The Chesapeake Bay Journal is running a multi-part series on excessive growth and overdevelopment in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The latest article leads with a mention of FAIR’s report on the harmful effects that immigration-driven population growth is having in the Bay’s watershed. The article’s author, Tom Horton, has written extensively about the Chesapeake Bay and has consistently acknowledged that immigration and a rapidly rising population has to be part of any honest conversation about the threats facing the Bay.
FAIR has for over 30 years argued that “environmental” groups that ignore immigration and population growth are doing great harm to the conservationist movement. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) epitomizes this obstructionism. The CBF supports the continuation of over development under the guise of “Smart Growth,” and it opposes ending mass immigration to the U.S. no matter the environmental costs. When FAIR’s report first came out, CBF spokesman, Tom Zolper, refused to acknowledge that population growth in any way was harmful to the health of the Bay.
In the Bay Journal article, William Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is quoting as saying:
“Would I like to see population stabilized, even reduced? Absolutely. But to tell poor countries to keep their people there because we don’t want their pollution is just wrong.”
There are many charitable organizations whose stated mission is to help impoverished people throughout the world, and many of them do great good. But Mr. Baker’s job is to “save” the Chesapeake Bay, not to throw up his hands and accept overpopulation and pollution in the Bay’s watershed as inevitable because we live in a less than perfect world. If we do not dismiss his quote merely as desultory cynicism, what he is arguing is that the United States must suffer unsustainable population growth and environmental ruin because, well, because it’s “just wrong” not to do so. Sadly, it is this type of thinking that characterizes many of the leading “environmental” groups in the United States.
Check out FAIR’s video below about the impact of illegal immigration on the Chesapeake Bay.