Letter Exchange with Mayor Bloomberg

Alan Saly
570 44th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11220

March 27, 2007
Hon. Michael Bloomberg
MAYOR
City of New York
City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mr. Mayor:

I was in the audience tonight in Sunset Park for your presentation to the community. I appreciated your frankness about many issues before us, and your unwillingness to give pat answers which would please the public, but which may be inaccurate or misleading.

On one front, however, I believe your comments missed the mark -- when you said that America must have a yearly influx of immigrants, at the level of 400,000 to 500,000, or risk a future in which “there won’t be enough workers to pay your social security benefits.”

Surely, there is a logical flaw with this position. About 25 years ago, I interviewed the noted scientist and writer Isaac Asimov for a magazine article. I asked Asimov what he thought was the optimum population for the United States, in order to maintain sustainability, and he replied that he thought it was about 150 million. Today, there are 300 million Americans.

You embrace with gusto the prospect of almost a million more New Yorkers in the next 20 years. I enjoy the richness and diversity of the City as much as you do, and it would be wonderful if we lived in a world of infinite resources. However, the scientific evidence is undeniable that our life style is not sustainable. In 2000, 12% of birds, 21% of amphibians, 24% of mammals, 25% of reptiles, 29% of invertebrates, and 30% of fish species were classified as threatened (IUCN). The numbers are higher today.

The footprint of the average American (the amount of land required to resource the lifestyle of one person) is 9.7 hectares, according the New Scientist magazine – the largest per capita footprint on earth. Surely, we don’t need to continue in this direction and champion population growth.

I fear that you are wearing rose-colored glasses when you say that sustainability can go hand in hand with population growth. I encourage you to question that point of view, regardless of the fact that to declare that population growth is not desirable is not politically correct. Perhaps you can meditate on this when your term ends and you take your well-deserved one week’s vacation.

Sincerely,



Alan J. Saly




May 12, 2007

Hon. Michael Bloomberg
MAYOR
City of New York
City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mr. Mayor:

Thank you for your carefully thought-out reply to my recent letter about population growth in New York City. I have reviewed the plaNYC website, and see there the fruits of much constructive thought and engagement with the issues of population growth and responsibility for our environment.

I am concerned however that we may be going down the wrong path. I understand your letter and your public posture on these ideas as the natural product of your genuine optimism, self-reliance, and conviction that it is possible for us as a society to overcome all odds. This reminds me (and I don’t mean to make an invidious comparison), of former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern’s frequent invocations of his childhood in New York City, where a public school and City College education was an opportunity to associate with the finest minds of his generation and everything seemed possible to anyone who had the wit to seize it.

To be optimistic is necessary, but it is also necessary to accept when limitations have been reached. I believe that – just as anthropogenic warming is creating something unprecedented in history – the human race is pushing up against limitations which will have unforeseen effects. For this reason, it’s crucially important that we be very cautious and prudent. Planning for a New York City with a million more people – no matter if this is done by our best thinkers and urban planners – may be a grave mistake. It may be better to find ways to avert or curtail this population increase – such as tax credits for smaller families and more serious restrictions on immigration. I realize that this would be extremely difficult, both practically and politically.

I understand that your point of view is that we can take the population increase in stride, and still create a more livable City. Would you be willing to question that assumption? Looking into the future, I see a continued downward spiral in wages for the average worker, a continued increase in income inequality as more and more people have less and less work. Even you are apparently interested in reducing pensions for new City workers, creating the specter of poverty in their old age. It doesn’t seem that anything will replace the mighty manufacturing engine that created the American prosperity which Henry Stern remembers so well. Capitalism is consuming the average worker with debt, and “financializing” all aspects of life. At the same time, the future of our biosphere is in the balance.

Please think about the issues I have raised in this letter and especially about the ramifications of a growing NYC population. I was proud to vote for you in the last election, and salute your management.



Sincerely,




Alan J. Saly