President Trump say’s our country is full. How crowded is too crowded in America – Global Population: 8 billion and growing

This is a very interesting question and a question who’s time may be coming.  With millions of people throughout the world immersed in the unfortunate circumstances of refugee status and mass human migration, more now than at the height of WWII by U.N. calculations (https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html), and President Trump’s pronouncement to migrants that “…we can’t take you anymore. Our country is full…” (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/04/05/trump_to_illegal_immigrants_sorry_our_country_is_full_so_turn_around.html), has the time come to face head-on what governments and politicians have feared facing – how much population can the world sustain, are we full?

Ezra Klien, of Vox, says “America Isn’t Full” and explains we need immigration to sustain and grow our economy (https://www.vox.com/2019/4/9/18300621/donald-trump-immigration-population-america-full).  USA Today’s J.D. Scholten’s article “Trump is wrong to say we are full.  Across Iowa and rural America we need immigrants” (https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/08/trump-wrong-rural-america-not-full-needs-immigrants-column/3394691002/), Scholten asserts we need more people to address labor shortfalls.  How full is full?!

Then there's the "Global Footprint Network." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Footprint_Network).  They have an interesting way of gauging how people are overdrawing the worlds capacity to absorb the human strain placed on it and replenish itself - or absorb the consumption people take on it.  Much like the "national debt clock" (https://www.usdebtclock.org/), they use the annual calendar to estimate on which day of the year people have exceeded the earths capacity to sustain us without drawing down the earth's resources – presumably beyond the unsustainable point of no return.  They call this “Earth Overshoot Day.”  Earth Overshoot Day is the day when humanity has exhausted nature's budget for the year. For the rest of the year, society operates in ecological overshoot by drawing down resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

 According to Global Footprint Network data, (https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/us_population) the U.S. can sustain a population of only about 150 million at a reduced consumption level similar to Europeans.  Whoa, I guess we’ve overshot that number.  The assertion is the U.S. population is using renewable resources twice as fast as they can be regenerated.  And, if everyone on the planet lived like an average American, it would take over 4 Earths to produce the renewable resources and absorb the wastes needed to support us.  Where do we go with that?

 Its worth a look at this quick population growth presentation. I first saw it in The Army War College.  I'm not sure where we go with it, but I thought it was a powerful representation of the point the presentation is trying to make about how humans have populated the planet over the last 200k years – more alarming, in the last few generations.  Take a look: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE).

I think President Trump’s position is the first time I have seen a U.S. president claim the country is full, and we can't take any more.  Of course the materials from the Global Footprint Network above suggest the country was full at 150 million (we're well over 300 million now).  I thought it was very unlikely that a U.S. President would ever crack open the Pandora's Box on population control.  An important issue - one that has so many second and third order effects, with no easy answers.  Historically, the planet’s successful global economies have always been built on growth.  What would a new sustainable model look like, if not the ages old growth model, as we charge toward a global population of 10 billion people and the inevitable strain this will place on us all?

 Is President Trump an accidental environmentalist by taking a position that “we are full?”  Is it time to have a serious dialog among us all about balancing the only planet we know of where we can live so that we do not out strip our resources?

 My sense is this.  It is possible to over demand from our earth what it can sustain and replenish with unchecked population growth.  We can chose to ignore this self-evident circumstance at our peril, or we can take action to balance the demands we place on our biosphere congruent its capacity to renew itself.  My concern is we are not likely to take intelligent proactive self-preservation measures as a global community because we live in an anarchic world with each nation competing as best it can to ensure its own best interests.  We are more likely to race to the bottom in a zero-sum game of resource consumption and control, growing economies as fast as possible until the race is won between the have’s and have nots.  Only when inevitable natural economic forces constrict growth will we confront conservation measures, not from an altruistic awakening and concern over a sustainable environment, since the facts have been in front of us all along, but from the reality that the capacity to draw from the earth has been exhausted and we can no longer do so without the consequences permeating into every American’s daily lives.  When this point is reached, not only will acceleration of social unrest on a global scale be exasperated, we will be faced with the difficult choices of who gets enough, and who does not.  As the saying goes: “be a lion… lions starve last.”

 My sense is to be a realist and confront this issue head-on. Anticipate the outcomes and continually take national security measures to keep America strong, while simultaneously searching for and promoting solutions the world can continue to dialog on to avert as much unrest as possible. I think though we do not currently confront these problems strongly enough as part of the public national agenda, the thinkers who trouble themselves with reality know the circumstances well. They know how this plays out. They know our best course of action is to keep America strong using existing economic growth models until they are exhausted, and new models evolve out of necessity. America and the world must deal with the difficult decisions to come regardless of whether we have already passed some points of no return. They, the realists, the strategists, the thinkers, know confronting the forecast of circumstances to come from a position of strength will be far better than from a position of weakness. This is why I say Americas interests must always come first today and in the future. Not from a lack of empathy for the plight of the rest of the world, but from the realist’s perspective of what we can and cannot get done given the current circumstances we face. Man, reality can be a cold glass of water in the face sometimes – right?