In a recent chat with Bay author Tom Horton, he reinforced a point he’d made to me last summer.  That if he were to write his report now on overpopulation in the Bay region (Growing, Growing, Gone), he would focus less on population and more on our culture’s addiction to “growth” — not only more people, but more of everything.  More money, more cars, more houses, more highways, more gadgets.  More things.

He makes a good point.  In his Eastern Shore drawl he argues that we often forget the rewards of being better, not bigger.  Studies of happiness, he notes, often show that while people need enough money to meet basic needs, “wealth” and the ownership of material goods don’t always correlate with a sense of satisfaction, of well-being.

In Chesapeake country, it sometimes seems that money can cause as many environmental problems as it solves.  Where a modest summerhouse once graced a rural riverbank, one now finds a mini-mansion.  Perhaps even a row of mini-mansions — with piers, cars, bright lights, super-green lawns right down to the water’s edge.  Our impacts on the landscape are bigger now, because we can afford more.

Horton is a big fan of living leaner.  But at the same time, his paper on population makes another sobering point.  While we can go a long way toward reducing our footprint on the earth — by reducing our energy demands, by driving less and walking more, by eating lower on the food chain — at some point absolute numbers will overtake us.

This is especially true if we want to preserve open space and natural areas.  If we want secluded marshes and riverside forests to remain undeveloped, if we want the Bay’s ecosystem to remain in the same shape we remember from the 1950s.

Worldwide, we need to balance human population growth with our demands on this planet we call Earth.

The United Nations posits three possible scenarios for global population, from high to low.  Of course unpredictable things could happen as well.  We could witness a world war.  We could be hit by an asteroid. We could be visited by plague or famine.  All of these things have happened before.  At some level, the trajectory of human population lies in the hands of fate.

But human beings are also thinking creatures.  We can look around us and observe. We know that current population in the Chesapeake watershed is more than 16 million, with another 100,000 added each year.  The U.S. population has now topped 300,000,000.  We know that world population has more than doubled since 1960.  The human population on this round globe is now over 6.7 billion and rising.

What happens next no one knows.  (For an interesting discussion of the possibilities, see Which World? by Allen Hammond.)

It’s hard even to talk about population growth.  Discussions run right into cultural issues, religious issues, ethnic issues.  There is a chance for prejudice to raise its ugly head.  This is especially true when one considers that much of the population growth in the U.S. comes from immigration, and that most immigrants come from what have historically been minority cultures in this country — at least since the English colonies took hold in the 17^th century.  (Before that, the Spanish were here, and before that, of course, Native Americans.)

The question before us now is what kind of conversation about human population growth we can have that is not driven by nationalism or racism or exclusionary thinking but rather by a compassionate concern for the future of the human race and for the planet on which we all live.  In this region, that includes a concern for the Chesapeake Bay and for the watershed that feeds it.

These are tricky waters, and Tom Horton deserves credit for his courage in beginning to navigate them.  While his focus may shift toward our consumptive lifestyle and the myth of endless growth, the questions he raises about population shouldn’t remain unanswered.

(See more about Tom Horton’s report at Chesapeake Quarterly online , and read the report itself, published by the Abell Foundation.)