Where will all the woke people live?

Examining the Efficacy of Wokeness in an Overpopulated World

I believe a lot of things that are currently unpopular. I agree with comedian/commentator Bill Maher who says he is not a member of any tribe because he wants to think for himself. I agree with him that it is a political miscalculation to keep borders open in the interest of skewing votes to the side of the Democrats. I further believe that growth inflates our country like a balloon ready to pop, and the pieces of that burst balloon are affecting us like pieces of actual balloons which, mistaken for food, choke wild animals.

I concur with the opinion of professor/author John McWorter (Woke Racism 2021) that the woke movement, strict in its view that everything is racially biased, is ultimately dismissive of the Black community. Like McWorter, I agree the Left’s attachment to wokeness does little to actually improve the lives of Black people.

I am a fan of Roy Beck and his book, Back of the Hiring Line (2021). I agree with his historical take on the effects of mass immigration being detrimental to the gainful employment of Blacks. I believe it continues to haunt their economic progress.

I find author and Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon’s take on wokeness and its harm to democracy in her book “Bad News”(2021) required reading for anyone who cares about our form of government. I even wish to expand her theory about the downsides of wokeness to include how we deal with growth in this country. You see I believe that sprawling up or building out as a response to continued growth is detrimental to life itself and will ultimately destroy all we hold dear about our country. It may be unpopular and unacceptable to say by those who want to appear like they care, but the evidence is just too solid.

I believe that change is hard. It is won out of sweat and sacrifice because no matter how justifiable, the rich and powered elite are always invested in the perpetuation of iniquity. It is therefore critical that our collective efforts are focused on adding up to real change, not just the kind that makes its appearance on center stage and then dances off never to be heard from again.

If you are newly awakened to the horrors of what has been done to native peoples throughout North and South America, you can change street and school names and take down statues or you can donate to groups like the Native American Rights Fund which works to provide voting rights and legal advocacy in the community. I believe I know which one has the most potential for making a real difference. I also believe I know which one makes us think we are erasing past tyrannies while doing no such thing. If you really care about helping the Black community you will do more than put up a sign, you will help them by insisting we fight for voter’s rights, end the hangovers of red lining and tackle mass immigration which just increases competition in the job market.

My biggest ‘sin’ is that I believe that if we take care of the natural world, it will take care of us. Unfortunately, we are doing just the opposite. We are on a self-destructive path as we continue to pollute, sprawl and demand from the earth more than the earth can provide. What happens when the bees, who we need to pollinate our food, are all displaced by our insatiable need to cover their plants with cement? What happens when our farm fields are all converted to housing and our aquifers are emptied? If we only care that our board rooms finally meet all representation and inclusion goals, where will we live and how will we survive? I always like it when Hollywood has more diversity and more women producers and directors, but what about biodiversity? It is one of my biggest fears that our long overdue efforts to right the wrongs of our past transgressions toward marginalized groups will be successful just in time to run out of water, food, wildlife, and open space. The environment is our foundation for life, and it is crumbling under our feet.

Elon Musk and others are eyeing our neighboring planet, as an option if we run out of room on ours. Again, I agree with Bill Maher, what a bad idea. Mars is void of air, soil and livable temperatures, plus it takes a lot of fuel to get there. How many rockets, how much fossil fuel will it take for it to be a true release valve for our country which is already about 150 million people over the amount our resources can support? (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/)

My unpopular position remains not only that we must stop growth, we must see it as the enemy of a viable future for our country and all who live here. We must stop the silliness of wokeness which has only served to distract and send more voters to the other side of the aisle in disgust and distrust that real issues that need addressing are being forfeited for the appearance of caring for those who are currently in the bullseye of bigotry and despair.

We may have countless sources of so-called news but they seem only capable of highlighting the absurd and focusing narrowly on one issue at a time. As Ungar-Sargon points out in her book, news agencies are now serving the elite who want to think they are changing the world for the better by emphasizing how triggered they are when something admittedly awful happens. Big picture thinking when it comes to really preserving our water supplies and organically addressing our traffic jams by taking our foot of the gas pedal of growth is off their radar screen. If it’s not reported in the major media outlets, only those who read ecological literature and pay attention to the deafening drone of bulldozers will understand importance of getting off the growth train. Thanks to a paucity of stories on the dangers of growth, more Americans can cite verbatim who won “Dancing with the Stars” than know relevant US population statistics.

Extensive Sprawl Studies, (see below) prove that growth even more than per capita consumption is harming our country. The West is running out of water while the developers are doing the devil’s handiwork but selling shiny new homes to those able to think only of square feet and fancy appliances. We are not only willing participants in draining our precious life-giving resources, we are also simultaneously increasing competition for scarce human resources too. More people require more hospitals, social services, schools etc. and those all require more natural resources. Instead of fighting growth and its advocates to stop sprawl, many propose to pack and stack people into already overcrowded cities. But density is sprawl’s evil twin. It harbors its own set of issues as we witnessed during the early days of the pandemic. It concentrates more consumers in one area often demanding more water from one resource which becomes unsustainable.

When growth is the deity we worship, those already hurting are first in line to feel the pain. If we truly want to help those who have been historically brutalized and are currently marginalized by undeniable institutional racism, we need to wake up to the real problems perpetrated by those who benefit from growth, the corporations who do not care who they hurt as long as their offshore bank accounts keep expanding. Because we have been woefully unsuccessful in keeping money out of politics, our political leaders follow the growth mongers right into their next bid for reelection.

History has demonstrated repeatedly that when resources become scarce, autocratic leaders jump in to inflame society’s fissures and scapegoat scenarios become our default button. As a person of 100% Ashkenazic Jewish ancestry, I know something about the ramifications of a world fighting to stay afloat. Hatred of the ‘other’ becomes more prevalent and justifiable in the eyes of those who see their future opportunities and way of life threatened. Antisemitism in the form of hate crimes and vandalism is already on the rise; how will we act towards each other when water no longer comes out of the tap?

No matter how inclusive we try to be or how triggered we are on our campuses by speech we do not wish to hear, our prejudices and our need to just survive will be amplified in proportion to our dwindling water supplies and increased competition for all our other resources. In other words, no matter how righteous you think you are today, it will be a brutal world of fighting for your own when we hit the wall of scarcity harder than we are today.

The mantra of wokeness is in response to the obvious need to reckon with the persistence of racism and racist policies, sexism and sexist policies and all the ways in which members of the LBGTQ community are still maligned. But it is the pendulum swinging too far the other side with nothing to show for progress. That progress is further interrupted by our ecological system’s inability to handle more and more of its top predator, us. Ecology needs a seat at the table of justice for it holds all the cards. We need to start fighting the real problems day instead of picking at scabs, watching them bleed and then asking for Band-aids. We need to listen to those trying to tell us the truth about the horrible ramifications of growth especially to those already struggling economically.

Sprawl study after sprawl study has warned about how when it comes to resources, we are eating our own. The ever-popular retirement destination, the desert southwest, is experiencing the kind of growth which is strangling the area’s ability to support life. “Arizona’s population growth of 4.2 million between 1982 and 2017–8 was responsible for 12 times more sprawl than all other factors combined.” (https://www.numbersusa.com/news/population-growth-and-diminishing-natural-state-arizona)

Reading these extensive studies is a sobering experience but just think of it as sacrificing an area the size of Maryland to population growth in just eight years on land that is otherwise needed for farmland, wildlife, and absorption of rain to replenish aquifers and you get the unsustainable picture. Layer that with the inability to even discuss these limits due to a time of super sensitivity and ‘shooting the messenger’ and you have the kind of inertia on fighting growth that will further undermine the issues of the woke.

This unsustainable parade is heading off a cliff and joining them in unison are many climate activists. Their denial that population growth has a relationship to growing carbon footprints, something that seems so obvious even before the clear data is examined, is being washed away in a sea of wokeness. They drank the Kool-Aid of the hour: say nothing about population growth for fear of being called out as racist. Someday when it is way too late, they just may see that this was a cowardly mistake.

When scholars wish to discuss the need to seriously restrict immigration and promote small families so that we are not setting ourselves up for more and more suffering down the road, we need to listen to them, examine their evidence and not assume nefarious agendas. Every population scholar that I know has their moral fiber intact with no motive other than holding up the flag of ecological sustainability.

Think of the US as a giant ship with the rich and privileged people at the top and those in steerage down below with no view and little food. It is a noble and worthy idea to make things fairer, but we can’t do that at the expense of watching out for icebergs. We must continue to press the question, at the risk of being unpopular, if we continue to encourage growth, where will the woke people live?