Way Too Many People in Paradise by Steve Lopez

Way Too Many People in Paradise

Can planet Earth afford to have any more people living in the country that has 4% of the world's population and consumes 25% of its resources?

by Steve Lopez

Only those who commute, work for a living or breathe air should have any concerns about the latest news out of paradise. I'm talking about the story informing us that in the last three years, 1 million additional people have taken up residence in sunny Southern California. Not that this came as a surprise. I've already seen about 900,000 of them while stuck at the freeway 405-101 interchange, and the others were waiting in line ahead of me after a bike accident landed me in the emergency room at County-USC Hospital.

Five of the 10 fastest-growing counties are in Southern California, and we've only just begun to show what we can do. Millions more are expected to join the party in the years to come, and once they get acclimated to local customs, every last one of them will be the lone occupant of a slow-moving vehicle traveling an insane distance from home to work.

Smart regional planning, it's safe to say, is not what draws the hordes.

Ben Zuckerman, a professor in UCLA's physics and astronomy department, was playing with numbers this week and came up with a particularly crazy one. If California population projections hold true in coming decades, the state will have to build a new school every other day.

Zuckerman has an answer for this problem, and it's not what you might expect from a former civil rights marcher who counts himself a liberal, not to mention a Sierra Club board member.

The U.S. needs to put the brakes on immigration, Zuckerman says, and it needs to do so quickly. At the current growth rate, the U.S. population will double in 57 years, with most of the increase coming from immigrants and their offspring. Southern California, of course, will be ground zero.

Can planet Earth afford to have any more people living in the country that has 4% of the world's population and consumes 25% of its resources?

"My primary concern is environmental and quality of life," he said. "My second major concern is the impact of over-immigration, and especially illegal immigration, on the poorest segment of the U.S. population, particularly the ones trapped in inner cities like in Los Angeles." That impact, Zuckerman says, is job loss, declining wages and increasingly overwhelmed schools, hospitals, highways and transit systems.

The Sierra Club happens to be in the midst of a nasty family feud regarding population growth, with tree-huggers going at each other like pro wrestlers. Zuckerman and others argue that the club ought to do more than prattle on about worldwide population control. They say it's high time to scream for U.S. lawmakers to slow the flow of immigrants. Members of the old guard counter that if the club goes nativist, it will be in cahoots with rednecks and yahoos.

I'll leave it to the combatants to work things out. But regardless of the outcome, someone, somewhere ought to be leading a discussion about how many people is too many, particularly in California.

We're paving over Central Valley farms, throwing up god-awful developments on mountainsides and teaching remedial reading in trailers as the state tries to fill a gargantuan budget gap.

Smog is back, the surf is up at Bacteria Beach, and every time I get onto the subject, some political hero tells me the problem isn't too many people, but too little leadership. They always turn out to be the same politicians who never provide any leadership. I want flex schedules, infill housing, higher gas prices, toll booths and public flogging of developers and politicians associated with massive housing developments on the fringe of the metropolis.

Immigration is a federal rather than a state responsibility, but California gets more immigrants than any other state. So why can't the congressional delegation at least speak up for tighter control of illegal immigration? Better yet, why not lobby for investing in south-of-the-border development the way we are investing in Iraq?

OK, time for me to come clean on the population explosion. I had a bouncing baby girl last year, so I'm part of the problem. When the taxman got back to us recently, he said our daughter had saved us quite a few bucks. I'm not stupid, so I didn't argue. But shouldn't I get a surcharge, rather than a tax break?

Speaking of backward policy, why is the Sierra Club promoting birth control in other countries, but not in the U.S.? We've got the highest birthrate and biggest teen pregnancy problem of any wealthy industrialized nation.

The Sierra Club ought to be spiking rivers and streams with birth control products. We ought to have Population Control Officers standing on rooftops with dart guns, sterilizing anyone within range. To pay for my sins and set an example, I'm willing to take the first bullet.

As Zuckerman says, public officials seldom utter a word, a thought, a solution regarding the exponential growth that has plundered paradise. Long-range planning doesn't exist, unless you count proposals to spend years fixing interchange bottlenecks that end up with more traffic when the job is completed.

"No matter what anyone says," Redlands economist John Husing told The Times, "people continue to want a single-family detached home, and they will crawl over the hills from Orange and Los Angeles counties on their hands and knees to get it."

This, by the way, will soon be the fastest way to commute.