Immigration threatens California's environment

It took some doing for California's population to explode in the late '90s. After all, 800,000 more people left California from 1995 to 2000 than moved there from other states. That California added about 1.5 million souls in that period was entirely due to immigration.

A surging population magnifies the biggest threats to California's environment: sprawl, water shortages, demands for new polluting power plants. It bulldozes wildlife habitat.

These numbers should frighten environmentalists everywhere, but especially in nearby states. The people who fled California's clogged freeways are now tearing up the environments of Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Nevada. The Census Bureau's projection of a doubling U.S. population by 2100 should terrify us all.

Given the obvious link between population and ecological degradation, you would have expected environmentalists to howl in anger when Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill granting state driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. But environmentalists did not howl at Davis. They voted for him. The total disconnect between their interests and their actions should send environmentalists to the psychiatric couch for lengthy observation. They're clearly unable to care for themselves.

We all know why most environmental leaders refuse to address what is nowadays their most pressing issue. The prospect of appearing unsympathetic to immigrants — or worse, racist — strikes terror in their hearts. So they instead tiptoe past the elephant in their parlor and wage boisterous campaigns to save a few undeveloped acres here and there.

Had America's middle-class families suddenly decided to have five children apiece, environmentalists would have taken up atomic-powered bullhorns. Don't these selfish yuppies know that all these children are wrecking the environment?!

In the 1970s, when population growth was attributed to high birth rates among the native-born, environmentalists staged nationwide rallies in protest. Robert Ehrlich's book "The Population Bomb" became their bible, and everyone who cared about the planet signed on to the cause. The population problem is actually far worse now, but because its root is immigration, the Sierra Club and other mainstream environmental groups have settled into paralyzed silence.

That California's environmentalists couldn't even take a stand against illegal immigration — the crux of the driver's-license issue — shows how hopeless they are. The joke is that even foreign-born voters weren't that wild about granting licenses to illegal immigrants.

Polls showed that 34 percent of California's Latino and 52 percent of its Asian voters actually opposed it. One can understand the objections of the people most hurt when undocumented low-skilled workers undercut prevailing wages.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory could help California's ecology in unexpected ways. The public widely despises the Bush administration's gutting of environmental protections. Rather than give up these unpopular actions, President Bush selectively spares those states in which he feels politically insecure.

The Florida experience is instructive. Bush last spring pledged $120 million to retire mineral rights in Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve. Then he promised to spend $115 million to buy back Florida offshore oil-drilling leases. Florida is a battleground in the next presidential election.

Californians also demanded a halt to federal sales of new oil-drilling leases and drilling under existing leases. But when old leases were about to expire, Bush extended them. Bush may now think twice about offending California if he thinks it is politically up for grabs.

So let's look at which groups supported Davis and why. The trial lawyers supported him because of money. Davis opposed tort reforms that would have hurt them financially. Union leaders supported him because of money. Davis gave away the store to public employees. Indians who run casinos backed him, again, because of money. Davis looked out for their business interests.

Environmentalists supported Davis because — because why? Schwarzenegger did make a dumb comment about terminating the California Environmental Protection Agency — which he quickly took back. But his moderate Rockefeller Republican outlook should leave environmentalists confident that he'll be sensitive to their concerns.

Schwarzenegger says one of his first acts as governor will be to cancel the law allowing undocumented workers to get state driver's licenses. How bizarre that environmentalists did not put up a struggle against a law that would have invited people from all over the world to descend on California illegally. Perhaps therapy will help.

So-called environmentalists have done quite nicely in controlling population. "Environmentalism" has surpassed Nazism and is now the second greatest mass murder movement in human history.

The eco-fascist's insane opposition to using DDT to control malaria kills 2 million people each year, mostly women and children in Africa and Asia. All these deaths are preventible. Only the communist movement has murdered more people. Quite simply, environmentalists are mass murderers.

Here's a cut from a recent article -

A pandemic is slaughtering millions, mostly children and pregnant women - one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually; and over 100 million people since 1972 - but there are no protesters clogging the streets or media stories about this tragedy. These deaths can be laid at the doorstep of author Rachel Carson.

Her 1962 bestselling book Silent Spring detailed the alleged “dangers” of the pesticide DDT, which had practically eliminated malaria.

Within ten years, the environmentalist movement had convinced the powers that be to outlaw DDT. Denied the use of this cheap, safe and effective pesticide, millions of people - mostly poor Africans - have died due to the environmentalist dogma propounded by Carson’s book.

Her coterie of admirers at the U.N. and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund have managed to bring malaria and typhus back to sub-Saharan Africa with a vengeance.

“Carson and those who joined her in the crusade against DDT have contributed to millions of preventable deaths. Used responsibly, DDT can be quite safe for man and the environment,” said former Surgeon General and retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Dr. Harold M. Koenig.

“DDT is the best insecticide we have today for controlling malaria,” said malaria expert Dr. Donald Roberts of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. “DDT is long-acting, the alternatives are not. DDT is cheap, the alternatives are not. End of story.”

DDT is also not hazardous to humans or the environment - despite all the propaganda to the contrary. According to tests conducted by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Sabine Island Research Laboratory, “92 percent of DDT and its metabolites disappear” from the environment after 38 days. (See Environmental Protection Agency’s DDT hearings transcript, page 3,726.) Plus, humans have nothing to worry about with small exposures to DDT.

Rachel Carson and the worldwide environmentalist movement are responsible for perpetuating an ecological genocide that has claimed the lives of millions of young, poor, striving African men, women and children, killed by preventable diseases. - Lisa Makson, FrontPageMagazine.com

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