In December I sat in a large auditorium among several thousand academics at a conference in San Antonio, Texas. The keynote speaker was Henry Cisneros, former four-term mayor of San Antonio and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration.
Cisneros was eloquent and congenial, and he connected quickly with his audience. He was the bearer of good news for the assembled representatives of hundreds of institutions of higher education in the south and southwest, many of which are confronting significant fiscal challenges connected with the developing recession.
The first piece of good news: by 2050, Cisneros said, the population of the United States will increase by 130 million people. These are people that will produce and consume, strengthening the economy, as well as, he said, serve in the military.
The second piece of good news: only 18 million of the 130 million new Americans will belong to the demographic group that we ordinarily call "white." About 44 million will be Asian or black, and about 68 million will be Hispanic.
This is good news for colleges and universities because the groups that will grow most between now and 2050 have traditionally been underrepresented in higher education; they are an enormous untapped source of new students. Furthermore, the changing nature of our economy, as we continue to move from manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy, will require all groups to have more education. There will be plenty of work for colleges and universities.
I'd like to think of all of this as good news, but I sensed the presence of a so-called elephant in the room. I kept stumbling over Cisneros' initial statistic: an increase of 130 million new citizens by 2050, which is the equivalent of adding to our population a whole country of a size somewhere between Japan and Russia.
The earth is enormous, and the subject of sustainable population is complicated. It's not hard to find enthusiasts on the Internet who argue that our planet and our country are nowhere close to exceeding their sustainable carrying capacity.
On the other hand, a week after Cisneros' speech, this Associated Press story appeared in my local paper: "Act on Gulf dead zone, scientists say." A group of scientists from the National Research Council is urging federal agencies to initiate efforts to reduce runoffs of nitrogen and phosphorous -- residue from the petroleum-based fertilization of our great Midwestern breadbasket.
Nitrogen and phosphorous make things grow. But when excessive amounts reach the Gulf of Mexico they create a vast low-oxygen "dead zone" -- currently as large as 8,000 square miles -- that destroys the ordinary food chain. Pretty soon all that can survive are jellyfish, and the formerly productive Gulf fisheries are threatened. Scientists are calling for immediate steps to reduce the chemical runoff in the Mississippi and other rivers.
Other signs that the earth is beginning to creak and groan under the weight of the human burden that it carries are abundant: shrinking ice at the poles, higher sea levels, diminishing energy supplies, gridlock in cities, eco-unfriendly sprawl in the suburbs, destruction of rain forest, species extinction, air and water pollution, and much more.
Cisneros' post-political career is real estate development, a field that by definition depends on growth; his enthusiasm for the huge population increase he predicts is understandable. But most institutions of higher education depend on growth for funding, as well; colleges with flat or declining enrollments are considered unhealthy.
In fact, growth is the essential fundamental principle of our economy, the story of our nation.
And when everyone benefits from growth, it's hard for anyone to raise the uncomfortable question of where its inevitable limits begin. But those limits may be closer than we're willing to acknowledge.
(John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail him at jcrisp(at)delmar.edu. For more news and information visit www.scrippsnews.com.)
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