The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism

Environmental issues played a starring role in the Congressional campaigns of 1970, a first in American politics according to New York Times reporter Gladwin Hill. “While the ‘environmental crisis’ has not become the major national issue that some militants predicted last spring it would be,” Hill wrote, “it has clearly emerged as a new and possibly portentous fixture of the political landscape.” Just a few months after Earth Day demonstrated Americans’ strong interest in environmental issues, major environmental organizations planted their flags in Washington, D.C. The nascent environmental lobby helped put conservation and pollution on the agendas and on the lips of every candidate fighting to retain a seat. However, while many politicians talked about environmental issues, few debated them; the topic, Hill reported, remained “in the category of ‘motherhood and apple pie.’ ” Frank Denholm, a Democratic candidate for Congress from South Dakota, said, “Pollution is not an issue with me until I find someone who is for it.” Alabama state senator Pierre Pelham told Hill, “Nobody’s going to take a stupid side of the issue in the campaign.”¹

Environmentalism was in fact riven with controversy, but on the national political stage much of that controversy took time to emerge. In the first flush of Earth Day, those who felt regulation did not go nearly far enough stayed hidden from view, limited mainly to local organizations and the alternative press. A strong anti-regulatory push by pollution-generating industries also remained out of the spotlight, negotiated in private or else papered over with green slogans. Critics of regulation’s ecological ineffectiveness (as opposed to its economic harms) wanted to be heard, and so emerged more quickly. “We are strapped in, crisis dead ahead, we can see it, are evaluating it, but not acting on it yet, even though we are already suffering from pains of inaction,” Environmental Action’s Cliff Humphrey wrote in 1969.2 For Environmental Action, and for a new organization called Zero Population Growth, “inaction” included anything less than systemic change that restructured the national economy and reoriented the mind of the modern consumer. The environmental crisis was not metaphorical but real, and it demanded a proportional response.

People had created the crisis, Humphrey believed, in their pursuit of material comfort. “We have taught ourselves to believe in a man created image,” he wrote, “but we are beginning to detect natural limits. The American dream images of the fifties are beginning to fade.”³ To find fault with the high-consumption “American dream” of the 1950s was to condemn more than nostalgia; 1970s environmentalism was in many ways a referendum on 1950s affluence. Critics like Humphrey questioned some of the most basic premises of postwar American society, including economic growth, individual freedom, and even democratic government. These bedrock premises, they believed, might have to be limited or abandoned for crisis to be averted. In the late 1960s and early 1970s when the mainstream environmental movement steadily advanced its agenda through litigation and legislation, crisis-minded environmentalists doubted the efficacy of conventional reform and instead treated environmental issues as a national emergency. In a state of emergency, they argued, fundamental assumptions should be questioned and unprecedented political sacrifices made.

Edmund Muskie of Maine, running for a third term in the Senate, seriously considered the question of limiting economic growth at a press conference just before Earth Day. He rejected the idea but worried that attending to environmental concerns in an expanding economy might require Americans to “give up the luxury of absolute and unlimited freedom of choice.”4 Muskie’s dilemma was the environmental movement’s too. Most environmentalists advocated a moderate approach even as they wondered whether settling for moderate reform might necessitate radical change. Environmental organizations began to master the tools of incremental improvement at the same time as environmental ideas pointed toward desperation, crisis, and even questioning industrial society itself. While major environmental organizations secured a part in the familiar machinations of government, others asked whether human survival might require giving up some of what Americans held most dear.

By the end of the 1970s, Michael McCloskey, executive director of the Sierra Club, could look back and identify unequivocally the Club’s primary strategy for protecting the environment: “I think the Sierra Club has mastered the theory of lobbying, particularly with respect to Congress, better than any other organization in the environmental field,” he said. By then the Club took pride in its reputation as a leader in conventional methods of reform. “The club has become known preeminently as the environmental lobby,” McCloskey said. “We tackle more issues; we are there on more occasions and before more committees than any other organization is.”⁵ Chief lobbyist Brock Evans told a reporter, “Whenever there is a big issue of any kind on the hill, and we meet in coalition with other environmental groups, we are always the ones who are turned to to deliver the mail.”⁶ The Sierra Club had, over the course of the decade, become an influential organization in Washington, D.C., scoring victories over bigger and better-funded industrial groups. And it was part of a much larger trend. “The environmental movement, nurtured by Earth Day’s youthful enthusiasm, has matured into a political lobby of formidable sophistication,” the Washington Post reported in 1979. “More than a dozen environmental groups now have Washington offices that rival the best corporate lobbies.”⁷

Major environmental groups had committed to a strategy of lobbying and working through the federal government years before the Washington Post acknowledged that strategy’s effectiveness. Beginning in the early 1970s the environmental movement focused on Congress and the courts, organizing its advocacy around lobbying and lawsuits. Out of the varied ideas and approaches that characterized the movement soon after Earth Day, the major groups emerged with a clear plan of action: to use the federal government to institute legal protections for the natural world. Three developments in particular furthered this goal, creating the foundation for environmentalism’s legislative approach to protecting natural resources and hitching the movement to the liberal democratic state.

The first major change occurred when the Sierra Club lost its tax-deductible status. Between 1954 and 1976, the deductibility of donations to conservation organizations remained a murky question. In 1954 the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Lobbying Act of 1946, making it a criminal offense to engage in lobbying without registering to do so. Being an official lobbyist, however, risked an organization’s tax-deductible status, and lobbying was defined only as directing a “substantial” portion of funds or activities toward influencing legislation. What that meant was never clear; organizing letter campaigns certainly counted as a form of lobbying, but did testifying before Congress? Although David Brower would later warn environmentalists against the centrifugal pull of Washington, D.C., in 1954 he argued that the Club should simply forego its tax status and commit itself to lobbying. Other directors worried how members would react to this aggressive stance and voted to set up a separate, non-deductible organization called Trustees for Conservation so that the Club could stand apart from the rough and tumble of politics.8

Once the home of the amateur tradition, by the 1970s the Club had moved purposefully if haltingly toward a more professionalized environmentalism. In the early 1960s more traditionally minded directors like Edgar Wayburn continued to insist that the Club was not a lobbying organization.9 The battles over dams in Dinosaur and Grand Canyon, however, forced the issue. Soon after Brower’s “battle ads,” the IRS suspended the Club’s tax-deductible status. Having lost its high perch, the Club took the path Brower initially advised and switched from a 501c3 tax-deductible organization to a 501c4 non-deductible group free to lobby for or against legislation (although not yet for or against specific candidates). The Club lost many large contributions between 1966 and 1968, but its newfound pugnaciousness and notoriety attracted many more small donations and its membership grew from 39,000 to 60,000. “We should almost be grateful,” Brower told the San Francisco Chronicle.¹⁰

The Club’s experience led, eventually, to greater clarity for other environmental organizations. Several groups gave up their tax-deductible status and established charitable foundations for non-political work, while others limited their lobbying to 5 percent of their overall program expenses. Finally the National Audubon Society pushed the IRS to specify what qualified as an acceptable amount of lobbying for a 501c3 organization, and in the Tax Reform Act of 1976 the IRS designated that amount at 20 percent of a group’s overall budget. Audubon opened a Washington office soon after. The Club, having lost its tax-deductible status and gained a much wider constituency, found nothing to hold it back from direct involvement in legislative debates, and it led the way toward more active lobbying by many other groups. Almost accidentally, the Club remade itself and the movement as a political force.¹¹

The second development pushing environmental organizations toward the nation’s capital, and toward a close relationship with the federal government, was the legislative infrastructure for protecting natural resources and natural areas constructed by the Nixon administration. During Nixon’s presidency, Congress passed some of the most far-reaching environmental protection laws in U.S. history. Revised and strengthened Clean Air and Clean Water acts, the Endangered Species Act, the Resource Recovery Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) all came to fruition between 1968 and 1973. Most significant of all was the 1969 passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law with implications far beyond the estimations of the senator who championed it—Henry Jackson of Washington—and the president who signed it into law.12 NEPA established the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a three-person board that advised the president on environmental matters and oversaw the implementation of NEPA’s regulatory aspects, and NEPA required that any government agency planning a significant project first file an environmental impact statement (EIS) that described all reasonable alternatives to the planned approach. Within a few short years, environmental groups used NEPA to temporarily halt construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, and to force further review of their potential effects; to postpone the operation of several nuclear power plants; and to delay the sale of oil and gas leases off of the Gulf Coast. By April, 1972 federal courts had ruled on more than 160 decisions related to NEPA, and continued to do so almost weekly.

Historians have disagreed on the motivations behind Nixon’s environmental credentials but generally attribute them to opportunism. Believing that environmentalism excited many and offended few, Nixon seized on it as an issue that might gain him respect among younger and more liberal voters without losing support among conservatives. In private, the president complained about environmentalists and criticized his own appointees as unreasonable in their support of environmental regulation. But, despite himself, Nixon declared the 1970s the “environmental decade,” and he appointed Russell Train chairman of the CEQ, William Ruckelshaus administrator of the EPA, and Walter Hickel Secretary of the Interior, all of whom proved friendlier to environmentalists than either Nixon or environmental groups could have guessed. Nixon also implemented a legal regime that would come to define the environmental movement for the rest of the twentieth century. Under Nixon-era laws, environmental organizations developed close working relationships with federal agencies, found new bases for lawsuits, and gained clout on Capitol Hill. Intentionally or not, the Nixon administration invited the environmental movement to Washington, D.C.¹³

The third development furthering a strategy of lobbying and litigation was the expansion of environmental law. At the same time as more established groups honed their lobbying operations, many new organizations extended the boundaries of the environmental movement’s legal activities. Major legislation like NEPA depended on enforcement, and enforcement required watchdogs that would poke and prod federal agencies with lawsuits. These watchdogs could employ staff attorneys and pursue expensive litigation thanks to the Ford Foundation, which committed funds to public interest law in the 1970s. Over several years, the Ford Foundation awarded tens of millions of dollars to public interest law groups in fields like consumer advocacy, civil rights, and especially environmental law. Ford Foundation grants allowed the establishment or expansion of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Continuing legal success further bound the Club and the broader environmental movement to an approach based on legislative gains in Congress and on enforcement of those gains in the courts.14

The Sierra Club’s shift in tax status and newfound freedom to lobby, the Nixon administration’s environmental protection laws, and the establishment of environmental law organizations all molded the environmental movement in the early 1970s. These shifts worked together like interconnected cogs: lobbying produced—and litigation fortified—key environmental laws; those laws provided opportunities for successful lawsuits; and legislative victories bolstered the reputation of environmental organizations, expanding membership and providing greater support for renewed lobbying.¹⁵

A strategy centered on legislators and litigators furthered the professionalization of the environmental movement. Older groups like the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, and later the Wilderness Society, along with new groups like NRDC, EDF, and the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), shifted the movement’s focus from grassroots organizing and major publicity campaigns to technical expertise in environmental policy and direct involvement in the legislative process. The major organizations began to fashion common goals and a shared strategy and to focus on the daily business of politics. Collectively, the primary environmental groups employed only two or three full-time lobbyists in 1969; by 1975 they had forty lobbyists in the halls of Congress, and ten years later more than eighty.¹⁶ Environmental organizations grew rapidly, taking advantage of the sudden popularity of environmental issues and using improved direct mail techniques. By 1971 the Sierra Club had added over three thousand new members a month, the Wilderness Society signed up over twenty thousand each year, and the relatively unknown Friends of the Earth surpassed twenty thousand members before its second anniversary.¹⁷

Professionalization also meant expanding funding by broadening environmental organizations’ appeal, and that often meant toning down their rhetoric. “Many of the ‘eco-freaks’ who had marched on Washington on Earth Day did not leave the capital when the event concluded,” Arthur Magida wrote in the National Journal in early 1976. “Gradually, their long hair was shorn, their pockets were filled with grants from foundations or donations from members of their environmental groups, and their naivete was replaced by the sophistication of experienced Washington lobbyists.” Creating a wider base of support meant not just looking the part but sounding dispassionate, often relying on technical arguments rather than ethical principles. The new lobby’s success, Magida suggested, rested on a less zealous approach to its work. “Environmentalists have been able to phrase their arguments on non-environmental grounds” Magida wrote, “and to pick up a greater variety of allies because of their growing confidence, decreasing doctrinairism and increasing tolerance.”18

“Tolerance” meant accepting the give-and-take of politics. “As one Congress ends and another begins, it is well to ask whether we and other groups like us are solely the victims of compromise,” Michael McCloskey wrote in 1977.¹⁹ “Might we not more properly be viewed as beneficiaries as well, and really, as time goes by, more beneficiaries than victims?” Brock Evans explained the benefits of compromise in his regular column for the Sierra Club Bulletin: “We win some and lose some—that’s the nature of the business,” he reassured readers in 1975. “Being realists, we cannot hope to succeed at every point.”²⁰

The environmental movement’s tone of detachment, its acceptance of compromise, and its calculated political gamesmanship did not signal a lack of ideology. It signaled exactly the opposite. The shift to Washington, D.C. meant an embrace of institutions and processes as well as a particular set of values. Environmental groups mastered the methods of liberal democratic politics and accepted the premises behind those methods. Despite the early-1970s rhetoric of “environmental revolution” and a “new ecological ethic” heard among grassroots activists and established groups alike, for the most part the major organizations appealed to trusted and familiar political principles. Sierra Club director William Futrell called NEPA an “environmental magna carta” and described environmentalism as part of the “grand struggle for justice, which is the haunting theme of our history.”²¹ Environmentalists frequently called for an “environmental bill of rights” to delineate government’s various ecological responsibilities, and Michael McCloskey justified political compromise as “the means by which legitimate interests in a democracy come to understand that they are being given fair consideration.”²²

Mainstream environmental groups took the public favor generated by Earth Day and turned it into political influence in the nation’s capital. The blossoming of small-scale activity in 1970 was encouraging, McCloskey thought, but finally ineffective: “The powerful who were polluting,” he later wrote of Earth Day’s aftermath, “needed to be confronted with the power of government, not just with hit-or-miss voluntary action.”23 With Nixon-era laws firmly in place, the environmental movement gravitated toward Washington, D.C. and the authority of the regulatory state.

Even in Washington, D.C., amid the environmental movement’s emergence as a savvy public interest lobby, a more dissident sort of environmentalism surfaced. Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was not much more than a year old when it opened its Washington, D.C. office just before Earth Day in 1970. In late 1968, an entomologist named Charles Remington and an attorney named Richard Bowers incorporated the group in Connecticut in order to fight overpopulation by advocating “zero population growth.”²⁴ The group’s goal was an end to population growth; the means, troublingly, were not yet specified. Within three years, ZPG had thirty-two thousand members.

Anxiety about population politics stretched back to at least the mid-eighteenth century, decades before Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, when Europeans and American colonists weighed the benefits and harms of a growing population for a polity’s resources and governance. The idea of global overpopulation, however, and the concern that there might be too many human beings in existence, was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. The fear of planetary overpopulation stitched together a complicated tangle of issues including agriculture and the distribution of resources, migration and national borders, reproduction and human rights, economic theory and policy, and ecology and conservation.25 That fear could also be reduced to a narrow relationship between a particular species and its resource base. In the United States, Aldo Leopold spelled out the ecological bases of overpopulation concern in his work on animal populations and carrying capacity in the 1930s (work that environmentalists would explicitly compare to global human population in the 1960s). In 1948 conservationists William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn, in Road to Survival and Our Plundered Planet, respectively, considered a global carrying capacity for the human population and how overstepping it could trigger resource shortages and environmental degradation.²⁶ An American optimism born of material abundance and technological advancements kept population worries muted but never silent in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the late 1960s, the emerging environmental movement stoked fears of excessive human numbers again.

The environmental movement’s emerging view that people were the problem led almost inevitably to concern with overpopulation. Only a few mainstream environmentalists, such as Brower, articulated this holism in no uncertain terms. But conservation groups’ increasing discomfort with the crowds at national parks, the roads through forests, and the loss of countryside to suburbs made it a short step to the view that there were simply too many people in the world. The sharp criticisms of people’s impact on the planet at the Club’s 1960s wilderness conferences made ZPG’s message all the more urgent.

Within months of incorporating, ZPG relocated its headquarters to Los Altos in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1960s the Bay Area was one of the centers of population activism. The move allowed Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, to serve as the group’s first president. Ehrlich was the most famous overpopulation alarm-raiser in the country—the first edition of The Population Bomb was reprinted twenty-two times between 1968 and1971—but he was just one of many in the Bay Area. In 1969 Stephanie Mills proclaimed her refusal to have children as she delivered the valedictory speech at Oakland’s Mills College. As much an activist for women’s rights as for environmentalism, Mills connected the two causes whenever she wrote or spoke. Ehrlich in particular hovered behind Mills’s valediction; she had read The Population Bomb a few months earlier and decided that a rosy graduation speech amid the population crisis would be little more than “a hoax.” Mills was instantly a divisive figure, celebrated for her environmental credentials and her refusal to accept a predetermined place in society, and criticized for questioning the choices of others and for dismissing centuries of tradition. After her graduation address she spoke widely, joined several boards of directors, headed the campus program for Alameda County Planned Parenthood, and edited a new magazine called Earth Times for Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner. Mills continued to believe in rousing the public to attention, even if “some people won’t get bothered about the smog in Los Angeles until it blocks the view of their TV screen.”27

In October of that same year, in a parking lot in Hayward several miles south of Oakland, Whole Earth Catalog publisher and founder Stewart Brand invited anyone interested to surround themselves with a plastic wall and subsist on only water for a week.²⁸ Brand hoped his “Liferaft Earth” would illustrate the dangers of overpopulation and limited resources. More than one hundred people—including Stephanie Mills—participated. Just north of Oakland, Berkeley folksinger Malvina Reynolds wrote songs about sprawl and the harm wrought by too many people. Long before Mills, Brand, and even Ehrlich concerned themselves with overpopulation, Reynolds had satirized the endless conformity of “ticky tacky” suburban houses south of San Francisco in “Little Boxes,” a song made famous by her friend Pete Seeger. In “Song of the San Francisco Bay,” Reynolds wrote about highways that paved over countryside so that cars could travel miles and miles “To find a place where they can see a plant, a bush and a blade of grass, and a lady bug and a bee.”²⁹

ZPG pushed further what was already a key issue for mainstream environmental organizations. The Sierra Club’s interest in overpopulation predated ZPG by many years. Population discussion emerged at the Club’s wilderness conferences by the early 1960s, encouraged by Club director Daniel Luten, and continued in its board of directors meetings soon after. In 1968 the Club’s directors assembled an advisory committee on population policy, and in 1969—the year ZPG was founded—the Club released a series of statements calling for the liberalization of abortion law and an end to pronatalist policies. David Brower persistently called attention to the issue of overpopulation and continued to do so after he left the Club. ZPG’s first lobbyists worked out of the Washington, D.C. offices of Brower’s Friends of the Earth. In 1970 Club president Phil Berry listed population first among “central subjects of concern for conservationists in the ’70s,” ahead of both wilderness and pollution.30 Berry suggested that the Club work with Planned Parenthood and the still little-known ZPG, a suggestion the Club’s National Population Committee passed on to Sierra Club chapters. Even though Club staffers like Louise Nichols questioned the wisdom of taking strong stances on population politics and especially immigration policy as early as 1973, overpopulation remained among the Club’s main priorities for the rest of the decade thanks largely to the efforts of John Tanton and Judy Kunofsky, two population activists who worked with both the Club and ZPG. When the U.S. House of Representatives considered a bill to establish an “Office of Population Policy” in 1982, Kunofsky testified in favor of the bill on behalf of the Club.³¹

The Wilderness Society came to population politics largely at the behest of its own supporters, though it did so more slowly and cautiously than did the Sierra Club. “All attempts to preserve wilderness areas will come to naught if mankind does not soon limit his numbers,” one member wrote to Society director Stewart Brandborg and several Wilderness Society councilmembers in 1969. Councilmember James Marshall responded sympathetically, acknowledging the importance of overpopulation but noting that the Society “has the responsibility, believing as it does, to concentrate on conservation problems.”³² Later that year Congressman Morris Udall wrote to Brandborg, stating, “It is my conviction that, increasingly, the conservation movement is going to have to get involved in the population problem.”³³ By 1971 the Society felt impelled to take a stand. “As the one species ever to undergo long-term, large-scale population growth,” the Society’s “Statement Concerning the Need for a National Population Policy” explained, “we must take seriously our responsibility to make our demands upon the earth finite by limiting the growth of our numbers.”³⁴

Unlike more established environmental organizations, ZPG did not consider overpopulation an issue connected to its core interests; overpopulation was its core interest. ZPG emerged near the end of a period that historian Thomas Robertson has called “the Malthusian moment,” from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, when phrases like “spaceship earth” gained wide currency and overpopulation grabbed the attention not just of environmentalists but of policymakers.35 ZPG leveraged this attention in its Washington, D.C. office and in its relationships with better-known groups, but whereas many environmental organizations treated overpopulation as a gradual problem to be dealt with over time, ZPG tapped into a vein of acute distress that ran through the environmental movement. Beneath the earnest concern of mainstream environmentalism lay a deeper dread about immediate threats and irreversible trends.

Stressing the worst-case scenario did not always endear ZPG to potential supporters. While the Sierra Club bragged of “delivering the mail” and environmental lobbyists pointed to Earth Day as evidence of their broad mandate, ZPG took pride in its relative unpopularity. “All new ideas seem extremist to those who uncritically support the established way of doing things,” one of the group’s early pamphlets read. “Thus it is right and proper that ZPG should seem like an extreme group to the general public.”³⁶

ZPG did strike many as extreme, even with environmentalism ascendant. “The degree of antagonism and hostility I encounter at the very mention of ZPG seems to ensure that the members of our chapter will go on having true communication only with the other members of our chapter,” one ZPG member from Rhode Island complained less than a year after Earth Day.³⁷ ZPG did itself no favors by taking on cherished ideas, the most cherished among them “pronatalism”—policies and beliefs that encouraged reproduction and presumed that “parenthood is the natural, expected and proper status to achieve,” in the words of board member Judy Senderowitz. The inevitability of parenthood was “in most cases so ingrained as to be unnoticed and thus unquestioned.”³⁸ ZPG wanted to debate a subject that most Americans did not even consider debatable.

To heighten the public’s concern about overpopulation, ZPG focused on education as much as on legislation. In this regard it was not unlike Cliff Humphrey’s Ecology Action in Berkeley. Humphrey believed that “almost all governmental programs are irrelevant to the crisis we face, as our officials can only propose solutions to problems that they publicly acknowledge.”³⁹ ZPG, which pushed for a national population policy, had more regard for federal action than did Humphrey, but like Ecology Action it found the national political conversation profoundly attenuated, and its view of social and environmental problems in the United States sprang directly from a sense of crisis. In the late 1960s and the 1970s this acute sense of crisis defined a vital strain of environmentalism, distinguishing it from the mainstream movement and marking one of the key elements of environmental radicalism.

A small but influential group of thinkers assembled the intellectual scaffolding of crisis environmentalism.41 Best known was Paul Ehrlich, who warned about the peril of overpopulation in articles and public lectures until David Brower convinced him to put his warnings into a book. The Population Bomb was one of the first in a series of dire predictions at the turn of the decade about human society and natural limits that together formed a sort of doomsday canon for environmentalists. These foreboding works shared the basic premise that any society based on continued growth, whether of people or products, was bound to run up against the simple fact of finite natural resources. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne Ehrlich were among the first environmentalists to successfully draw attention to the idea of limits at a time when Americans still lived comfortably within the nation’s longest economic boom—a boom that just a few years earlier had prompted Lyndon Johnson to declare “unconditional war on poverty” and to champion a “Great Society” that set its goals higher than mere affluence. In The Population Bomb the Ehrlichs warned that the world’s exponentially increasing population could lead to widespread famine and political instability in just a few years. They argued that the number of people in the world, combined with environmental degradation and ever-higher consumption, was already outstripping available resources and would soon trigger wars and social turmoil. The Ehrlichs took the central points of Malthus’s 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population and placed them squarely in the American present. But instead of claiming that society approached the edge of a demographic cliff, the Ehrlichs claimed it had already overshot and was now hanging in midair, ready to plummet.⁴²

Few took crisis environmentalists entirely seriously, but few ignored them outright. As historian Derek Hoff has shown, federal concern with population growth declined steadily during the Nixon administration. But that concern received “a very temporary shot in the arm” from the publication of The Limits to Growth, a report authored by a group of scientists known as “the Club of Rome” and funded by an Italian businessman named Aurelio Peccei. Headed by another husband-and-wife team, Donella and Dennis Meadows, the group based its findings on computer models that estimated population growth, food supply, availability of natural resources, pollution, and industrial production to predict worldwide conditions many decades into the future. From that seemingly objective point of view, the group discerned a dark horizon: unless the rates of industrial growth, population increase, and natural resource depletion slowed dramatically, “the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”⁴³ A more concise statement of this grim view appeared in Blueprint for Survival, a book based on a special issue of the British magazine Ecologist: “The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable,” the editors stated in the book’s opening pages.⁴⁴ The belief that human wealth and comfort could be achieved and expanded by greater and greater industrial production was an illusion, and people could ignore this difficult truth “only at the cost of disrupting ecosystems and exhausting resources, which must lead to the failure of food supplies and the collapse of society.”

The literature of crisis environmentalism offered more than just simple apocalypticism. These ominous books provided a critique, implicit or explicit, of the modern assumption of endless consumption. That critique came into greatest focus among a group of heterodox economists who were both convinced that crisis was at hand and interested in different ways of thinking about the economy. Most proposed some version of a steady-state system as a means of preventing destructive growth. A steady-state economy was one in which the total population and the total amount of natural resources remained constant, at a particular level and with a minimum of “throughput” (that is, the fewest births and deaths and the lowest levels of production and consumption). The ecological economist Herman Daly argued that a steady-state system was inevitable, given finite resources.45 The only question was whether nations would ignore this fact until the point of human extinction (which, given its balance of no people maintained by no throughput, would simply be another sort of steady state) or else try to shape their economies around the inescapable limits set by the planet itself.

The British economist E. F. Schumacher held views similar to Daly’s but used a different language to express them: Schumacher called his approach “Buddhist economics”—a view of the economy that focused less on material wealth and more on human happiness. Its hallmarks were simplicity, moderation, and an orientation toward the local. Economic sense, for Schumacher, was a matter of achieving “the maximum of well being with the minimum of consumption.” The unsustainable use of resources constituted a form of violence, and following Buddhism’s pacific teachings there was “an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does.”⁴⁶

With discrete vocabularies, Daly and Schumacher articulated the same view of modern economic thought and modern patterns of consumption. Daly called the problem “growthmania,” the “mind-set that always puts growth in first place—the attitude that there is no such thing as enough, that cannot conceive of too much of a good thing.”47 Schumacher echoed this thought: “An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth—in short, materialism—does not fit into this world,” he wrote, “because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”⁴⁸ A society oriented toward economic growth, both Daly and Schumacher believed, was a society hammering away at its own foundation.

The problem resided not just in the habits and practices of the modern world but in the very goals that world set for itself. Industrialization in the late twentieth century, Schumacher explained, “produced an entirely new situation—a situation resulting not from our failures but from what we thought were our greatest successes.”⁴⁹ Daly articulated this position in even more specific terms: modern accounting considered “defensive expenditures” incurred to counteract the effects of production (building deeper wells and bigger pumps to pursue a dropping water table, building new refineries to process lower-grade ores from depleted mines, and making fertilizers to encourage depleted soil) as part of the gross national product, and so a part of beneficial growth. “This” Daly said, “creates the illusion of becoming better off, when in actuality we are becoming worse off.”⁵⁰ Economic activity demanded by diminished resources counted as positive expansion, and so liabilities were measured as assets.

Environmentalists concerned with limits to growth challenged some of the most fundamental assumptions of the mid-twentieth-century United States. More goods, more jobs, and greater production might signal an imperiled economy rather than a healthy one, and more products for more people might be a disastrous rather than a noble goal. “We now have a vested interest in our own destruction,” Cliff Humphrey said. “What generates capital or credit today? A field lying fallow, seeded in legumes, building up its nitrogen, or a housing tract on the same parcel?”⁵¹ What had been thought to be the promise of the modern age was in fact its greatest threat; material wealth did not mean boundless progress but instead meant impending crisis. Simple reform in that case held little promise. The vaunted environmental lobby fought a forest fire with a garden hose.

The line between incremental reform and sweeping change grew all the more apparent in the 1970s. All environmentalists considered the harms of economic and population growth but not all sided against them. Few if any major environmental organizations would go as far as Cliff Humphrey, who called the stock market “merely a device for signalling [sic] an imminent or successful act of destruction or contamination of some part of our surroundings.”52 Humphrey readily disavowed established institutions and abided extreme solutions because he remained convinced that anything less would flirt with calamity. The more an environmentalist like Humphrey accepted the existence of environmental crisis, the more he rejected the world as it was.

At the edge of crisis simple endurance was the first order of business. If the planetary environment was in a state of crisis, environmentalists concerned themselves with survival as much as with quality of life. “The mounting evidence of environmental degradation in the 1960s,” historian Adam Rome writes, “provoked…anxieties about ‘survival,’ a word that appeared again and again in environmentalist discourse.”⁵³ Even though radical environmentalists of the 1980s read and took to heart the major works of crisis environmentalism, those works’ focus on human survival suggested how non-ecocentric crisis environmentalism was by comparison.

For a few years, Cliff Humphrey did not just shout from offstage when he warned of crisis and survival. At the beginning of the 1970s his existential concerns surfaced even at the Sierra Club, where he sat on the “survival committee.” Officially known as the “environmental research committee” but never referred to that way, the survival committee described itself to the Club’s board as a “think tank” charged with providing advice on issues “outside the ‘traditional’ areas of concern of the Club.” Responding to the amorphous state of environmentalism early in the decade and the growing array of ideas associated with it, the survival committee went far outside the areas of concern the Club had favored for nearly a century. Although it couldn’t bring itself to disavow economic growth in 1971, it willingly questioned many other premises of modern American society. Richard Cellarius, one of the Club’s directors and the committee chair, assigned committee members futurist tracts like Jean-Francois Revel’s Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun, and Warren Wagar’s Building the City of Man. Cellarius told the committee he believed “reformation/revolution is our only hope. I accept Revel’s thesis that it is beginning…. The environmental years of 1969-70-(71?) made up one early ‘campaign’ of the revolution.” The end goal of the Sierra Club, he suggested, should be a global, steady-state civilization without nations and centered on the sustainable use of all resources.54

The Sierra Club never adopted Cellarius’s idea as a stated goal, and the handful of directors who retreated to a cabin on the California coast or to a lodge in the Sierra Nevada to discuss the possibility of a drastically changed world finally had little impact on the Club’s program. But in the early 1970s the Club took the committee’s ideas seriously. Phil Berry, president of the Club when it formed the survival committee, attended several of the committee’s meetings and remembered it as an attempt to consider the many dire predictions for the future that circulated in those years. “We were talking about the elements of a program essential to global survival,” he explained. The environmental movement was broadening itself to consider issues far afield from national parks and forests, Berry said, and “We were talking about how to put this into a Sierra Club agenda for action. That’s really what the survival committee was.”⁵⁵

The rhetoric of survival revealed two key characteristics of early 1970s crisis environmentalism. The first was that despite its frequent references to the decimation of natural resources and the destruction of natural places, crisis environmentalism was overwhelmingly oriented toward people. The ecocentrism of later radicals remained either rare or inchoate in the early 1970s. Whereas radical environmentalists of the 1980s would prioritize nonhuman nature, crisis environmentalists worried most of all about the fate of humanity. John Fischer, a contributing editor and columnist at Harper’s, suggested as much when he proposed an experimental university—“Survival U.”—structured entirely around “the study of the relationship between man and his environment, both natural and technological.” The crucial question for students at Fischer’s imagined campus would be how long people could last on a degraded planet. The loss of forests and animals was frightening, but the potential loss of people was the greater tragedy. “For the first time in history,” Fischer declared, “the future of the human race is now in serious question.”⁵⁶

What was a thought experiment for Fischer was a serious undertaking for Paul Ehrlich. In 1971, Ehrlich and political science professor Robert North first proposed a program in “social ecology” at Stanford University to study the intersection of biological systems, social institutions, and cultural values. “It is apparent that mankind is moving toward a crisis of unprecedented magnitude,” the program’s official proposal began.57 The crisis of human existence that Ehrlich and North feared arose from a combination of industrialization, overpopulation, environmental degradation, and above all a culture of endless expansion. Ehrlich and North wanted to approach social and biological systems as interconnected and ultimately unsustainable, in courses like “Environment, Ecology, and Survival” and “Social Institutions and the Survival Problem.” People faced the greatest risks on a dirty and crowded planet, and so the social ecology curriculum focused on “stimulating social action for reducing mankind’s peril.”

The second characteristic of crisis environmentalism was an orientation toward the future and a certainty about its dire condition. Crisis environmentalism rested on the conviction that the house of cards would inevitably topple. Crisis environmentalists demanded a dramatic and purposeful response, not to a clear and present danger but to a disaster that was, ostensibly, moments away. They called attention both to what was easily demonstrated, such as oil spills, pollution, or plans for a dam or power plant, and to more serious but less apparent events lurking in the near future. And so, because the public reflexively dismissed overly pessimistic outlooks, they battled optimism. They dealt with the public’s rosy disposition in several ways: by making the pragmatic argument that preparing for the worst entailed the least risk, by claiming that the die had been cast and that it was no longer a matter of if but of when, or by making predictions as rigorously as possible. Ehrlich tried all three. He claimed that planning for disaster would yield benefits even if disaster never arrived, he opened The Population Bomb with the words “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and most of all he tried to buttress his prophecies with data.⁵⁸

Jay Forrester—a member of the Club of Rome, a mentor to the Meadowses, and a founder of the field called system dynamics—specialized in anticipating what the near future would hold. Forrester claimed that complex social systems, from corporate management to urban poverty to the interaction of population, industrialization, and pollution, could be modeled and predicted with the help of a computer. In an article first published in Technology Review and later reprinted in the ZPG National Reporter, Forrester argued that social policy was often ineffective and even counterproductive because it relied on linear thought and failed to understand the complicated relationships between different social and natural systems.59 Ehrlich read the article with interest and proposed using, at Stanford, something similar to Forrester’s DYNAMO (Dynamic Modeling) computer program. Intrigued by the Club of Rome and its computer simulations, Ehrlich arranged for the Meadowses to visit Stanford. The predictive dimension of system dynamics made it compelling for Ehrlich and vital to crisis environmentalists. Only some claim to scientific rigor would allow policymakers to take crisis environmentalism seriously. Explaining to readers why they had published Forrester’s article, the editors of ZPG National Reporter wrote, “ZPG is a fortune-telling organ…. The roads to doom seem many and broad. The path to a desirable, or even tolerable, life seems intricate and narrow. Professor Forrester tells the future. And he tells it the way we want to hear it told.”⁶⁰ The first step to survival was knowing what was to come. And the presumption of knowing quickly led to a second step: political reaction.

So urgent was the crisis environmentalist sense of imminent catastrophe that some willingly questioned not just demographic and economic growth but also democratic governance. The political implications of crisis environmentalism often simmered beneath the surface of calls for more drastic measures, and on occasion they rose into plain sight. Crisis environmentalists found it difficult to reconcile the state of emergency they described with democracy’s meandering procedures and its tendency to favor compromise over decisive and dramatic action. Radical environmentalists of the 1980s would become similarly frustrated with the gradualism of democracy, but while those later radicals used direct action to either accelerate or circumvent conventional reform, crisis environmentalists pondered a wholesale abandonment of democratic procedures.

Democracy’s great strength and weakness, political scientist David Runciman argues, has always been indecisiveness. Lacking centralized authority and a consistent vision, modern democracies have relied on trial and error. Democratic governments, according to Runciman, think in the short term and succeed in the long term. They take on problems as they arise, and while this ad hoc approach can appear aimless in the moment it tends to bear fruit over time. What democracies have lost through equivocation they have gained through flexibility. At various points of crisis in the twentieth century, this was not a reassuring method of decision-making; experimentation became a less palatable mode of governing as the point of no return approached. And democratic nations, Runciman explains, held tight to the belief in a bright future in order to remain confident of their haphazard mode of politics, even when optimism seemed foolhardy. “Could any democratic politician be expected to point out the limits of growth,” he asks, “and to dampen expectations of continued expansion in living standards?”61

Crisis environmentalists argued that the more urgent the issue at hand, the less effective were democratic governments at taking necessary action. Ecologist Garrett Hardin explicitly linked environmental problems to broad political and social values in his 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” arguing that the use of any shared resource in a manner that maximized individual gain would inevitably harm the general good. If individual actors behaved in a rational manner, seeking to advance their own interests, the net result would be to degrade any commons. Hardin’s example was a grazing pasture, on which the advantage for any single herdsman of adding an animal to his herd (the value of that animal on the market) was significant, while the disadvantage (the effects of overgrazing borne by all the herdsmen) was marginal. Logically, each herdsman would keep adding to his herd to increase its value, and in doing so help destroy the pasture. “Freedom in a commons,” Hardin wrote, “brings ruin to all.”⁶²

Hardin never explained in his original essay exactly what he meant by “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,” although he implied that it would involve a combination of public education and enforcement. On its own, mutual coercion was not an argument against democracy—all democracies, in fact, depended upon the proscription of some freedoms through mutual agreement—but the political scientist William Ophuls, who wholeheartedly agreed with Hardin, pushed the logic of Hardin’s essay to its ultimate, antidemocratic conclusion. Ophuls pointed to “striking similarities” between “The Tragedy of the Commons” and Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth-century justification for a strong, centralized state. Like Hobbes, Hardin advocated giving up certain individual liberties in order to gain social order, and argued that the loss of particular political rights actually led to greater freedom by handing the state the power to improve the general social good and, through it, individual opportunities. The path to social stability, for Hobbes and, Ophuls claimed, for Hardin, ran not through freedom and democracy but through something approaching authoritarian control. The tragedy of the commons illustrated the need for quick and selfless action, and the leisurely pace and self-interested nature of democratic reform could only lead to disaster. “Real altruism and genuine concern for posterity may not be entirely absent,” Ophuls admitted, “but they are not present in sufficient quantities to avoid tragedy. Only a Hobbesian sovereign can deal with this situation effectively, and we are left then with the problem of determining the concrete shape of Leviathan.”63

Crisis environmentalists’ willingness to abandon personal freedoms did not arise from philosophical considerations alone. A larger sense of decline hung over the 1970s, fed by energy crises, runaway inflation, and political scandals. The Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 to foster close relations between North America, Western Europe, and Japan, called the halting political response to the decade’s adverse conditions “The Crisis of Democracy” in a 1975 report. The oil shock of 1973, in particular, raised alarms about overpopulation and the conservation of natural resources despite that event’s largely political origins. In 1974 the economist Robert Heilbroner suggested basic social and political change might be the only safeguard against overpopulation, environmental destruction, and nuclear war. Caught between the individualistic and growth-oriented consumer culture of the mid-century and the era of limits that the 1970s seemed to inaugurate, fundamental and difficult changes might be realistic “only under governments capable of rallying obedience far more effectively than would be possible in a democratic setting. If the issue for mankind is survival, such governments may be unavoidable, even necessary.”64

A year later, Heilbroner felt even more convinced that the tension between individual freedom and commonweal that characterized liberal society could not be eased through democratic means. “The malaise, I have come more and more to believe, lies in the industrial basis on which our civilization rests,” he wrote. Democratic reform could not address such a fundamental problem; so entrenched was the culture of individualism and material gain that only force, backed by authority, could undo it. At certain historical points, Heilbroner said, “It is not possible to reconcile the hopes of the moment and the needs of the future, when a congruence between one’s personal life and the collective direction of all mankind cannot be established without doing violence either to one’s existence or to one’s understanding.” Balanced against each other, personal lives could not match the weight of the species and planet. Eventually human society as a whole would have to make a grim choice that Ophuls described as either “the coercion of nature” or “an iron regime.”⁶⁵

Throughout the 1970s, ZPG wrestled with the question of coercion. The ease with which overpopulation could theoretically be ended by fiat made obligatory measures seductive. Kingsley Davis, the demographer often credited with coining the term “zero population growth,” liked to make this point in the most clinical terms: “If ZPG were the supreme aim,” he wrote, “any means would be justified. By common consent, however, raising the death rate is excluded; also, reducing immigration is played down. This leaves fertility reduction as the main avenue.” The problem, Davis contended, was simply a matter of what people were or were not willing to give up to achieve demographic stability. “If having too many children were considered as great a crime against humanity as murder, rape, and thievery,” Davis pointed out, starting with a premise few people would support, “we would have no qualms about ‘taking freedom away.’ ” In fact, he continued, having children would be understood as a violation of others’ rights.66

This sort of turning of the moral tables was a common and often effective gambit for ZPG. The organization liked to refer to laws restricting abortion as “compulsory pregnancy,” and to describe those laws as arising from “a particular segment of the population…imposing its religious and moral doctrine upon others who do not share their views.”⁶⁷ But pointing out the wrongness of one form of coercion did not establish the rightness of another, as ZPG was well aware. Executive Director Shirley Radl wrote to Ehrlich in early 1970 to assure him that the young organization was learning how to present itself publicly. “We have good readings from the membership, the general public, and our legislators, and an understanding of what is acceptable to all such factions,” she explained. “We know, for example, that to discuss hard-line compulsory birth control is totally taboo.”⁶⁸ The question persisted, though, among those most concerned with overpopulation. ZPG supporters like Edgar Chasteen strongly advocated compulsory birth control, and Radl had to explain the impracticality if not the undesirability of such a position. “We have so many really serious problems with which to cope,” she wrote to Chasteen, “I’m not sure any of us are ready to take on the controversy which will result if we adopt a resolution endorsing compulsory birth control.”⁶⁹

Having the discussion and taking the position were different matters, as ZPG came to understand. The group started off swimming against the current. “We aren’t afraid to discuss the possibility that population pressure may force compulsory family limitation” ZPG stated in 1969.70 That fearlessness would quickly fade, however, in ways illustrated by one of the odder episodes in ZPG’s history. In November 1971, director Michael Campus contacted ZPG about his new film based on the novel The Edict, to be called Z.P.G. Like the novel, the film would tell the story of an overpopulated future in which a “World Federation Council” makes reproduction a capital offense. Campus claimed to be inspired by The Population Bomb and wanted ZPG’s endorsement of a film he hoped would alert Americans to the perils of too many people.⁷¹

Privately, ZPG’s leadership discussed the financial implications of the film, which might produce significant royalties as well as a relationship with billionaire Edgar Bronfman, who partially funded Z.P.G. After seeing an early version of the movie, executive director Hal Seielstad recommended endorsing it as long as Paramount Pictures agreed to a prologue and epilogue scripted by ZPG.⁷² Publicly though, ZPG began to put strategic distance between itself and the film, uncomfortably aware of how even fictional suggestions of coercion might tar the group. A week after Seielstad recommended endorsement to ZPG’s executive committee, he sent a “crisis alert” to chapters: “Since ZPG advocates personal responsibility for voluntarily restricting child birth rather than government decrees enforced by pain of death,” he said, “this association is very damaging to our image with the movie viewing public.”⁷³

Paramount rejected the idea of a prologue and epilogue despite an appeal by Campus himself. ZPG had not trademarked its name and so had no guarantee of financial gain either. Weeks before the film’s release, ZPG filed suit to block the use of its name and began organizing leafleting by its members to make sure that audiences knew the difference between Z.P.G. and ZPG. No injunction was granted, and Z.P.G. hit theaters in March. Increasingly concerned about its brand, ZPG polled moviegoers in the Bay Area, asking them whether they were aware of an organization called Zero Population Growth, whether they thought such an organization called for government restrictions on childbirth, and whether they thought the organization endorsed the film. A plurality—before and after viewing—believed that population activists advocated government regulation of reproduction. On the other hand a majority had never heard of ZPG, so it was unclear whether there was much of a brand to damage. By May, ZPG felt comfortable declaring victory as it became clear the film was a flop.74

ZPG never in fact endorsed any form of coercion, although it confronted the possibility more seriously than did any other environmental group. At the organization’s founding, several board members, including Garrett Hardin, pushed the idea and were soon outvoted. Richard Bowers, a negligible presence for most of ZPG’s history despite helping to found the group, later regretted that initial shift toward voluntarism. By the 1990s, Bowers believed Hardin had been proven right and that “human coercion is needed and the sooner the better for humankind and more so for wildlife.”⁷⁵ For the most part, though, controversies about coercion remained more talk than action. ZPG staffers never actively sought legal strictures to limit human numbers. They just believed in the urgency of the environmental crisis enough to hazard the conversation. Walking up to the line without ever overstepping it, ZPG’s discussions of coercion suggested how environmentalists could question, however hesitantly, the unalloyed good of individual freedom, material comfort, the nuclear family, and mid-century liberalism.

New Left activists pointed to overpopulationists as an example of environmental antihumanism. “ZPG says that there are too many people, especially non-white people, in the world,” New Left Notes reported in 1970, “that these people are terrifying and violent, and that their population growth must be stopped—by ‘coercion’ if necessary.” New Left Notes made two specific critiques of population politics: first, it was coercive; second, it blamed all people for environmental destruction instead of recognizing the much greater guilt of the wealthy and the privileged. Population activists abetted the most powerful in society by failing to expose the powerful’s outsized responsibility. “This is not the first time that racist hysteria and fascist practices…have been advocated by capitalist agents,” the newspaper observed.⁷⁷

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) accused ZPG of reckless simplification, reasoning that by treating all people as a single flat category, population activists ignored not only human difference but also human value. Ehrlich heard this complaint from both sides of the political spectrum. His two chief antagonists were the Left-leaning biologist and environmentalist Barry Commoner and the Right-leaning economist Julian Simon. Commoner said that Ehrlich never took account of social inequality, capitalism’s drive for profits, or how some people were polluters and other people were victims; Simon argued that Ehrlich failed to appreciate human ingenuity, capitalism’s knack for innovation, and how more people could mean more solutions to the problems of scarcity and pollution. Both critics accused Ehrlich of failing to treat people as complicated and autonomous individuals rather than as simply part of the human horde.⁷⁸

This was a key grievance against not only population activists but also against environmentalists more generally. Too often, critics said, environmentalists treated all people as the same in the good and the harm that they did, ignoring the ways people could help as much as hinder and suffer as much as perpetrate. SDS, Commoner, and Simon, despite their differences, could all make this critique of population politics because they shared a commitment to liberal individualism. The environmental movement, less committed to individualism, could subordinate individual autonomy to the interests and faults of a collective “people.” ZPG and its sympathizers took this further, questioning the obligation to individual freedom that had informed liberal political thought for centuries, and in particular questioning a twentieth-century liberalism that embraced consumption and economic growth and emphasized social distinctions. By criticizing material prosperity and minimizing social difference, ZPG cut against the grain of a particularly modern liberal ethos. These points of tension were basic and informed much of the debate between ZPG and its antagonists. But ZPG was also a bridge between crisis environmentalism’s harsh rhetoric and mainstream environmentalism’s more pragmatic reformism. As a crisis-oriented group that operated in a broad political context, ZPG challenged modern liberal commitments while still trying to pay heed to pluralism and to how categories like gender and race structured society.

Any objections to material consumption challenged the essence of mid-twentieth-century American liberalism. “Growthmania” was not simply a matter of acquisitiveness. The shift in emphasis among policymakers from economic stability to economic growth in the mid-twentieth century was good for business, for organized labor, and for the middle class, as well as for social reform. Government-sponsored economic growth provided steady profits for the corporate sector, a rising standard of living for workers and suburbanites, and increased military funding for the Cold War, and it allowed politicians to talk less of redistributing wealth and resources and more of expanding them. In this calculus, social reform was not a matter of taking away from some to give to others but instead a means of letting everyone have more. “The interpenetration of growth economics and liberal politics,” Robert Collins writes, “produced a defining feature of public life in the 1960s—the ascendancy of what might be labeled ‘growth liberalism.’ ” Economic growth was not an end in itself, Collins makes clear, but rather the means to many ends: the formula that solved for all problems social, political, and material.79 Consumption was not only an economic activity but also a civic responsibility and a political process. According to Lizabeth Cohen, never-ending growth constituted the engine of “an elaborate, integrated ideal of economic abundance and democratic political freedom, both equitably distributed, that became almost a national civil religion from the late 1940s into the 1970s.”⁸⁰

For much of the American public in the postwar decades, social reform, an expanded state, and material affluence were not just coincidental but connected. Consumption aligned closely with liberal political ideals. Economic growth stood at the center of a broad social and political vision that celebrated population growth in economic as well as cultural terms. More people producing and consuming would lead to ever-greater benefits for all. Nonetheless, as historian Derek Hoff has shown, many policymakers found reasons to reconcile a lower birth rate with assumptions of continued increases in production and consumption. Departing from some of John Maynard Keynes’s demographic views, these legislators and pundits subscribed to what Hoff calls “stable population Keynesianism” (SPK), essentially the view that state-induced consumption could offset lower numbers of consumers. In fact, fewer consumers might even raise wages and encourage gains in per capita consumption. According to SPK adherents, the incomes and purchasing power of buyers mattered far more to the overall economy than the mere number of buyers. “By contending that the size of the population means little to the economy compared to spending and saving habits,” Hoff writes of SPK, “it contributed to the rise of consumerist liberalism in the United States.”⁸¹

Population politics contributed, and eventually population politics took away. By the 1960s and 1970s, Hoff explains, environmentalists had to decide whether to argue that limiting the population would foster economic growth and benefit everyone materially or that economic growth itself was inherently harmful to the planet and so must be limited too. They had to decide, in other words, whether or not to challenge what had become part of the scaffolding of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic expansion and material affluence. Different environmentalists made different arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of an expanding economy and its relationship to environmental degradation. Most, however, at least agreed that economic growth, population growth, environmental harm, and political beliefs were all intricately related.

The Sierra Club waffled on these questions, at times critical of consumption for consumption’s sake but more often uneasy with dismissing the engine of national prosperity. Even the survival committee, which discussed dystopian and utopian possibilities as a matter of course, found itself conflicted. Members of the committee discussed the problem of “credit, which has led people to have a vested interest in their own destruction,” and lamented “the lack of a rational measure of quality other than profit,” but generally agreed that “the Sierra Club should not oppose growth as such.”82 To oppose an ever-expanding economy, the Club knew, was to oppose many Americans’ dreams for the future.

Crisis environmentalists had fewer qualms. ZPG argued that economics and ideology combined in a system it called “structural pronatalism.” This system was part and parcel with mid-century suburbanization and the consumer lifestyles that went along with it. The public and private institutions that facilitated middle-class consumption, ZPG believed, also encouraged people to have children in both obvious and subtle ways. The most obvious was the tax code, which offered deductions for children and which treated married couples as a unit rather than as individuals, discouraging two-income households. Somewhat less obvious was the suburb itself, which presented a host of problems. A report by ZPG’s population policy committee noted how suburban homes wasted energy; suburban neighborhoods “increased the racial, social, and age segregation of American society”; and suburban living patterns were “associated with a high-fertility life-style” as well as “the increasing isolation of women from the job market.” Large automobiles further contributed to suburban expansion, to large families, and to air pollution. One member of the committee advocated the elimination of federally insured loans for houses larger than 1,500 square feet. Another recommended a ban on all but subcompact vehicles.⁸³

For crisis-minded environmentalists the birthrate alone was far from the whole story. The problem was people, but even more so people’s consumption. This sort of systemic view did not always endear environmental groups to their supporters. George Mumford of Grayling, Michigan, wrote to Paul Ehrlich in 1970 to complain about The Environmental Handbook, which was published by the organizers of Earth Day and edited by Garrett DeBell, one of ZPG’s lobbyists. The book included “some shockingly-dangerous notions,” Mumford said. “For example, on pages 6 and 7, a kook named Keith Lampe advocates phasing out nations and capitalism.”84 This was true. Lampe had long advocated a dismantling of capitalism and industrialism. In his own newsletter he told his readers, “enormously overcrowded planetary conditions make necessary a rapid evolution from competition to cooperation, that in the U.S. specifically…means shucking capitalism and evolving a community for which there is yet no label, a community within which the notions of ownership and money no longer have meaning or appeal.”⁸⁵ Ecology Action pushed beyond simple math too. “Simply stated,” one of its editorials read, “a few people with what most of the world considers a high standard of living have an infinitely greater negative impact than few or even many people with a low standard of living.”⁸⁶ ZPG sought to put this theory into action, proposing in 1973 a Center for Growth Alternatives that would advocate “selective limitation of growth in population, consumption and development,” and that would seek to “reverse the general thought that affluence carries with it the right to disproportionate use and degradation of the public environment.”⁸⁷

By opposing an economy based on ever-greater consumption, environmentalists picked a fight with a key element of twentieth-century American liberalism. By opposing more products and more purchases, they set themselves against what many people viewed as an essential quality of American citizenship. While the nation yelled, “More,” environmentalists cried, “Less.” Sometimes population activists glossed over the ways that different social and economic contexts shaped different levels of consumption and environmental impact. At other times they paid close attention to such distinctions. At their most discerning, population activists considered the ways that environmentalism and twentieth-century liberalism overlapped but never aligned.

Unlike many environmental groups, ZPG frequently discussed gender equality. This was a matter of both conviction and convenience. It was a point of conviction for ZPG that normative gender roles both subordinated women and encouraged childbirth. ZPG called this “psychological pronatalism,” a cause and a consequence of structural pronatalism. While structural pronatalism was easy enough to identify once described, psychological pronatalism was so ubiquitous as to be invisible. “The enormous power exerted by this set of social attitudes results from its pervasiveness in all aspects of our lives,” one member of the population policy committee reported.88 This ever-present point of view was buttressed by a lack of professional options for women and the assumption that most women should raise children at home; restrictions on advertising contraception alongside television’s regular celebrations of sex and parenthood; and hostility to sex education in schools. In the mid-1970s ZPG argued that addressing the unquestioned association of women with domesticity started with passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, aggressive affirmative action programs, and state-level commissions on the status of women. But laws were not enough. Women would not dutifully take responsibility for birth control, Rhonda Levitt and Madeline Nelson wrote in a special issue of the ZPG National Reporter by and about women, “unless we are able to assert our humanity outside of motherhood and servitude to our husbands.”⁸⁹

It was a matter of convenience for ZPG and for reproductive rights groups like Planned Parenthood that they could set aside some of their key differences and unite in defense of abortion rights, which they both supported wholeheartedly. In the 1970s ZPG and Planned Parenthood adopted each other’s ideas and language to further their common goal. “Never before had we been so aware of the crucial interdependence of peoples and economies on our fragile, finite planet,” the Planned Parenthood Federation of America said of the previous year in its 1974 annual report. “We have learned to speak of food production, population growth, economic development, environmental protection and human rights not as ‘separate problems,’ but as interrelated dimensions of a single world crisis of survival.”⁹⁰ ZPG, for its part, dedicated several issues of the ZPG National Reporter to reproductive rights. “Legalizing abortion will be the final step in giving women control over their own reproduction,” the editors of one of those issues wrote.⁹¹ Planned Parenthood of Alameda and San Francisco participated in the Bay Area’s “World Population Day” in 1974 along with ZPG and the Sierra Club, while ZPG signed on to a letter Planned Parenthood sent to every member of Congress on the second anniversary of the key abortion decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.⁹²

For several years, ZPG and Planned Parenthood, and the communities they represented, stood on political and philosophical common ground. But eventually feminists grew increasingly concerned about population groups’ focus on a vague “greater good,” and how that focus might restrict women’s right to have children rather than their right to terminate pregnancies. Between 1968 and 1971, The Birth Control Handbook, a popular Canadian feminist text published by McGill University students, reversed its view of overpopulation and the groups associated with it. The original edition had linked birth control to both women’s liberation and the welcome reduction of human numbers. After 1971 the pamphlet described population control—and in particular, Ehrlich and ZPG—as a racist project that relied on coercive methods. ZPG recommended its members avoid subsequent editions.93

Even more volatile for population activists than the issue of gender was that of race. The Population Bomb famously opened with Ehrlich’s description of his family’s taxi ride through New Delhi, a white family inside of the car and an endless mass of nonwhite people outside of it, the defining moment when Ehrlich understood the population problem “emotionally.” He immediately drew a line from the United States to the crowded streets of urban India, writing, “The problems of Delhi and Calcutta are our problems too. Americans have helped to create them; we help to prevent their solution.”⁹⁴ But the visceral sense of the insideness and outsideness of that taxi characterized population politics for decades.

African American leaders from Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson to Roy Innis criticized population activists for using a white, middle-class point of view to frame the population issue while claiming population as a universal problem.95 As Samuel Hays suggested in the late 1970s, environmentalists presented limits to growth as a problem for all people although the issue often arose from concern for open space rather than for the state of cities.⁹⁶ Conservation groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society took up the issue more readily than did antipollution activists. Terms like “survival,” applied frequently by population activists to the entire human race, held different meanings when applied to particular social groups. In March 1972 the Black Panthers organized a Black Community Survival Conference in Oakland, where they registered over 11,000 voters, tested more than 13,000 people for sickle-cell anemia, and gave away 10,000 chickens to local families. Environmentalists’ rhetoric of survival inspired little sense of urgency among the Black Panthers, who understood survival as the economic and political vitality of communities of color. “Primarily,” Panther chairman Bobby Seale said, “we want to unify the people and let them know that the party can institutionalize concrete survival programs that serve their basic political desires and needs.”⁹⁷

By 1969, stung by African American leaders’ criticisms and increasingly cognizant of the shortcomings that those leaders so easily identified, Ehrlich and other ZPG activists had begun to stress the disproportionate impact of white, middle-class families. “Our goal is to change the hearts and minds of middle-class America,” ZPG claimed in 1970.⁹⁸ Racism and paternalism continued to inform many population activists, however. That same year a ZPG chapter coordinator from Albuquerque wrote to the ZPG National Reporter about the possibility of compulsory birth control classes. “There is a great deal of resentment about the welfare mothers being able to have as large a family as they want, at the taxpayer’s expense,” the coordinator said, “while the taxpayer is being asked to limit himself to only one or two natural children.” Explaining that she served on the board of the local Planned Parenthood Association and knew firsthand that compulsory classes were something that “welfare mothers” wanted, she noted, “A lot of the women actually do not know how a conception takes place, let alone that anything can be done about preventing it.”⁹⁹

The most severe critics of Ehrlich and ZPG accused them of opening the door to racial genocide. Such accusations sprang from the close connection between family planning and eugenics in the early twentieth century. Well into the 1940s and 1950s, writers considering the relationship between population and environmental limits—most notably William Vogt—continued to organize their ideas according to a strict sense of racial hierarchy.

The assumption, however, that eugenics persisted as practice and theory throughout twentieth-century population politics is misleading, as Hoff has argued, and it ignores the many differences among efforts to limit population from decade to decade. While individual population activists continued to harbor racist views, by the 1960s and 1970s population organizations were trying to break with the movement’s disturbing past. In 1971 the Council on Population & Environment, concerned about rifts between business, labor, social justice, and environmental groups, organized a meeting with representatives from each to discuss how to address population and environmental issues while paying heed to matters of employment, housing, and poverty.

Where Ehrlich once used India as an example of overpopulation, ZPG increasingly used India as a point of comparison to illustrate American overconsumption. “This is why ZPG has directed its educational campaign toward the affluent consumptive middle classes,” executive director Hal Seielstad wrote.100 ZPG member Lewis Perelman insisted that to achieve a global steady state would require “a vastly more equitable distribution of wealth and power among all the people of the world than exists today.”¹⁰¹ Increasingly, ZPG called into question suburbs, cars, and middle-class lifestyles as much as it did the birth rate. In 1972 it adopted a “local growth resolution” that recognized municipalities’ right to limit population through local ordinances but noted that such regulations “must at all times be administered so as to protect and enhance the opportunities of the disadvantaged, including the poor, the aged, and racial and religious minorities.”¹⁰²

Nevertheless, the taint of eugenics stayed with population activists for many decades. Black leaders tended to point out how proportional balance between different social groups was every bit as important as overall numbers. Jesse Jackson argued that numbers were a source of strength for minority communities, and that limiting childbirth meant limiting political power. Keith Lampe, always trying to reconcile his environmentalism with the broader Left, wrote, “Most black people in North America fear that all the talk about population control might really be a cover story for genocide. For this reason it is urgently important that groups like Zero Population Growth (ZPG) make abundantly clear their opposition to genocide in any form.”103 Although not at Lampe’s bidding, ZPG-California did take on the question. Its 1972 convention included a panel discussion called “Population Control, Racism, and Genocide,” which put Paul Ehrlich on stage with several African American community leaders from the Bay Area. “I think the discussion was very valuable in bringing out some of the basic misunderstandings and legitimate concerns that black people have toward the population-stabilization movement,” secretary-treasurer Jean Weber wrote to Ehrlich afterward. As though speaking for the movement as a whole, she continued, “I know I learned a great deal from the discussion, but I still have a long way to go.”¹⁰⁴

Race was an obvious if at times surreptitious dimension of population policy in discussions of immigration. A focus on immigration was to some degree inevitable for population activists during the 1970s, a decade during which the fertility rate declined in the United States and blame for population growth shifted from childbirth to new residents. Environmental organizations had wrestled with immigration since at least the early 1960s, when the Sierra Club began to debate the “population explosion,” but it was in the 1970s that immigration grabbed the attention of the environmental movement as a whole. The shift was in part the work of John Tanton, appointed chairman of the Club’s population committee in 1971 and several years later president of ZPG’s board.¹⁰⁵

“Any population policy that fails to deal with illegal immigration can be of little worth,” Tanton reported to ZPG.106 He was in favor of restricting legal immigration and fighting illegal immigration as determinedly as possible. ZPG largely agreed, proposing in 1975 a reduction of immigration to roughly the level of emigration, and recommending a restriction of illegal immigration through better funding for the Border Patrol; a crackdown on employers hiring undocumented immigrants; and an increase in foreign aid to improve potential immigrants’ economic opportunities at home.¹⁰⁷ Because immigration of any kind did not actually increase the number of people in the world, environmentalists often had to explain why they paid any attention to it. They made two broad arguments that came close to contradicting each other. The first was that Americans had a responsibility to safeguard American resources, and that any increase in the population of the United States jeopardized the American parks, forests, waterways, cities, and ecosystems that environmentalists fought to protect. The second was that more people in the United States meant more people living a profligate and costly American lifestyle. Sometimes both arguments appeared at once. Gerda Bikales warned members of the National Parks & Conservation Association that “immigrants come, essentially, because they want to eat, dress, live, and consume like Americans—a luxury our planet can no longer afford,” and at the same time spoke of avoiding “the ultimate sacrifice from us—the social and ecological ruin of our land.”¹⁰⁸ Americans were at once the scourge of the planet and the stewards of a fragile landscape.

Tanton represented both the balance of interests that could coalesce around the population question and the troubling directions in which it could all lead. An ophthalmologist with a practice in Petoskey, Michigan, Tanton worked not just with the Sierra Club and ZPG but also with the Michigan Audubon Society and the Michigan Natural Areas Council. He was president of the Northern Michigan Planned Parenthood Association, chairman of Planned Parenthood’s Great Lakes public affairs committee, and a member of the Sierra Club’s survival committee. Many in the Club—and even in ZPG—began to ignore or oppose the increasingly severe proposals that Tanton fired off.¹⁰⁹ The Sierra Club’s Louise Nichols wrote to Chuck Clusen about Tanton and immigration in 1973, stressing the potential for embarrassment and offense. “I always suspected Petoskey Michigan might not be the best place to live and understand what’s really going on in the world,” she wrote.¹¹⁰ Ehrlich, responding ambivalently to Tanton’s occasional requests that Ehrlich call for immigration restriction, acknowledged the role of immigration in population politics but stressed the many problems with immigration restriction.¹¹¹ But both the Club and ZPG took immigration seriously as an environmental issue, ceding Tanton’s basic point and hoping that he would stick to ecological arguments. That hope was misplaced. By the end of the decade, frustrated with inaction by both organizations, Tanton began to set up anti-immigration organizations, including Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform. During the 1980s and 1990s he increasingly talked about immigration in terms of race, language, and culture, and was less concerned with natural resources than he was with “a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”¹¹²

Tanton was an extreme example of the ways that environmental arguments could be used to support bigoted, jingoistic ideas. Well into the twenty-first century, a vocal minority of mainstream environmentalists pushed for closed borders. There were also more subtle and complicated ways that environmental activists questioned basic claims underlying twentieth-century liberalism, many of them rooted in a fundamentally ecological perspective as opposed to a fundamentally social one. The anarchist Murray Bookchin pointed this out when he criticized Gary Snyder’s widely published essay “Four Changes,” which claimed, “there are now too many human beings.” Bookchin called this statement “a social problem…being given biological dimensions in a wrong way, a biological primacy that it still does not have.” The issue was almost purely a political one, according to Bookchin. “The solution to this kind of ‘overpopulation’ lies not in birth control within the existing system, but in a social revolution that will harmonize man’s social relations with man and man’s relationship with the natural world.”113

Bookchin gestured toward a set of concerns that would become central to radical environmental debates in the 1980s: whether environmental problems were essentially social or ecological, whether justice preceded sustainability or vice-versa, and eventually whether human welfare mattered more than did the integrity of the natural world. Bookchin continued to argue the points that he made in the 1960s when a new school of radical environmentalists appeared in the 1980s. Those radicals would be both more dedicated to the uncompromising protection of the natural world and more dubious of modern liberalism’s commitments to individual freedom and economic growth.

In 1976, the environmental scholar Timothy O’Riordan wrote of Garrett Hardin’s essay, “The commons parable is powerful because it drives right at the heart of environmentalism—the moral relationship between short-term selfishness and enlightened longer-term community interest.”¹¹⁴ Environmentalists often understood the tragedies of various commons in these terms: the unrestrained advance of individual interests jeopardized a collective reliance on a resource, an ecosystem, or a planet. When too many people tended to their own sheep, they failed to notice the entire meadow disappearing in front of them.