Man Swarm review by Leon Kolankiewicz - The Rewilding Institute

In New Book, Prominent Conservationist Urges Immigration Reductions, Takes
Environmentalists to Task for Turning their Backs on U.S. Overpopulation
Guest blog by Leon Kolankiewicz
Wildlife Biologist and Environmental Planner
“How far conservationists and environmentalists have fallen from what now seem to me to be
the Golden Years of the 1960s and 1970s. No wonder I’m such an old sorehead.”
-- Dave Foreman, Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife (Durango, CO:
Raven’s Eye Press, 2011; p. 121)
As a founder of Earth First!, The Wildlands Project, and the Rewilding Institute, as well as the
author of Confessions of an Eco-Warrior and other books, Dave Foreman is one of America’s
most iconic living conservationists. Foreman belongs in an elite outfit we might call the Old
Guard Conservationists, including such legends as David Brower (one-time Sierra Club
executive director and board member, founder of Friends of the Earth, the League of
Conservation Voters, and the Earth Island Institute), Senator Gaylord Nelson (founder of Earth
Day, counselor for the Wilderness Society), Captain Paul Watson (founder of Greenpeace and
the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society), and Stewart Udall (former Interior Secretary in the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations and author of the conservation classic The Quiet Crisis).
It is no exaggeration that these same individuals
helped shape the America we live in today. Our
country is a far better place than it might have been
without their endeavors, and those of other leaders and
their legions of followers. This is because – in spite
of the beleaguered condition and troubled future of the
American environment – today our country goes to
much greater lengths and expense to protect our
shared natural heritage than it used to before these
heroes began their teach-ins, protests, organizing,
lawmaking, lawsuits, newspaper ads, marches,
speeches, direct action, books, and civil disobedience.
And the beneficiaries of all these efforts, awareness,
and funding are our treasured wildlife, endangered
species, wilderness, clean air and water, open space,
public health, national parks, forests, and fisheries.
And of course, the Americans who care about these
things.
It is also no exaggeration that the Old Guard
Conservationists, those coming of age or already in
their prime around the time of the first Earth Day in
1970, recognized the role of explosive, unsustainable human population growth in piling ever
more pressure on the environment.

In contrast, with precious few exceptions, at least in
their public postures, contemporary leaders of the
politically correct Environmental Establishment either
tend to ignore U.S. overpopulation altogether (their
preferred strategy), or when pressed, actively dismiss or
minimize its role as a causative agent of greater
environmental impacts. (At the same time, in a hushed
tone or whisper, some may tell you that of course
population is a huge issue, but it’s also a radioactive one
that they and their organization must avoid at all costs.)
The endangered Northern
Aplomado Falcon – a favorite of
Foreman’s in his native New
Mexico
By the Environmental Establishment, I mean the wellfunded,
well-connected, politically potent, big national
environmental groups. I mean advocacy groups such as
the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation,
Greenpeace, Wilderness Society, Environmental
Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, National Audubon
Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, The
Nature Conservancy, League of Conservation Voters,
U.S. Public Interest Research Group, World Wide Fund
for Nature (WWF) and the Union of Concerned
Scientists. I also mean federal agencies like the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and countless
state counterparts.
A favorite haunt of the Aplomado Falcon and Dave Foreman – the
Chupadera Wilderness of Bosque del Apache National Wildlife
Refuge in New Mexico, with the Rio Grande visible

In his new book, Man Swarm and the Killing of Wildlife, Dave Foreman lends his own vigorous
voice – and his barbed pen – on behalf of the imperiled and voiceless fellow creatures with
which we share our nation and our planet. These critters, or wildeors as Foreman calls them in
Old English, cannot vote, contribute to political campaigns, or purchase products, so unless
pressed, neither politicians nor businessmen will pay them any heed. Foreman both instructs us
as to why ever more people means ever less
wildlife, and he assails spineless or clueless
environmentalists for not recognizing reality and
for not doing anything about it.
Few living environmental activists, conservation
biologists, or environmental historians can match
the combined breadth and depth of Dave
Foreman’s knowledge of both ecological science
and recent and past conservation history. And still
fewer writers/activists have actually contributed to
making and shaping recent environmental history
to the extent he has.
Even as Foreman treats all of the grim statistics
about approaching mass extinctions and the like
with all of the gravity – and deep dismay – they
deserve, he is still a pleasure to read. He has an
The endangered jaguar, a stealthy
wild cat of the American tropics
whose range extends north into
Arizona and New Mexico
avuncular, self-deprecating manner; indeed, the Rewilding Institute distributes a periodic column
to his supporters called “Uncle Dave Foreman’s Around the Campfire.” In Man Swarm, he
excoriates with equal relish the fatuous cornucopians of both Left and Right political persuasions
who deny overpopulation.
Representing the Right, the late Professor Julian Simon, the “guru of growth,” who declared in
1994:
We now have in our hands – in our libraries, really – the technology to feed, clothe, and
supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.
Foreman on Simon’s feckless and reckless claim: “University of Colorado physics professor
emeritus Al Bartlett writes that some of his friends quizzed Julian Simon after his seven-billion
year wisecrack and Simon backtracked that he meant only seven million years. (Be glad this guy
wasn’t doing your taxes!)”
Standing in for leftie cornucopians, former socialist presidential candidate, anti-pollution
crusader and The Closing Circle author Barry Commoner, who wrote:
It is a totally spurious idea to claim that rising population anywhere in the world is
responsible for the deteriorating environment.

Foreman correctly observes that when it comes to their views on human growth without limit,
these opposite ends of the political spectrum – both hard-core Right and Left, Libertarianism and
Marxism – are remarkably similar. “They both see Earth as an overflowing warehouse for
industrial civilization, a warehouse that is never empty,” Foreman writes.
Foreman wields his cudgel more for the left-wingers, however, since they have been far more
influential in pulling their fellow travelers in the environmental community away from the
population stabilization cause – under threat of shunning or excommunication. And Foreman
acknowledges forthrightly that the main reason for this is what he calls the “Bugbear of
Immigration:”
Conservationists and others won’t work on growth in the United States until we deal
forthrightly with immigration. We can’t do that until we make a new playing field where
we can talk about immigration without being damned to hell by erstwhile friends who say
we are anti-immigrant.
And:
…unless we cap immigration to the United States, we cannot keep from doubling or
nearly tripling today’s U.S. population by 2100. You might not like this hand, but it is the
hand we are dealing ourselves.
If other American conservation leaders had the courage, common sense, and plain speech of
Dave Foreman instead of the cunning and deceit purveyed by the counselor Wormtongue in
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, America’s wildlife and wild places would stand a much better
chance of surviving this hard new century.
Foreman goes on to offer his own wide-ranging recommendations on how to cap immigration to
the U.S., some of which may strike NumbersUSA supporters as familiar, and others as original,
radical, or unrealistic. But they represent fresh, outside-the-box thinking on the immigration
issue by a free-thinking and innovative conservation ally.
Not content to lament, and definitely not a passive prisoner of folly, fatalism, and futility,
Foreman closes Man Swarm, with a 32-page chapter called, “What Do We Do?” Here he
furnishes an even wider-ranging array of actions that disturbed conservationists can take, from
the personal to the political.
I hope I’ve whetted your appetite for this book – it behooves you to buy it, read it, digest it…and
act.
And from Uncle Dave Foreman’s Man Swarm, the final word:
Those environmentalists, who think we can double or triple U.S. population without
wiping out wildlife and scalping our last wildernesses, are living in a fool’s paradise –
not in the real world where we either will or will not keep the other Earthlings [wildlife]
hale and hearty in our shared neighborhoods.