Thread: Why I am an Environmentalist - For Immigration Reduction

Why I am an Environmentalist — For Immigration Reduction

By Philip Cafaro, Published for Thursday, April 22, 2010, 3:46 AM EDT - posted on NumbersUSA

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Philip Cafaro is an associate professor of philosophy at Colorado State Univeristy. He recounts for NumbersUSA's audience how he realized the beauty in nature, and then found that immigration-fueled population growth was a major factor behind every major threat to nature. )

I’m an environmental activist, and have been for over twenty years. I vividly remember the issue that made me one: a proposal to dam the Oconee River, a lovely, lazy river that runs for a hundred miles through the Georgia Piedmont.

I had moved to Athens, Georgia, in 1986, from Chicago. I came to study American history at the University of Georgia, but the main effect of moving to the South was to open my eyes to nature. Here, in a very different environment from the one I had grown up in, I realized the importance—and beauty—of nature.

A friend taught me bird watching, during the spring warbler migration. Another took me for my first canoe ride. Before long I was immersed in learning about the local landscape. I wrote my masters thesis in the then-new area of environmental history.

But as is often the case, I had hardly started to learn about the landscape, when I began to learn about threats to it. New highways. New sprawling subdivisions. The issue that really catalyzed my environmental activism, though, was the proposal to dam the Oconee, which flows through Athens. Its stated purpose: to provide “flood controlâ€

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