing close ties and Jewish organizations are taking the lead in this effort.

Finally, it should be noted that there is no self-criticism in these reports — no angst about the ethics of Israel’s horrific actions in Gaza or the erection of the racialist, apartheid state of Israel. Nor is there any self-examination of the power of Jews in American politics, particularly the issue of disloyalty as it pertains to the Israel Lobby.

The portrait of Judaism is therefore part and parcel of creating a positive Jewish self-image. This one-dimensional “Jews-have-no-warts” image is a useful fiction for a group with such a large agenda in conflict with the interests of so many other peoples — from white Americans and other European-descended peoples to Iran and the Arab world.

It is an image that is aggressively enforced by Jewish activist organizations such as the ADL. A large part of Jewish power is the ability to create and enforce a positive image of Jews that is quite independent of the reality of aggressive Jewish pursuit of group interests.

The rest of us need not see the Jewish community in quite such a one-dimensional manner.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

At 308 million people, the U.S. is currently the third most populous nation on Earth, behind only China (1.3 billion) and India (1.2 billion).  By 2050, India will rise to #1, with 1.6 billion—a 37% increase.  China’s ‘one-child’ policy will limit its increase to about 8% (1.4 billion).  The growth rate in the U.S., though, tops them both:  We are projected to hit 440 million, or an astonishing 43% increase.  This is, by far, the highest growth rate of any western industrialized nation.

Such dramatic population growth, under any circumstances, causes a variety of social and economic problems.  In the U.S., as we know, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that most of our increase will be among non-White minority groups, primarily Hispanics. The numbers are striking:  The 43% increase amounts to 132 million people; of these, 130 million will be minorities.  White population will increase by only 2 million, reducing it to 46% of the total by 2050.  Thus we can expect that problems with minorities will grow in a variety of areas:  housing, schools, welfare, health care, crime, security, economic inequality, and racial and ethnic conflict.

But one neglected area of importance is truly color-blind, and that is the environment.  Resource and energy use, development, road construction, expanded cropland and pastureland, deforestation, pollution and waste disposal — none of these care which race or ethnicity is doing the consuming.  Only two things matter:  sheer numbers of people, and the level of consumption.  And on this count alone, we are facing an ecological crisis in this country.

Measuring environment impact is a challenging prospect, but consensus seems to be building around the concept of the ecological footprint as one relevant criterion.  The basic idea behind it is sound:  that human beings, as consumers and producers, require the ongoing use of some portion of the planet’s surface, from which to draw resources and on which to dump their wastes.  Some resources are renewable, others are not.  Some waste products decay quickly, others take millennia.  Many of our resources demand a quantifiable area of land:  land to farm, pave, pasture, or otherwise develop.  So too our waste products:  our trash takes up an ever-growing space, and greenhouse gas emissions from all sources may require offsets in terms of vegetation (trees or other ground cover).  And plant life generally has a vital ability to break down the various pollutants and toxins that our society churns out daily.

In an attempt to formulate a standardized measure, environmental scientists have added together the land area of all our resource use, plus the land area required for all our waste products and carbon offsets.  The result is, for each nation, a single measure of land area—the ecological footprint—that represents the amount of area required, per person, to sustain a given standard of living.  (In the following, I use the World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report 2008”.)

At the low end, nations like Haiti and Bangladesh struggle by on roughly 1 acre per person.  The bulk of the Third World consumes between 2.5 and 8 acres, including India (2.3) and China (5.3).  Most of Western Europe ranges from 10 to 15.  At the top of the list of major nations is the U.S., at nearly 24 acres per person. (Two energy-intensive oil fiefdoms, UAE and Qatar, rate higher than the U.S, but only slightly.)

Naturally, there is some guesswork and estimation in these numbers, and certainly they are subject to debate.  But I have little doubt that they are directionally correct, and that the margin of error is within reason.  But even if they are off by 50%—that is, if they indicate twice the actual consumption level—they point to some troubling conclusions for our country.

Consider, for example, the total footprint of the U.S.  With over 300 million people consuming on average 24 acres per person, this yields a total footprint of 7.4 billion acres.  By comparison, the continental U.S. (i.e. excluding Alaska) has a total land area of just 1.9 billion acres—merely one quarter of our actual usage.  Putting it otherwise:  Our footprint is 400% of our continental area, and takes in more than 20% of the entire planet.

In fact there is a two-part explanation for our situation.  First, we are overtaxing the land itself. The above calculation of ecological footprint for the US implies that it is possible to use more than 100% of the land. This happens by, in essence, depleting the “natural capital” of the biosphere, which occurs through such actions as deforestation, loss of topsoil, and overuse of groundwater.  By most indications, humanity as a whole is overtaxing the planet by 30–40%—a condition that, if true, clearly cannot continue indefinitely.  But the second and more important factor for the U.S. is a situation whereby we are able, through globalization and international trade, to consume the land resource area of other nations—in the form of imported agricultural products, manufactured goods, chemicals, clothing, machinery, vehicles, and fossil fuels.

For both reasons of social justice and ecological sustainability, the world of the future will have to live within its means.  In a practical sense this means three things:  reducing total (global) consumption to sustainable levels, reducing the per capita consumption (given the U.N. assumption that populations will rise), and, most critically, living within the capacity of each nation’s land area.

So for the U.S., the calculation is straightforward.  With 1.9 billion acres of land, we can carry at most only (1.9 billion / 24 acres =) 80 million people sustainably.  Compare this to a present population of 308 million, which is rapidly heading up to 400+ million.  Thus, we should be contemplating a reduction of 75%, rather than staring head-on into a 40% increase.  (This, of course, assumes a fixed level of consumption; if we are willing to cut our footprint in half, we could get by with a mere 50% population cut, to something like 150 million people.)

But the situation is worse than this.  True long-term sustainability demands that a large portion of the land be set aside as true wilderness, unused and unexploited, in order to maintain overall ecosystem viability.  How much to set aside is a difficult question, especially given the wide variability and sensitivity of differing ecosystems, and the lack of consensus on the appropriate metrics.  Minimum estimates seem to run in the 20–25% range, and at the high end, some have argued for 50% or more, especially in the more biodiverse regions.¹ If, worst case, we are then allowed to use only about 1 billion acres of land, current consumption levels will sustainably support only 40 million people—an 87% reduction.

These are, frankly, shocking numbers.  And as I mentioned above, even if the footprint figures are significantly wrong—if, say, we are actually consuming only at a rate of 10 or 12 acres per person—then the long-term sustainable population is only back up to 80–100 million.  Thus we cannot argue our way out of this problem simply by claiming wild overestimates by some crazed environmentalists.  Clearly more drastic action is demanded.

Given the radical unsustainability of our present situation, we need to immediately address both the level of consumption and the population issue simultaneously.  On the consumption side, we clearly need to become more efficient, less wasteful, and generally consume less.  Americans as a whole waste a tremendous amount of energy and resources, and this does little or nothing for our standard of living.  Germany, for example, has an equal or higher quality of life, and it achieves this on a footprint of just 11 acres per person—less than half of ours.  A comparable level for the U.S. is clearly attainable, especially over a period of a few decades.  But it will not happen without overcoming some ferocious infighting by vested interests.

The other half of the equation is even more difficult and contentious.  Tackling the thorny issue of population control, let alone population reduction, is only slightly less controversial than Holocaust denial.  And in fact any attempt to discuss large-scale population reduction invariably brings up bad jokes about gas chambers and crematoria.  But the situation demands a rational discussion, and there are some obvious first steps.

One: An immediate end to all immigration.  The myth of America as the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ is, for most immigrants, nonsense.  Immigrants don’t come here because they ‘love our freedoms.’  They come primarily for one reason:  to make money, and increase their standard of living.  But every new immigrant—whether poverty-stricken Mexican or well-educated Asian—contributes directly to an already overshot ecosystem.  Neither our nation nor the planet can stand any more Americans.

Two: Deportation of all illegal immigrants, and termination of green card privilege.  Given the urgency, every illegal person here should be arrested and deported.  The green card system should be ended, and those holding current green cards should be subject to accelerated expiration without renewal.

Three: Pay people to leave.  If anyone wants to permanently relocate outside the U.S., the government should pay all moving expenses, and perhaps throw in a little financial incentive as well.  This obviously does nothing for the global population predicament, but it does help the total consumption problem; the fact remains that any given person living anywhere besides the U.S. will, on average, consume less.

Four: A full-court press on family planning and contraception options.  Free or low-cost access to condoms, birth control pills, educational programs, even abortions, should be considered.

Five: An end to all tax incentives to have more than one child.  Current tax laws allow exemptions for all children, regardless of number.  They should be revised to allow a break only for the first child, and increasing disincentives beyond the second.

If these should prove insufficient, more radical options are available:

Six: Government-paid sterilization.  Certainly some percentage of the American population would be willing to get sterilized if it was free.  More radical yet would be to provide monetary incentives for sterilization.  Imagine if the government offered $5,000 for any childless adult who was willing to get sterilized—and imagine the outcry!  But there can really be no complaint, as long as there is no coercion and the program is fully voluntary.  Yes, the lower classes are more likely to participate; this is perhaps unfortunate, but given that we accept extreme financial inequality in our country, we have to live with the consequences.  (At worst, this would offset the higher birth rates of the lower class immigrant populations.)

Seven: Birth licenses or ‘credits’. This is a kind of capitalist version of China’s policy.  Kenneth Boulding and Herman Daly, among others, have proposed a system that gives every woman a certain number of credits, such that would allow her to have one legal child.  If she wants two or more, she must buy the credits from another woman who is willing to forego hers.  A national marketplace would set the price, and childless women would clearly profit.  This is perhaps a rather heartless method, but the present system is exceedingly cruel in its own way—an uncontrolled human plague eating up the planet.

No doubt many readers will think of sterilization programs or birth credits as outrageous and impossible.  To which I offer two replies:  (1) we would obviously begin with the less radical approaches first, and only contemplate the more extreme actions if necessary; and (2) do we have any better ideas?  Continuing on in the same vein is not a rational option.  This only invites catastrophe as a means of reducing our population—which will certainly happen if we do nothing.  Human numbers will go down; we can rationally plan a soft landing, or just wait for a ruthless Mother Nature to crush us.

The above actions, addressing population and consumption simultaneously, would doubtless have a substantial impact.  The actual effect would of course depend on the speed of implementation.  The situation is pressing, but there seems to be sufficient time for these actions to work.  Reduced consumption and greater efficiencies can happen rather quickly, but no one is proposing 50% or 75% population reductions in a decade.

More realistically, I would propose something on the order of a 50-year plan to achieve the above goals.  If, over the coming five decades, we could reduce both our footprint and our population by just 2% per year, we would reach 2060 with 110 million people, consuming at a level of 8.7 acres per person—a sustainable 1 billion acre footprint in total.  Two percent annual reductions are easily achievable, and would barely register on the public consciousness.

There is plenty of flexibility in the numbers, of course.  If we were only able to muster, say, 1% reductions per year on average, the process would still work—but it would take 100 years to achieve sustainability.  Tradeoffs between population and consumption are also possible.  If we could, for example, drive population down by 3% per year, then consumption need only fall by 0.5% annually; or vice versa.

And finally, critical to any population reduction scheme is equitable and proportionate implementation.  It would not do, for example, to have one class or ethnicity voluntarily adopting low-growth (or negative growth) policies while others ignored them with impunity.  There would thus need to be some minimal policy of monitoring and, particularly for systems of tax penalties or birth credits, equitable enforcement.

Every year that we wait, things get immeasurably worse: growing population, increasing per capita consumption, and a global ecosystem nearing exhaustion.  With a sustainable population in America, we could feed ourselves, supply all of our own energy (think of it—no more wars for oil!), and maintain vast areas of wild nature.  This is truly achievable.  It is only a matter of will.  But the discussion must start now.

Note

1.    See:  Metzgar and Bader (1992), “Large mammal predators in the Northern Rockies,” Northwest Environmental Journal, 8(1).  Hoctor et al (2000), “Identifying a linked reserve system,” Conservation Biology, 14(4).  Noss et al (1999), “A conservation plan for the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion,” Natural Areas Journal, 19(4).  Carroll et al (2003), “Use of population viability analysis,” Ecological Applications, 13. RETURN TO ARTICLE.

Dr. Thomas Dalton (email him) is the author of Debating the Holocaust (2009).