Dear Your 3 Members of Congress,

In May 2020, the Biden Administration formally released their “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful” plan to ensure that 30 percent of America’s land is protected from development by 2030. The more-ambitious “Nature Needs Half” movement argues for stopping the destruction of natural habitat before the ratio falls below 50 percent (already too late for many countries, but not the United States).

Our open spaces are worth protecting, but we will fail as long as we add another 18 million new residents every decade, as the Census Bureau projects. Americans are living more densely, but we lost 17,800 square miles of open space between 2002 – 2017. Two thirds of that loss was related to population growth. Even if all new population could somehow be added to cities without the cities expanding over any new ground, the additional people would still greatly increase the overall ecological footprint of the cities into rural areas.

Given that the Census Bureau projects nearly all future population growth to be determined by federal immigration policies, I urge you to adopt the recommendations of former President Clinton’s Task Force on Population and Consumption, and reduce immigration to a level that will allow our population to stabilize.