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Intro -- Contents -- 1. Good People, Hard Choices, and an Inescapable Question -- 2. Immigration by the Numbers -- 3. The Wages of Mass Immigration -- 4. Winners and Losers -- 5. Growth, or What Is an Economy For? -- 6. Population Matters -- 7. Environmentalists' Retreat from Demography -- 8. Defusing America's Population Bomb-or Cooking the Earth -- 9. Solutions -- 10. Objections -- 11. Conclusion -- Appendix -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

From the stony streets of Boston to the rail lines of California, from General Relativity to Google, one of the surest truths of our history is the fact that America has been built by immigrants. The phrase itself has become a steadfast campaign line, a motto of optimism and good will, and indeed it is the rallying cry for progressives today who fight against tightening our borders. This is all well and good, Philip Cafaro thinks, for the America of the past--teeming with resources, opportunities, and wide open spaces--but America isn't as young as it used to be, and the fact of the matter is we can't afford to take in millions of people anymore. We've all heard this argument before, and one might think Cafaro is toeing the conservative line, but here's the thing: he's not conservative, not by a long shot. He's as progressive as they come, and it's progressives at whom he aims with this book's startling message: massive immigration simply isn't consistent with progressive ideals. Cafaro roots his argument in human rights, equality, economic security, and environmental sustainability--hallmark progressive values. He shows us the undeniable realities of mass migration to which we have turned a blind eye: how flooded labor markets in sectors such as meatpacking and construction have driven down workers' wages and driven up inequality; how excessive immigration has fostered unsafe working conditions and political disempowerment; how it has stalled our economic maturity by keeping us ever-focused on increasing consumption and growth; and how it has caused our cities and suburbs to sprawl far and wide, destroying natural habitats, driving other species from the landscape, and cutting us off from nature. In response to these hard-hitting truths, Cafaro lays out a comprehensive plan for immigration reform that is squarely in line with progressive political goals. He suggests that we shift enforcement efforts away from border control and toward the employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. He proposes aid and foreign policies that will help people create better lives where they are. And indeed he supports amnesty for those who have, at tremendous risk, already built their lives here. Above all, Cafaro attacks our obsession with endless material growth, offering in its place a mature vision of America, not brimming but balanced, where all the different people who constitute this great nation of immigrants can live sustainably and well, sheltered by a prudence currently in short supply in American politics.

Presented at the Fall 2012 Center for Collaborative Conservation (https://collaborativeconservation.org/) Seminar and Discussion Series, "Power and Ethics in (Collaborative) Conservation", November 6, 2012, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. This series focused on the work that the CCC's Collaborative Conservation Fellows have been doing across the Western U.S. and around the world. ; Philip Cafaro is professor of philosophy at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and an affiliated faculty member with CSU's School of Global Environmental Sustainability. A former ranger with the U.S. National Park Service, his main research interests are in environmental ethics, consumption and population issues, and wild lands preservation. Cafaro is the author of Thoreau's Living Ethics and coeditor of the forthcoming anthology Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, both from University of Georgia Press. An active environmentalist for twenty-five years, he has lobbied Congress on behalf of the Wilderness Society and the Massachusetts and Colorado state legislatures on behalf of the Sierra Club. He is the incoming President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. ; Includes recorded speech and PowerPoint presentation. ; Currently humanity is extinguishing Earth's species at a rate not seen in 65 million years, since a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. Is that wrong? If so, how wrong? This talk asks how much people should be willing to give up in order to end the 6th mass extinction, and whether there is room on Earth for the flourishing of human beings and the rest of life.

AbstractThis essay, a personal account of teaching environmental ethics, advances two main points. First, focusing on local environmental issues makes for better classes. Teachers can take advantage of local environmental expertise at their institutions and in the wider community; local focus provides a good balance given philosophy's tendency to abstractness; students tend to feel more engaged and excited about the class. Second, environmental ethics classes should spend more time helping students articulate their own ethical positions and showing them how to act upon them. In this way, our classes will better prepare and inspire students to do right by nature.

AbstractRachel Carson is well known as a founder of the modern environmental movement. This article argues that her life and writings have much to offer contemporary environmental philosophy. I begin by discussing the environmental ethics articulated in Silent Spring. I next examine Carson's earlier natural history writings and the non-anthropocentrism they express. I conclude with some suggestions for how Carson points the way forward for environmental ethics.

This article clarifies the potential environmental impacts of more or less expansive EU immigration policies. First, we project the demographic impacts of different immigration policy scenarios on future population numbers, finding that relatively small annual differences in immigration levels lead to large differences in future population numbers, both nationally and region-wide. Second, we analyze the potential impacts of future population numbers on two key environmental goals: reducing the EU's greenhouse gas emissions and preserving its biodiversity. We find that in both cases, smaller populations make success in these endeavors more likely – though only in conjunction with comprehensive policy changes which lock in the environmental benefits of smaller populations. Reducing immigration in order to stabilize or reduce populations thus can help EU nations create ecologically sustainable societies, while increasing immigration will tend to move them further away from this goal.

We present new population projections out to 2100 for the countries of the European Union and for the EU as a whole under a wide range of fertility and migration scenarios. As policy-based projections rather than forecasts, they aspire not to maximize predictive success regarding future demographic developments, but to accurately show the impact of different migration and socio-economic policy choices on population numbers. Our chief aim is to clarify those policy choices for European citizens and policymakers. We show that demographic policies have the potential to markedly increase or decrease future populations across the EU. Migration policy offers greater scope for influencing future population numbers than policies aimed at influencing national fertility rates. In countries with particularly low fertility rates or high emigration levels, egalitarian economic and family support policies have the potential to limit future population decreases to a significant extent, especially in combination. In most cases, EU nations are well placed to stabilize or slowly reduce their populations by continuing status quo policies or with moderate changes. Thus they are well placed to achieve one of the necessary conditions for creating ecologically sustainable societies.

We present new population projections out to 2100 for the countries of the European Union and for the EU as a whole under a wide range of fertility and migration scenarios. As policy-based projections rather than forecasts, they aspire not to maximize predictive success regarding future demographic developments, but to accurately show the impact of different migration and socio-economic policy choices on population numbers. Our chief aim is to clarify those policy choices for European citizens and policymakers. We show that demographic policies have the potential to markedly increase or decrease future populations across the EU. Migration policy offers greater scope for influencing future population numbers than policies aimed at influencing national fertility rates. In countries with particularly low fertility rates or high emigration levels, egalitarian economic and family support policies have the potential to limit future population decreases to a significant extent, especially in combination. In most cases, EU nations are well placed to stabilize or slowly reduce their populations by continuing status quo policies or with moderate changes. Thus they are well placed to achieve one of the necessary conditions for creating ecologically sustainable societies. (Appendix I: https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2019-15en; Appendix II: https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2019-16en; Appendix III: http://dx.doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2019-17en)

The authors argue that a serious commitment to environmentalism entails ending America's population growth by implementing a more restrictive immigration policy. The need to limit immigration necessarily follows when we combine a clear statement of our main environmental goals - living sustainably and sharing the landscape generously with other species. He supports this with uncontroversial accounts of the current U.S. demographic trajectory and of the negative environmental effects of U.S. population growth, nationally and globally. At the current level of 1.5 million immigrants per year, America's population of 306 million is set to increase to over 700 million people by 2100. Recent "reform" proposals would actually increase immigration to over two million annually, which has the potential to nearly triple the U.S. population to over 850 million by the end of the century. The U.S. is losing the battle to create a sustainable society and protect wild nature. Sprawl development destroys 2.2 million acres of wild lands and agricultural lands each year; over 1300 plant and animal species remain on the endangered species list, with more added each year; water shortages in the west and southeast are being used to justify new riverkilling dams and reservoirs; and U.S. carbon emissions continue to rise. Adapted from the source document.