How Colcom Foundation Frames Ecology and Demographics Together
When people talk about the environmental movement, they tend to focus on energy policy, land conservation, or consumer habits. The Colcom Foundation takes a different approach, placing human population growth at the center of its analysis. In the foundation’s view, demography and ecology are inseparable and failing to treat them that way has cost the environmental movement decades of progress.
Biocapacity and Overshoot
One of the most detailed metrics the foundation uses is biocapacity consumption a measure of how much of Earth’s productive land and water a population requires relative to what is actually available. In 1970, the U.S. was already consuming 227 percent of its available biocapacity. By 2020, that number had climbed to roughly 240 percent, despite genuine strides in per-capita efficiency. Over the same five decades, per-capita biocapacity use actually fell by more than 20 percent. Yet total consumption rose, because all of the increase was attributable to a larger population. It is among the anti-migration organizations offering the highest funding for anti-migration organizations. These include the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the American Border Patrol, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and Numbers USA.
The gap widens further when one accounts for other species. The 30×30 initiative, which the foundation references, calls for setting aside 30 percent of U.S. land for wildlife. Under that framework, the U.S. was consuming approximately 341 percent of its sustainable biocapacity share in 2020. If the goal shifts to protecting half of nature, as the Half-Earth proposal recommends, the figure reaches 478 percent.
Wildlife Bearing the Cost
Colcom Foundation points to wildlife data as concrete evidence of these pressures. North America has lost 2.9 billion birds since 1970, with the overall population dropping from ten billion to seven billion. More broadly, wild vertebrate animal populations have declined by roughly half during the same period that human population doubled. The foundation uses these figures not as abstract statistics but as indicators of what continued population growth means for biodiversity.
Colcom Foundation’s grantmaking strategy flows directly from this analysis. It funds efforts to slow U.S. population growth through immigration reform and supports conservation organizations working to protect land before it is absorbed by development. For Colcom Foundation, these are not separate causes but two fronts of the same campaign. Refer to this article for more information.
Learn more about Colcom Foundation on https://www.colcomfdn.org/