The Biden Administration’s “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful” plan aims to protect 30 percent of America’s land 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 still 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.

Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA

P.S. Secure our borders. Stop the influx of immigrants and refugees. Implement the Congressionally-mandated biometric entry/exit system. Evict those here illegally. End chain migration. End birthright citizenship. End the visa lottery. End amnesty. End asylum. End catch-and-release. Make E-Verify mandatory. And more! Illegal immigration is a weapon of mass destruction!

Sent to:
Jay Obernolte, Alex Padilla, Dianne Feinstein