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Immigration-driven population growth is "anything but environmentally meaningless"[/h][FONT="]
Julie Axelrod's article, "Farewell, Sierra Club," paints a poignant picture of the large environmental groups' ("Big Green") retreat from population stabilization:[/FONT]
[FONT="]"That population increase in California, and more specifically where it came from, brings me to another problem with Big Green, which is that it prioritizes helping its political allies over actual protection of the national environment.....
[FONT="].... In recent years, the progressive coalition (which, of course, includes environmentalists) has insisted on total conformity on all issues. Probably there is no better issue to illustrate the top-down demand for conformity by Big Green than immigration....
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[FONT="]....Growing up in California gave me not just an appreciation of nature but an awareness of the impacts of unsustainable levels of immigration on a community, with those impacts very much including effects on the natural environment. The fact is that living in many of the most historically desirable places in California is very different today than it once was because of the tremendous growth in state population. Roads are horribly congested, infrastructure is inadequate to support the population, biodiversity is threatened by urban sprawl, and limited water supplies are under great pressure. Domestic migration to California has been lower than domestic out-migration from California for a number of years, yet foreign migration has meant California's population has kept growing. This growth is anything but environmentally meaningless."[/FONT]
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Axelrod describes the political and financial pressures that led the Sierra Club to reverse its position on immigration, which is attributable to 90% of our country's population growth, and leads to increased traffic, additional urban sprawl, crowded cities, strained water supplies, and loss of open space. And she considers what a new conservation movement - one that addresses the primary factor in America's unsustainable population growth - might look like.[/FONT]
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Read the article and join the conversation by clicking below. Share the article on social media along with your thoughts.[/FONT]