Why do the petitioners think Sierra Club needs to change its population policy?
Petitioners seek to restore traditional Sierra Club population policy, which was altered in 1996 by unilateral Board action to exclude mass immigration levels as they relate to U.S. population growth. To preserve wilderness, wild rivers, forests, species, and ecosystems, Sierra Club policy has long called for stabilizing population “first of the United States and then of the world.” (Sierra Club, 1970). We all know well the environmental impacts caused by the doubling of U.S. population over the past 50 years. We must resist another doubling which the Census Bureau projects over the next 70 years, due largely to mass immigration. The U.S. will add 125 million persons in the next fifty years. California alone will add 17 million by 2025, the equivalent of another southern California. Growth will continue indefinitely thereafter, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Mass immigration will account for 2/3 of U.S. population growth over the next 50 years according to the National Academy of
