Way Too Many People in Paradise
Only those who commute, work for a living or breathe air should have any concerns about the latest news out of paradise.
I'm talking about the story informing us that in the last three years, 1 million additional people have taken up residence in sunny Southern California.
Not that this came as a surprise. I've already seen about 900,000 of them while stuck at the 405-101 interchange, and the others were waiting in line ahead of me after a bike accident landed me in the emergency room at County-USC.
Five of the 10 fastest-growing counties are in Southern California, and we've only just begun to show what we can do.
Millions more are expected to join the party in the years to come, and once they get acclimated to local customs, every last one of them will be the lone occupant of a slow-moving vehicle traveling an insane distance from home to work.
Smart regional planning, it's safe to say, is not what draws the hordes.
Ben Zuckerman, a professor in UCLA's physics and astronomy department, was playing with numbers this week and came up with a particularly crazy one. If California population projections hold true in coming decades, the state will have to build a new school every other day.
Zuckerman has an answer for this problem, and it's not what you might expect from a former civil rights marcher who counts himself a liberal, not to mention a Sierra Club board member.
The U.S. needs to put the brakes on immigration, Zuckerman says, and it needs to do so quickly. At the current growth rate, the U.S. population will double in 57 years, with most of the increase coming from immigrants and their offspring. Southern California, of course, will be ground zero.
Can planet Earth afford to have any more people living in the country that has 5% of the world's population and consumes 25% of its resources?
"My primary concern is environmental and quality of life," he said. "My second major concern
That impact, Zuckerman says, is job loss, declining wages and increasingly overwhelmed schools, hospitals, highways and transit systems.
The Sierra Club happens to be in the midst of a nasty family feud regarding population growth, with tree-huggers going at each other like pro wrestlers.
Zuckerman and others argue that the club ought to do more than prattle on about worldwide population control. They say it's high time to scream for U.S. lawmakers to slow the flow of immigrants. Members of the old guard counter that if the club goes nativist, it will be in cahoots with rednecks and yahoos.
