From Washington comes an urgent missive: “Negative Population Growth President Donald Mann has announced a new nationwide effort to get Congress to debate and pass legislation that will end the practice of granting automatic citizenship to all babies born on U.S. soil regardless of their parents’ citizenship status.”
Donald Mann, Wesleyan ’43, is 98, considerably older than climate activist Greta Thunberg. But he shares her alarm at humanity’s current predicament. Like Thunberg, he is an activist. Many recent Wesleyan graduates — millennials — are having second and third thoughts about having children due to their insecurity about what the future will hold. A climate of uncertainty is spreading.
Like Greta Thunberg, who is ridiculed and lampooned in the right-wing press, Mann is dismissed by his critics on the other side of the political divide. They confuse his science-based opposition to immigration with xenophobia.
Thunberg told the United Nations, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Mann, soon to become a centenarian, puts it differently: “What we should be doing is paying more attention to future generations, because those poor people, they’re not in a position to do anything about it.” What they are both saying may be so similar that it is a distinction without a difference.
Dystopias are not fun, but they are very popular. Today people aren’t as quick to dismiss Don Mann’s vision of a probable future as they would have been ten years ago. “There’s not going to be enough to go around,” he says. “Because of overpopulation, it’s going to be pretty rough sledding.” Yet Mann remains an idealist. And as Bard College President Leon Botstein said in a recent lecture on Don Quixote, “idealism is not something to be made fun of.”
Writing decades before Al Gore asserted his inconvenient truth, Don Mann — along with well-regarded scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners — put forward the intellectual blueprint for a wide-ranging discussion on how to reduce and reverse population growth beginning with the founding of his organization, Negative Population Growth, or NPG, in 1972. Noted polymath Isaac Asimov was one of his champions, as was Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day, and former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Population Lindsey Grant.
Mann’s office in his Deerfield Beach, Florida, ranch house looks much like his dorm at Wesleyan University might have back in 1941. The printed word is everywhere. Opened books, papers marked for reference, newspapers, curios like a bust of Abraham Lincoln and a statuette of Moliere — take up the space. There’s a photo album of the Allied landings in Normandy, which Don remembers personally because he was there, as an officer in the U.S. Navy Amphibious Forces.
“I was in an amphibious craft,” he recalls. “We got a message from the Supreme Commander — we expect every man to do his duty. And so, in we went.
“D-day had passed. Bodies littered the beach. We were taking them out. As I was heading out to the hospital ship with one of the wounded, I heard a sharp puff. I looked down and saw that a bullet had left a little furrow in my finger, and my finger was only a few inches from my head. The bullet came from the beach. The Germans were still shooting.”
“I remember there was a black man on deck, not terribly wounded, but wounded, and he was very brave. Didn’t complain. And I thought to myself, he couldn’t even go to the same mess as white people, and here he’s getting blown apart. Amazing.”
He grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. “My father didn’t get to college, but he was very bright. He invented one of the first gum vending machines and he went up to Chicago with it and made a lot of money.” Then the Depression came along, and the family relocated to St. Petersburg, Florida.
Enrolled in a junior college, Mann had a family friend whose brother was a Wesleyan Trustee. He recalled that he sent in a recommendation that read something like this: “Don is an awfully nice young man. He’s not much of a scholar, to tell you the truth.” That got him to Middletown. His memories of college include playing on the basketball team, waiting on tables at Psi U, and enjoying a farewell dinner where a retiring English Professor remarked, “Don Mann can quote more Chaucer than most of us have ever read.”
“My senior year,” he remembers, “I took care of Jack Lowndes, who bless his heart, had had polio as a child. Jack had to have somebody to help him. You had to carry him to class. His legs were paralyzed completely. I had some kind of a scholarship, but a small one, for taking care of him. Never used a wheelchair. I would carry him every place he went — upstairs, downstairs, to class, everyplace. Jack was also an English Major, and he graduated with me.”
At Wesleyan he got acquainted with Shakespeare and French writers. “One of the real pleasures in my life is my friend Moliere,” he says, holding the plaster bust of the playwright that he keeps on his desk. He also has a well-read leather-bound pocket edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy close at hand. He can recite the lyrical Italian from memory, savoring the words. It’s Canto V of the Inferno, the part where the noblewoman Francesca describes how she and Paolo, her husband’s brother and illicit lover, were swept away by their passion and doomed to the first circle of hell.
In a trajectory familiar to Wesleyan graduates, literature and interdisciplinary learning attracted Donald Mann more than anything else — but he couldn’t make money at it. After the war, he studied philosophy at Columbia for a semester, but then went back to Paris, resolving to learn French in the hopes of joining the Foreign Service. Those plans were derailed by marriage to a lady he met in Paris who shortly became pregnant. With a family to support, he bounced around between France, Morocco, Lebanon, Germany and the US, perfecting his French and picking up some Arabic, working in sales for General Tire overseas and in real estate back in America.
On a trip back to New York his experiences and thoughts seemed to crystallize. “I was coming back from Europe after having been over there for three or four years. I had always loved the forest in the Florida Keys, and the oceans. I saw how devastated things were, due to war and over-exploitation of resources. It seemed like things were going down real fast because there were too many people. I thought, maybe I can do something about this.”
It seemed obvious: on a finite planet, with limited resources, growth can’t continue forever. A continually exploding population would eventually deplete nature, leading to catastrophic reverses for mankind. But postwar America was primed for growth. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” updating the theories of Malthus, helped usher in the environmental movement but was debunked as alarmist.
Mann felt that Zero Population Growth, founded in 1968, wasn’t going far enough. Isaac Asimov was on record saying that no more than 100 million people could live in America without causing irreparable damage to our natural ecosystems. Keeping to that number — less than a third of the country’s current population size — would protect our rivers, aquifers, and wilderness areas, that in turn provide the space for people to live in harmony with nature, not crowding out the many species that live alongside us.
Mann began writing essays on population growth and overcrowding in America, and sent them to a collection of scientists and academics. He received positive responses, and enlisted professors at Columbia to write papers for his fledgling organization. Those went to “a huge list of scientists,” and many responded with encouragement and funding, allowing him to incorporate NPG in 1972. “They told me, keep going, you’re doing the right thing.”
At 51, Mann was ready to devote his energies, full-time, to building the political and social consensus for a US population policy that would lead to a sustainable world. Marshaling the intellectual resources of dozens of environmentalists, economists, and scientists, he brought them together in what amounted to a public brain trust. He invited the experts to write on such topics as soil erosion, groundwater resources, traffic and urban sprawl, air and water pollution, human fertility, and immigration — ten to twelve page “NPG Forum” papers which were sent to NPG members, schools and libraries. NPG sponsored contests for students to write essays on the consequences of living in a crowded world. It placed op-eds in major papers, encouraged members to write letters to the editor, and provided resource materials for environmental activists opposing growth in their states and cities.
What measures does NPG advocate? One paper, picked more or less at random, written by San Diego State Professor John Weeks and published in 1992, provides several recommendations of policies to influence fertility. They include providing full legal rights to women, increasing the legal age for marriage, legalizing abortion, payments for not having children, and the distribution of birth control methods at all health clinics.
With U.S. fertility dropping in the 80’s and 90’s, along with that of other first-world nations, NPG recognized that were it not for immigration, US population growth would be negative. Continued high levels of Immigration however, insured that the opposite would happen. A graph, created by David Simcox and published in Lindsey Grant’s 1992 book, “Elephants in the Volkswagen,” is dead on when it comes to today’s population numbers, based on a projection of 1.5 million new immigrants each year. The graph (see below) accurately predicts today’s US population number of 330 million. By contrast, if population had been held equal to emigration, the graph shows there would be only 220 million Americans today.
NPG took issue with economists who argued that immigrants boosted America’s productivity and didn’t take jobs from native-born citizens. It documented the environmental degradation stemming from consumerism — both steadily rising because of population growth.
When the Trump administration took office, it severely restricted immigration — but not for the environmental reasons NPG championed. Unemployment receded to historic lows, giving credence to arguments that competition from immigrant labor had indeed cost many Americans their jobs. A rising tide of xenophobia put NPG in a difficult position — should it ride the swelling tide of nativism, or stick to the science?
The tradition of free intellectual inquiry — as Socrates would say, following the argument to wherever it leads — is championed at Wesleyan. Donald Mann remains true to that ideal, even though the country is now in the midst of a raw and angry debate about immigration.
When this writer interviewed him late in 2019, news was just breaking that the US was abandoning its Kurdish allies in Syria, potentially creating a new refugee crisis. Mann said:
“These are people who fought with America, and they’re now open to being killed. Even though we [at NPG] don’t believe in more immigration, maybe we should be doing something to help them. We can’t go off and leave them.”
When asked about the climate change movement, Mann says, “It’s odd that people don’t want to recognize that population is the central issue here. In a small world with limits, eternal growth is not possible. That’s the answer but it’s pretty hard for people to accept that. I would tell today’s Wesleyan students, the growth of population is the most important thing you can address.”
As I leave his home, Don insists on giving this writer his own annotated copy of “Elephants in the Volkswagen,” by Lindsey Grant. On the dedication page is the inscription, “This book is affectionately dedicated to Donald Mann, who has fought the good fight.”
That was 27 years ago, and Don still has a lot of fight left in him.
