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  Yahoo News 16 Oct 06
300 million US consumers make an outsized environmental mark
by Virginie Montet

National Geographic 16 Oct 06
300 Million Americans Will Take Great Environmental Toll, Report Warns
Kelly Hearn

Yahoo News 15 Oct 06
U.S. population set to hit 300 million
By Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - America's population is on track to hit 300 million on Tuesday morning, and it's causing a stir among environmentalists.

People in the United States are consuming more than ever — more food, more energy, more natural resources. Open spaces are shrinking and traffic in many areas is dreadful.

But some experts argue that population growth only partly explains America's growing consumption.

Just as important, they say, is where people live, what they drive and how far they travel to work. "The pattern of population growth is really the most crucial thing," said Michael Replogle, transportation director for Environmental Defense, a New York-based advocacy group.

"If the population grows in thriving existing communities, restoring the historic density of older communities, we can easily sustain that growth and create a more efficient economy without sacrificing the environment," Replogle said.

That has not been the American way. Instead, the country has fed its appetite for big houses, big yards, cul-de-sacs and strip malls.

In a word: sprawl. "Because the U.S. has become a suburban nation, sprawl has become the most predominant form of land use," said Vicky Markham, director of the Center for Environment and Population, an advocacy group.

"Sprawl is, by definition, more spread out. That of course requires more vehicles and more vehicle miles traveled."

America still has a lot of wide-open spaces, with about 84 people per square mile, compared with about 300 people per square mile in the European Union and almost 900 people per square mile in Japan.

But a little more than half the U.S. population is clustered in counties along the coasts, including those along the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. Also, much of the population is moving away from large cities to the suburbs and beyond.

The fastest growing county is Flagler County, Fla., north of Daytona Beach; the fastest growing city is Elk Grove, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento; and the fastest growing metropolitan area is Riverside, Calif., about 50 miles east of Los Angeles.

"In New York City, people tend to think of that as an urban jungle, but the environmental impact per capita is quite low," said Carlos Restrepo, a research scientist at New York University.

"It tends to be less than it is for someone who lives in the suburbs with a big house where they need more than one car."

The Census Bureau projects that America's population will hit 300 million at 7:46 a.m. EDT Tuesday. The projection is based on estimates for births, deaths and net immigration that add up to one new American every 11 seconds. The estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. are included in official population estimates, though many demographers believe they are undercounted.

The population reached its last milestone, 200 million, in 1967. That translates into a 50 percent increase in 39 years. During the same period, the number of households nearly doubled, the number motor vehicles more than doubled and the miles driven in those vehicles nearly tripled.

The average household size has shrunk from 3.3 people to 2.6 people, and the share of households with only one person has jumped from less than 16 percent to about 27 percent.

"The natural resource base that is required to support each person keeps rising," Replogle said. "We're heating and cooling more space, and the housing units are more spread out than ever before."

The U.S. is the third largest country in the world, behind China and India. The U.S. is the fastest growing of the industrialized nations, adding about 2.8 million people a year, or just under 1 percent. India is growing faster but the United Nations considers it to be a less developed country.

About 40 percent of U.S. population growth comes from immigration, both legal and illegal, according to the Census Bureau. The rest comes from births outnumbering deaths.

"It's not the population, it's the consumption that can do us in," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"These are the luxuries we have been able to support until now. But we're not going to be able to do it forever."

National Geographic 16 Oct 06
300 Million Americans Will Take Great Environmental Toll, Report Warns
Kelly Hearn

One U.S. demographer says it will be a Hispanic baby boy born in Los Angeles to a Mexican immigrant mother on Tuesday, October 17. But regardless of whether this prediction proves to be right, someone in the coming days will tip the U.S. population to 300 million people, a demographic milestone with heavy environmental fallout.

A recent study by the Connecticut-based Center for Environment and Population (CEP) paints a troubling picture of the United States as an expanding nation of "super-sized resource appetites" making disproportionate claims on the planet's resources.

Steady birth rates, longer life spans, and heavy immigration have helped make the U.S. the third most populous nation in the world, behind China and India.

"The main point is that we are the only industrial country having this kind of population growth," said Martha Farnsworth, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, who was not affiliated with the CEP report.

"People aren't aware that we differ so much from other industrialized countries in this respect." Population upticks present political, economic, and cultural challenges, Farnsworth says, but in the U.S., the environmental pressures are especially evident.

The CEP study notes that the U.S. has just 5 percent of the world's people but consumes nearly a quarter of all natural resources.

Unhealthy Choices

Some experts say the link between population trends and land use, water quality, and biodiversity is subtle and complicated.

Population growth alone is a poor measure of environmental impact, notes CEP director Vicky Markham.

"Large numbers of people in America don't always have to automatically translate into negative environmental impacts," Markham said. "It depends on the choices made." Where Americans live, what they drive, the food they eat, and things they value shape the country's ecological footprint, she explains.

As the nation grows by 1 person every 11 seconds, those decisions lead to growing pressures on nature.

The CEP study says each American currently withdraws water at rates three times the world average; produces five pounds (2.2 kilograms) of trash per day, or five times the average in developing countries; and occupies 20 percent more land for housing, school, shopping, and other uses than the average American did two decades ago.

The 300 millionth American will find an increasingly suburbanized nation of low-density sprawl, the report concludes.

"Sprawl development is now the predominant form of land-use change," Markham said. Spreading out rather than building up means Americans drive more, produce more greenhouse gases, and require more roads and land for malls, shops, and schools.

The study says 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) of farmland are plowed under daily to meet suburbia's needs.

America's plump populace also eats what the study says are "disproportionately high amounts of meat and dairy products," foods that require more land, water, and energy than grain and vegetable-based diets.

Going Coastal

In addition to the effects that America's growing population is having on the land, environmentalists are paying attention to where people are going.

More U.S. citizens are moving south and west, the study finds, shunning clustered development and cold climates for coastal zones. Fifty-one percent of Americans now live 100 miles (161 kilometers) from a coast, according to the report.

These migration patterns put more people in the path of Mother Nature's wrath.

Farnsworth, the former Census Bureau head, notes that natural disasters will continue to reap greater tolls as more people move to previously uninhabited areas. Most of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina was done to homes built in the recent past, she said.

Increased migration to the coasts also forces coastal ecosystems to accommodate population density five times that of other geographic regions, Markham says.

The country's two population hot spot--the South and the West--are already under environmental stress. Of the ten states with the highest rates of plant and animal species extinction, seven are in the U.S. South, according to a 2002 study by NatureServe, a Virginia-based nonprofit.

The South is also the region with the highest number of mussel and fish species at risk of extinction, according to the CEP report. The West, already saddled with water- and land-management problems, is the fastest growing region and the one where house sizes exceed the U.S. average.

Though the U.S. family has shrunk over the last 30 years, house sizes and the amount of land around them have grown, the report finds. The average number of people per household fell from 3.1 in 1970 to 2.6 in 2000. Meanwhile, the average size of new single family homes grew by 700 square feet (65 square meters), the study says.

But the 300 millionth American may have a room of his or her own--in the second home of Baby Boomer grandparents.

Baby Boomers--those born in the decade following the end of World War II--are the biggest spenders and consumers in U.S. history, the CEP report finds.

"The Baby Boomer segment of the U.S. population has the highest natural resource use, and largest environmental impact of any generation," Markham said. "They also have the highest rate of second home ownership."

Yahoo News 16 Oct 06
300 million US consumers make an outsized environmental mark
by Virginie Montet

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States, the only industrialized country with strong population growth, now has 300 million people whose lifestyle makes a disproportionately huge mark on the global environment, experts say.

The world's third most populous country behind China and India, the United States has five percent of the world's population. But it consumes -- alone -- more than a quarter of the world's natural resources, more than any other country, according to the National Report on Population and Environment, put out by the US-based Center for Environment and Population.

"The nation's relatively high rates of population growth, natural resource consumption and pollution combine to create the largest environmental impact, felt both within the nation and around the world," the report read. "The US population has the largest ecological footprint in the world," it adds.

The United States emits almost one quarter of carbon dioxide (CO2) and greenhouse gases -- emissions that are expected to soar 43 percent by 2020. With more than 237 million vehicles in 2006 (up from 98 million 40 years ago when the population was 200 million) the transport sector alone accounts for a third of CO2 emissions.

The average US driver spends some 47 hours every year in rush hour traffic jams compared to 16 hours 20 years ago, according to the CEP. And the size of typical American homes has ballooned even as the number of people living in each home has declined from 3.1 per household in 1970 to 2.6 in 2000.

"At the same time, the average size of new single-family homes increased by more than 700 square feet," the report says.

The taste for super-sizing homes has driven up the amount of natural resources used in home construction as well as the amount of energy used to heat them in the winter and cool them in the summer.

Overall, taking into account the space given to housing, schools, roads and commercial areas, each American uses 20 percent more land than in the mid-1980s.

Americans also use an average of three times more water than the average planet resident. Pollution has left roughly 40 percent of US rivers off-limits to fishing and bathing.

Every day, US consumers toss out 2.3 kilos (five pounds) of trash -- an average of five times more than people in developing countries. Their food consumption, one third of which is animal origin, tops the scales at an average 136 kilos of meat per person compared to 72 kilos for a European and 27 kilos for a resident of a developing country.

With a growing population and a mushrooming demand for resources the country's infrastructure is vulnerable, said Carlos Restrepo, a research scientist at the Wagner School's Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS).

One sign of straining infrastructure is that there have been some 400 blackouts between 1990 and 2004. Given the interdependence of production and electric distribution systems, and water supplying and oil or gas supplies, breakdowns are taking longer to fix, Restrepo said.

"Those levels of energy consumption are probably not sustainable," he said.
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