Austin, December 2049

Today, state officials held a massive parade and public barbecue to celebrate official federal confirmation that Texas is America’s greatest and most important state.

The occasion: The U.S. Census Bureau released estimates showing that the ever-growing Lone Star State, with more than 40.3 million people, had surpassed stagnant California, stuck at just under 40 million people for 30 years.

As Texans boasted about their new status—“We are the greatest civilization of the greatest country on earth,” declared 79-year-old U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, now in his seventh term—Golden State leaders issued well-practiced denials.

“Population isn’t a true measure of greatness,” protested California Gov. Meghan Markle. “California is still the land of the grandest dreams, of the most embarrassing celebrities, of $10 million two-bedroom starter homes.”

But most longtime observers of the Golden State shrugged at Texas’ triumph.

Some noted that, as early as 2023, estimates from demographers predicted that Texas would surpass California in population by 2050.

In retrospect, 2023 was also the year it became obvious that California would willingly cede national leadership to Texas, signaling its surrender with a total lack of response to a startling and historic drop in population.

California’s population had always grown, often dramatically, ever since statehood. And when California passed New York to become the most populous state in November 1962, the moment launched an era in which the Golden State was seen as the nation’s leader in culture, economy, and policymaking.

That era started to end in the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2020 to July 2022, it lost more than half a million people. Many pinned the cause on COVID deaths, and Californians leaving the state. But deaths and departures were part of the population decline.

The real problem was the lack of new Californians. The birth rate fell to a level that made old Europe look fertile. Immigration plummeted too, in part because of cruel and restrictionist federal immigration policies. And Americans all but stopped moving to California, with its rampant homelessness and expensive housing. How could they afford to?

In a saner time, such a rapid reversal of population in a state synonymous with arrival and growth—“California, Here I Come”—would have been considered a crisis. State and local governments would have come forward with new programs to encourage births, to keep existing Californians in the state, and to attract new ones. Budget surpluses could have been devoted to big new tax bonuses for starting families, to loan forgiveness for California university graduates who settled in the state after graduation, and to massive new affordable housing and infrastructure projects.

But 2023 was a very peculiar and unsettled time. People were depressed and anxious. Society was divided and in conflict. The public conversation, diminished by the decline of independent media, offered few visions of the future. Instead, the state and the country were consumed by loud and angry debates about racial and gender identity, and how to reinterpret the past.

So, Californians never seized on population decline as a reason to remake and rebuild the state.

And they never did the democratic math and recognized that losing population would mean losing power and influence.

Instead, Californians used population decline as an excuse not to do new and hard things.

This denial was most prominent on housing. Communities countered state pressure to build more housing by arguing that housing wouldn’t be necessary because there would be fewer people. This was a cynical bit of illogic—there couldn’t be more Californians without more housing—and it ignored the hard fact that California’s housing stock was the oldest in the West (and as old as housing stock in much of the Rust Belt).

But it worked. Media amplified the argument. State courts began embracing an argument that people themselves were pollution under the state’s main environmental law. And housing production, which had dropped by nearly half between the early 2000s and the early 2020s, continued its fall. The housing shortage became permanent, freezing California’s population at 40 million.

A similar dynamic froze California in other ways. With the population of children declining rapidly, school districts shut down schools and programs, instead of expanding educational offerings and building new schools to draw more kids. The state’s university systems, consumed by culture war and workplace conduct controversies, did too little to counter declines in enrollment. California’s powerful environmental groups and labor unions kept fighting efforts to build new, climate-resilient infrastructure in water, energy, and transportation.

The message sent by California to the rest of the world was clear: If we don’t build it, you won’t come.

And you didn’t.

In truth, today’s news on state populations was just the latest in a long series of declines. The Texas economy became bigger than California’s in 2040, which was not much of a surprise. Texas had been the nation’s leader in exports and renewable energy since early in the 21st century. For a couple of generations, Texas invested a higher percentage of its budget in education, and delivered better student outcomes, than California.

Meanwhile, the Digital Age ended the primacy of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The entertainment and technology sectors could operate anywhere and no longer required headquarters in California, or anywhere else.

California’s slide down the economic rankings came quickly. In 2023, California’s governor liked to brag about the state becoming the world’s fourth largest economy. The state is down to 14th place today, and dropping.

Which leaves us with questions. If California had focused more on growth and the future back in the 2020s, could it have remained bigger and richer than Texas? Or could the state at least have forestalled its decline?

Maybe. But we’ll never know, because California never really tried.

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Then you are dead wrong.

Because our very senior senator, more than any other political leader in the state, actually represents California’s future. And while those political insiders campaigning to force her retirement may be correct about her diminished capacities, they fail to recognize just how much she resembles who we Californians are, and what we are becoming.

California’s future, like Feinstein, looks old. Californians are increasingly the sort of people who are well past their prime but don’t know it. We forget other people and even ourselves. Once among America’s youngest and fastest-growing states, California is now losing population and aging faster than the rest of the country.

Both trends should make us cherish our senator, who is 88, even more, because she represents a rare and precious demographic success story: People over age 85 who, through their longevity, are preventing a California population collapse.

This rising Feinstein Generation is by far the fastest-growing and most rapidly diversifying age group in California; by one estimate, it will grow 489 percent from 2010 to 2060. State analyses suggest that the post-85 group will dominate the 2030s, as the first Baby Boomers enter what you might call the new prime of California life.

Younger people, by contrast, show nothing but ingratitude for this cohort’s largesse, choosing to leave California (85 percent of departures are among those 25 to 64), or failing to move to the state in the first place.

Instead of whining about DiFi and her ilk, why don’t young people and younger politicians devote themselves to building up the younger generations they claim to champion? They could get busy having more children and enticing others to procreate, thus reversing declines in the number of California kids and increases in closures of schools (some of which will probably be repurposed for senior living). Incentives to have children might well be combined with greater investments in public education to extend school days and school years, improve instruction, and raise standards.

Another strategy would be to push harder to reverse the restrictionist immigration policies of our last three presidents—Obama, Trump, and Biden—that have contributed to a decline in international migration to California. Still another pro-youth strategy would be to build more and cheaper housing, so more young people could afford to settle here.

It’s hard politically to expand new public investment in California, particularly when it benefits young people who represent a declining share of the population. But it would be easier if politicians pursued more money for schools or child care in combination with more care for the growing population of the elderly. Investing in seniors is popular, with support for the governor’s Master Plan for Aging, which has five big goals around improving care and housing for the oldest Californians, recorded at around 80 percent.

Feinstein could help the cause by being less defensive about her decline. Indeed, her staffers and supporters, instead of disputing press reports about her lapsing memory or diminished cognition, should embrace her faltering. They make her a better representative of her state.

The senator, on her good days, might talk more often, and in public, about the needs for forward-looking investments, even if she experiences senior moments in the process. She should present herself, and her good fortune in having plenty of money to pay for care-giving, as examples: Every Californian should have as many people to keep an eye on them as Feinstein does.

It’s tempting to want someone younger and more energetic for the job of being one of two senators for nearly 40 million people. I myself recently accused Feinstein of stubbornly holding on, in a certain San Francisco fashion. And it can be unsettling to see one’s elected representative seem confused in public.

But take a step back. Who isn’t confused by the strangeness and pressures of American life these days? And to her credit, Feinstein hasn’t created nearly as much confusion as her much younger friend, Gavin Newsom, has done with ever-shifting COVID restrictions and policy announcements.

It may be time—as her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is now arguing—for Feinstein to step aside. But the reason for retirement would not be that she is failing to represent our state. To the contrary, in one very important respect, every day Feinstein remains in office, she provides Californians with an indispensable example.

When we look at our senator, we are looking in a mirror.

The post Dianne Feinstein Is California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This should be the summer when the population of California finally surpasses 40 million.

We should celebrate by reflecting on just how small we are.

Of course, we won’t. California, like an insecure male lover, is always bragging about how big it is. And so reaching the 40 million threshold—there is no red-letter date, though, by state figures, it’s likely to happen in late summer—will occasion another round of boasting about our size, not merely in population but in economic output and cultural impact. And this moment is likely to produce new predictions—offered either with pride or fear—about how soon we’ll get to 50 million or even 100 million people.

Such projections of massive growth may be fun, but they will likely prove to be exaggerated. To the contrary, this is the moment to consider the very real possibility that California’s rapid population growth is over—and that shrinkage may be in our future.

The very factors that have produced population declines in other places are now strong trends in California. Our birth rate has fallen to a record low—even lower than during the depths of the Great Depression. Also, we’re now three decades into a serious out-migration of California residents, with the Golden State losing about one million more people per decade than it takes in from the rest of the United States.

International immigration won’t save us—it’s at near-historic lows and is likely to fall further as the federal government continues its systematic harassment and mass deportation of immigrants. And the Trump administration’s destructive trade war is already hurting our globally oriented economy, eliminating jobs that draw and keep people here.

Worse still, our state’s own policy mistakes—underfunding schools and child care; failing to build adequate housing or infrastructure; letting runaway retirement costs for public employees undermine public services—all discourage family creation and add to the high cost of living that drives people out of California.

Which may be by design. The state’s ascendant environmental groups see population control as crucial to reducing pollution and fighting climate change. Indeed, such policies are self-reinforcing, creating a negative population spiral.

As the number of children declines and young people leave California, the state is aging rapidly. San Francisco now has the lowest proportion of children (13 percent) of any major U.S. city. Aging populations tend to be less supportive of the very things that boost population: immigration and taxes to pay for child development. And, economically, aging populations consume less and innovate less (most new things are invented by the young), making their economies smaller and reducing the number of jobs.

Unfortunately, population also could suffer via disasters that no longer seem so unlikely—from nuclear war to huge firestorms fueled by climate change.

If you’re sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405, you may be reading this skeptically, wondering, “Why am I stuck behind all these cars if the population growth is so low?”

My answer is, first, you should put down your phone while you’re driving—it’s not safe, and California can’t afford to lose you. Second, you should consider the numbers: California’s population growth is at record lows—less than 0.8 percent annually—and falling. During the heyday of immigration in the 1980s, annual population growth was 2.5 percent a year.

Indeed, with many other states growing faster than the Golden State, in 2022 California could lose a seat in the House of Representatives for the first time. The likelihood of such a loss increases if the Trump Administration succeeds in politicizing the census and undercounting California’s racial and ethnic minorities.

California would hardly be alone if its population started to decline. Illinois and Pennsylvania have seen their populations drop in some recent years. And the most recent population report from the United Nations says that 51 countries are expected to see population decreases between now and 2050, including European countries that inspire our state’s social policies, like Germany. In Asia, Japan’s population already is in decline; now at 127 million, its government has declared a goal of limiting losses so that the total doesn’t fall below 100 million. Even China, once a feared “population bomb,” and long a source of immigrants to California, is expected to see a 2.5 percent decline in its population by 2050.

Despite the warning signs, the prospect of population loss hasn’t penetrated the California mind. Instead, we remain devoted to the great California pastime of overestimating our own population growth. One big offender, Gov. Jerry Brown, talks about reaching 50 million as a fait accompli that could threaten the environment, urging Californians “to find a more elegant way of relating to material things.”

But, out of sight, number crunchers at the state’s think tanks and government bureaus have been ratcheting down California’s population estimates. As recently as the mid-1990s, the state and federal governments’ official predictions showed California reaching 50 million people by 2020, a year when our real population likely will be fewer than 41 million.

And if we never get much beyond 40 million, will it be a mortal wound to our pride? After all, the United States hasn’t had that low a population since 1872, which was when the newspaper man Horace Greeley, famous for the advice “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” ran for president, lost, and promptly dropped dead.

Today’s 40-million-person California, for all its delusions of grandeur, has less than one-eighth the population of the United States, less than one-third the population of Mexico, and not even 1/35th the population of China. If California were a country, we would rank just 35th. Ukraine, Uganda, Argentina, Colombia, Tanzania, and Myanmar all have millions more people than us. Our most populous city, Los Angeles, ranks just 71st on the planet.

This California, of 40 million, faces a choice. Either accept that, instead of the colossus of our boastful imaginings, we’re a small place that’s likely to become smaller—at least compared to a world that is growing faster than we are. Or think more seriously about how to attract more people here from other states and countries, and better nurture and retain the young people we have here now.

If we’re as big as we think we are, this is no time to think small.

The post Could California’s Population Actually Shrink? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Since its inception in 1790, the U.S. Census has aimed to count every living person in the country, and the stakes are high. The results of the census determine the allocation of hundreds of billions of federal dollars, which affect every slice of American life.

In order to do so, the Census must ask Americans the right questions—and give them the right options for their answers. It seems relatively simple, but—as I learned in 2013, when I became a member of the Committee on Population Statistics of the Population Association of America—the undertaking is so enormous that the planning for the 2020 Census began even before the completion of the 2010 Census. In 2010, the Census Bureau launched the Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) to compare different Census questionnaire design strategies. Five years later came the National Content Test (NCT), in which different questionnaires were sent to a statistically representative sample of approximately 1.2 million households in the United States and Puerto Rico.

I had the opportunity to review the results of both tests and assess which questionnaire design results in the most accurate count of the U.S. population. That meant taking three interrelated components into consideration. The first is increased reporting: Which questions were people most likely to answer? The second is decreased non-reporting: Which questions were more likely to get groups who are susceptible to non-reporting (including poor families who get evicted, immigrants who do not read or understand English, and undocumented migrants who may fear government officials) to respond? The third is increased, detailed reporting: Which questions yield more information about the respondents?

The design of a question itself affects how people answer it. Take the race and ethnicity question. People who identify as Asian or Hispanic answer it differently depending on how it is presented on the Census form.

In the 2010 Census, Hispanic origin and race were listed as two separate questions. In both the AQE and NTC, the Census Bureau tested the option of combining race and Hispanic origin into one question, which they refer to as the “combined format.” In addition, they tested which combined format would elicit the most detailed reporting on origin.

One option was to list the racial categories only, with an option to write in their detailed origin. A second option was to list racial categories and also provide check boxes denoting examples of detailed origin, along with the option to write in one’s origin.

More than 70 percent of self-identified Hispanics said they were Hispanic when they were offered Hispanic as a race option (the combined option). When they are not presented with this option, as in the 2010 Census, self-identified Hispanics are more likely to check “some other race” or mark two or more races. In short, the combined option—in which Hispanic is listed as a race category—more easily allows Hispanics to accurately report their Hispanic identity. Moreover, when Hispanics are offered the combined option, they are significantly less likely to mark “some other race” or two or more races to self-identify. Both results indicate more accurate reporting on the part of Hispanics.

Moreover, Asians were most likely to mark their race, including their detailed race, when they are provided with a check box to mark their national origin (for example, Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese). When these check boxes are removed, however, and Asians are presented with only a space to write in their national origin, they are less likely to report it. The difference is significant. The check-box format yielded a 97.4 percent response rate among Asian-Americans, and plummeted to 92.6 percent when they were provided only with a write-in option.

Detailed reporting among Asians is critical because it allows researchers to disaggregate data, which is essential to identifying health, educational, and economic disparities among Asian ethnic groups.

Such disaggregation may sound technical and mathematical, but it can have profound human impacts. For example, having data specific to different sub-groups on disease rates, health insurance coverage rates, and birth and death rates can allow policy makers and community organizations to make more informed decisions about how to best serve these populations.

Some Asian ethnic groups are more susceptible to certain health risks: Men and women of Vietnamese origin experience the highest rates of lung cancer among all Asian American subgroups, while men and women of Korean origin have some of the highest colorectal cancer rates. Such data can guide outreach on health insurance coverage; while 13 percent of Asian Americans lack health insurance, the rate is as high as 20 percent among Koreans.

In the state of California, there’s been broad recognition of the importance of breaking out such data. Last fall, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation directing the Department of Public Health to disaggregate data for the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander populations on or after July 1, 2022. Following suit, the University of California and California State University have agreed to begin releasing disaggregated data on admissions, enrollment, and graduation rates—data that will help to unveil the wide disparity in educational attainment among Asian Americans.

Data disaggregation is a powerful weapon to dismantle the dominant narrative of Asian Americans as the model minority, which has resulted in their exclusion from policy debates on poverty, health care, and education. While Asian Americans may be touted as academic high achievers, one-third of Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong do not graduate from high school. Data disaggregation exposes these gaping differences among Asian ethnic groups, and points to the dire need for the federal resources to help boost the educational outcomes of these groups, which are essential to immigrant and second-generation integration.

If the 2020 Census provides only a write-in option to list one’s origin, we will lose a lot of disaggregated data, and be unable to identify the stark differences among U.S. Asians. We will also miss a great deal of information on the country’s growing and increasingly diverse Hispanic population.

You don’t have to be on a committee like I am to weigh in on the Census. For the second time before the potential revisions of the 2020 Census, the White House Office of Management and Budget has invited public comments. While the ultimate decision about potential changes rests in the hands of Congress, your opinion counts. April 30 is the last day to weigh in.

The post Why the Census Must Frame the Right Questions on Race and National Origin appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But that was when the U.S. was still largely an agrarian society, and by the early 20th century urban opportunity was sucking the energy out of such places. After World War II agribusiness replaced family farms, big box stores killed local enterprises, and manufacturing jobs all but disappeared. Today, only about 9 percent of the population lives in places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. And the most notable features of many of those places are shuttered businesses and dilapidated houses.

So I was surprised and delighted to notice that, early in the 21st century, the hardscrabble Long Island village I passed through to get to my summer retreat had taken on a new look.

The tiny downtown of Greenport, New York is now graced by a grassy expanse leading down to Peconic Bay, a carousel attracting young families from “up-island” and New York City, and restaurants that attest to its status as a foodie destination. The village has undergone a transformation of the kind that most small American towns gave up on decades ago.

Its success is visible everywhere. Lovely old houses have been restored, yachts preen at the marina, and summer events include bowdlerized Shakespeare on the lawn and Monday evening dances en plein air. The annual Maritime Festival brings together old-time Greenporters—some are descendants of families who settled the area in the 1640s—and denizens of the new tourist economy. For the first time since 1950, the census of 2010 recorded an increase in population, to 2,190 full-time residents, with another 500 or so part-timers.

This revitalization has two principal sources. In the 1990s a vigorous and imaginative mayor found public and private support for a park that would anchor his vision of a revived downtown. And as his dream became reality, a new working class arrived to staff it—immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

They found work in and around Greenport—landscaping, housekeeping, construction—and housing. Often these immigrants enjoyed the company of family members or friends from home who had preceded them. By 2010 they constituted one-third of village residents. “They’ve saved this town,” says former mayor Dave Kapell, who sparked the renewal.

As I got to know (and interview) a number of the newcomers, I discovered that settling in Greenport offered them more than material benefits. On several levels they appreciated the peacefulness of their surroundings. For the family from El Salvador that ran a pupuseria the North Fork of Long Island was a political haven; a Guatemalan gardener was grateful to be living among fields and vineyards. Familiarity was part of the appeal. And it seemed safe. Upon arrival in the country, many people had spent time in Brooklyn or Queens—before choosing rural life because it seemed crime-free, even if, for some, the threat of deportation loomed.

Curious about small-town immigration beyond Greenport, I started to make a list of communities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants and large numbers of foreign-born residents. I quickly concluded that, at least where immigrants have settled, rumors of the death of the small town have been greatly exaggerated. All over the country, immigrants, whether legally present or undocumented, have brought new life to towns abandoned by agriculture and manufacturing sectors.

A number of those towns are in the Midwest, especially Iowa, which is 87 percent non-Hispanic white. In Denison, with 8,390 residents in 2013, it is no longer true, as one commentator noted in the early days of the new century, that you could “nap undisturbed” on a sidewalk in the business district. Renovation of that part of town now reflects the 14 percent population increase since 2000; nearly half of the residents are Hispanic, and half of those are foreign-born. West Liberty, with 3,733 residents, up 12 percent since 2000, has the distinction of being Iowa’s first majority Hispanic community, with about one-quarter foreign-born. According to its mayor, in 2011, “If you didn’t have the Hispanic population here in town, there would be a lot more storefronts that are empty.”

While the majority of immigrants in small towns come from Mexico, with a growing presence from Central American countries, other continents are represented, too. In Dalton, Georgia, almost 60 percent of the student body in the public schools is Hispanic (most American-born children of immigrants), but there are also students from dozens of countries who speak 22 languages, according to school district officials. In Huron, South Dakota, almost 7 percent of the population of 13,163 is Asian, from Thailand and Burma.

Immigrants from India, Japan, and China have contributed to the economic recovery of Columbus, Indiana, the hometown of the 2016 Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence. New tastes and cultural practices come from refugee communities, too. Ten miles from Burlington, Vermont, farmers from Rwanda and Bhutan are responding to the demand for goat meat among their fellow refugees from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

Adapting to the needs of immigrants in small towns presents some challenges. English as a Second Language teachers are expensive additions to the budgets of small school districts. Native-born citizens (including police officers) of small towns usually have little exposure to the languages and customs urban residents encounter in daily congress. Complaints about immigrants butchering animals in the backyards of Dalton or drying fish on the clotheslines of Huron are typical of neighborhood tensions. And residential crowding—families doubling up to save money and find companionship—is a general concern, as it is in cities.

But the process of adjustment to the new demographic reality in many small towns is proceeding much as it did in more traditional urban environments during the last immigrant wave a century ago—with the acquisition of English, the discovery of economic opportunity, and the rising of the next generation of Americans.

It is, of course, too much to think that an influx of immigrants can reverse the decline of the American small town or that small towns are the answer to the manifold challenges of immigrant integration. But some communities are no longer places to leave—just ask those who have recently arrived.

The post Want to Preserve American Small Towns? Embrace Immigrants. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hypothetical in the sense that very few of us spend any time around tigers outside of zoos, though we interact with images of tigers on a daily basis, depending on what type of cereal we eat, sports team we root for, or comic strip we read.

Necessities in the sense that most of us would agree that the world really, really needs tigers; that tigers must remain lurking in the jungle, with their stripes rippling under the dappled light. The existence of tigers is a certification that wildness still exists and that conservation works. If we are going to live in skyscrapers with antibacterial countertops, use Skype for transcontinental chitchat, and actually dine on a substance called Soylent, we need to know that somewhere these gorgeous, powerful, and unpredictably violent animals still roam. The further we live from danger, the more important it is that the tigers be out there.

Tigers in India are a conservation success story, a bright orange stripe in what has otherwise been a century of heavy extinction. A hundred years ago, India had tens of thousands of tigers, but by the early 1970s they had dwindled down to a mere 1,200. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi started Project Tiger in 1973, relocating 200,000 people away from designated tiger zones, and creating buffer zones between tigery jungles and more developed areas. In 1975, tigers were listed as an endangered species. Tiger numbers have risen and fallen over the years but in January of 2015, there were 2,261 tigers in India—70 percent of the world’s wild tigers. (There were about 13,000 non-wild tigers in 2010.)

The Paris Climate Accord signed in December made preserving tropical forests a key strategy for dealing with climate change, and Project Tiger and other initiatives in the Sunderbans, the giant mangrove swamp on the border of India and Bangladesh, seem to offer a successful model for that: Careful stewardship can preserve whole biological zones, complete with beautiful wild predators. But on closer inspection, Project Tiger is also a cautionary tale about what happens when tigers (and conservation) are a bigger priority than the humans who live nearby.

Some people have paid a very high price for the world’s few tigers. People who live in the buffer areas around the Sunderbans have suffered from so many deadly tiger attacks that there are about 3,000 so-called tiger widows in India and 10,000 in Bangladesh. A few weeks ago, I happened across a journal article titled, “Ecopsychosocial Aspects of Human-Tiger Conflict: An Ethnographic Study of Tiger Widows of Sundarban Delta, India,” published in Environmental Health Insights earlier this year. The study was written by Dr. Arabinda Chowdhury and three colleagues who work in an emerging field called ecopsychiatry.

Dr. Chowdhury, a psychiatrist who spends part of his time working for the National Health Service in the U.K., is particularly concerned about the psychological cost of human-tiger conflict. From 2001 through 2006, he and his team surveyed more than 3,000 households in the Gosaba area, which is right at the edge of the tiger reserve, then did psychiatric evaluations of 49 tiger widows, spending as long as three days with each woman.

Before they ever came face-to-face with a tiger, these women’s families were very poor. Encroaching seawaters have made fields salty, forcing farmers to find other ways to earn money. Entering the tiger zone to get wood, hunt for honey, or catch tiger prawn seed have become the main local sources of income, but they require paying the government for a permit. Men from poor families haven’t been able to afford the permits so many sneak in at night. In the Indian area of the Sunderbans, about 40 people—mostly those sneaking around without permits—are attacked by tigers every year.

After they lose their husbands to tigers, widows become much poorer. The measure of extreme poverty is living on $1 per day, but many of the widows and their children in the survey survived on just $6 per month. They frequently starved and ate foraged roots and scraps from better-off families. Because many of their husbands were killed while working illegally, they were not able to have funerals or publically mourn them for fear of punishment by authorities. The widows had few skills: Of 65 tiger widows in one survey, only three could read.

But the widows’ poverty has been amplified by another factor. In that region tigers are “not just an animal, they’re a god-like concept,” as Dr. Chowdhury put it, and tiger deaths are seen as signs of the wrath of the forest goddess Bonobibi. Families and communities shun tiger widows. One woman told the team that she was waiting until her children were grown to kill herself. “The meaning of life has changed completely after his death. The relatives became distant, [the] community looks down on us and excluded us from any social festival.” The psychiatric team diagnosed many of the widows with major depressive disorder and dysthymic disorder, and (using a series of questions) determined that the women’s scores on a test of stigma were approximately twice those of other widows in the area.

The idea that we can measure a conservation project by a simple metric—number of tigers—gets complicated when you look at those stigma scores of tiger widows. Saving tigers is a worthy goal, but it requires political will to make sure that the people who live close to the tigers have enough resources to keep them out of harm’s way. (And to make sure that measures to protect tigers, like requiring expensive permits, do not harm the poorest.) The plight of the tiger widows is just the top layer of a much larger problem: a lack of electricity, clean water, transportation, health care, or industry surrounding the conserved areas, where the World Bank estimates that 1,700 children under 5 died in 2008 alone from dirty water and poor sanitation. The charismatic tiger brings our attention to the tiger widows, of course, but the toll of filthy water is many times higher. Conservation needs a moral compass that considers human costs.

India has been debating how to better balance conservation and development for decades, and in 2006 the country passed legislation on the rights of forest people, but that was not extended to the Sunderbans. Since the study, Dr. Chowdhury says, some things have improved in the buffer zone, and a Bangladeshi group called LEDARS has helped many tiger widows on the other side of the border. In central India, a nonprofit called Satpuda works with more than 80 villages near tiger reserves to provide jobs, medical care, and education—in addition to doing tiger conservation. Dr. Chowdhury has a dream of training people in villages to do basic psychological counseling as part of a medical team, while encouraging highly skilled psychiatric professionals to visit during their vacations. But it will require a lot of political will to address the deep problems in the area: poverty, population growth, changing climate, and the human-tiger conflicts.

The Western environmental movement of the 1970s aimed to protect wild animals from humans, but the next environmental movement can’t succeed morally or practically unless it also protects and enhances the lives of the poorest humans. When we finally get down to combatting global warming, we also need to tackle development aggressively. This will mean facing up to the real-life tensions between the ideal of living “naturally” in nature and letting nature live.

Ironically, the best approach for humans may be to simply leave nature to the tigers. Indian academics estimate that if sea levels continue rising in the Sunderbans and strong tropical storms keep hitting the area, it’s going to be too dangerous for human beings to continue living there and as many as 13 million climate refugees from the mangroves in India and Bangladesh could flee. There’s a growing discussion that the better solution in the long run may be to move the humans to urban areas with electricity, clean water, jobs, and access to education.

Then, like us, these Sunderbans exiles may live in dense cities, work in high rises, chat long- distance, and eat strange manufactured foods. And the tigers can continue to roam wild. Somewhere out there.

The post The Campaign to Save India’s Tigers Ignores the Human Cost of Conservation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The short, if incomplete, answer: Fresno is in California. And there is something very different about our state’s poor cities.

In other parts of America, people have abandoned cities labeled poor—because of high poverty rates and low rates of education among residents—in big numbers. Detroit’s population fell from 1 million in 1995 to 688,000 today. Cleveland’s population dropped from 500,000 in 1999 to less than 390,000 today. Population declines have been seen in places like Buffalo, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Birmingham, and Toledo. I cut my teeth as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, and my main job was watching people flee; Charm City’s population, once more than 900,000, is down to 620,000 today.

But in California, our poor cities don’t lose people. To the contrary, they are magnets, drawing new people and maintaining strong population growth. Fresno, our poorest large city, had 392,000 people in 1995 and 520,000 now. Bakersfield has grown from 185,000 in 1990 to 363,000 today. Stockton and San Bernardino grew in population, even as they slid into bankruptcy, and they’re still adding population post-bankruptcy. The dynamic extends beyond cities to rural places; California’s two poorest counties, Imperial and Tulare, have both doubled their populations since 1978.

This growth is particularly noteworthy given the slower gains in the state’s population—in 2010, California failed to add a seat in the House of Representatives for the first time in its history—as a result of a net outflow of people to other states, relatively flat immigration, and a declining birth rate. The people moving into California’s poorer cities have caused some head-scratching elsewhere; the conservative Manhattan Institute marveled that to examine various city populations, “one would never guess that it was San Bernardino and Stockton, not Akron and Cincinnati, that recently went bankrupt.”

Indeed, the success of our underappreciated cities may come as something of a surprise to Californians, who hear constantly about all the people who are leaving California. These cities’ growth may sound even more surprising when you know that it’s the poor—those making less than $30,000 a year—who are most likely to leave California. The two contrasting narratives around poverty—California as a place that the poor are fleeing, and California as a place with the highest percentage of poor people of any state in the country—may further confound. Is California attracting the poor, or repelling them?

The answer, of course, is both.

Poor people are leaving our expensive and crowded coastal counties—which now have the costliest housing and densest urban communities in the United States—in search of places where they can improve their standard of living, and find a home and space. The basketcase known as Los Angeles County—with its perfect storm of high poverty, high housing prices and lagging job growth—has become particularly adept at driving people away. While many coastal people leave the state entirely, many head, at least at first, to our inland cities.

There they are joined by migrants, some of them doing seasonal labor on farms, and Californians from smaller, rural communities who have come to places like Fresno and Stockton to attend college and find jobs.

There are many reasons to stick it out in these parts of California, rather than to leave the state. While California higher education has become costly, our universities and community colleges still provide good value. If you’re poor, California offers services that are more generous than those of many other states. CalFresh (food stamps), CalWORKs (welfare for families with children), and the new state earned income tax credit—in combination with federal tax credits, housing subsidies, supplemental security income, and free school meals—provide a cushion, and are credited with keeping the poverty rate from being even higher.

California’s poor cities also offer another amenity: warm weather. Research shows that having warm January weather is among the reliable predictors of urban growth. Many of these cities also offer vibrant arts and nearby recreation, at very low cost. Of course, these cities’ popularity has made them denser and more expensive, as well. California’s taxes and growth-restricting regulations create barriers to building housing, though inland cities tend to be more flexible on development than rich jurisdictions on the coast.

This escape-valve role that these cities play hasn’t won them much respect. The supposedly progressive leaders of this supposedly progressive state too often see poor people—and the places where they live—more as burdens than potential assets. Tellingly, Gov. Brown and other Democrats in Sacramento lament the more than 12 million on MediCal (California’s version of Medicaid) as a budget burden, instead of celebrating this expansion of health coverage and doing more to make sure that the newly covered can use their MediCal to get fast, high-quality health care.

This is a very old fear in California: that we are being over-run by the poor. Hollywood famously sabotaged Upton Sinclair’s 1934 gubernatorial campaign with phony movie reel ads of “poor people” declaring they were heading to California if Sinclair won and established cash payments for the needy. We are overdue for an attitude shift, in no small part because median income declined in California after 2007 and we are becoming a more working-class place.

We should start by supporting—and treasuring—our growing poor cities. If California is—in an oft-repeated phrase—America’s America, these cities are California’s Californias. Today, municipalities all over the country are all chasing the same narrow swath of creative college-educated hipsters with tech skills. Might it be more advantageous, in this age of American inequality, for a state to champion cities that attract poor people, and to figure out ways for those cities to do better by their residents?

In California, a focus on poor people and poor places feels like an imperative. Many of our wealthiest places are rapidly aging; these growing poor cities are almost all younger than the state average. And by measures of well-being, their poor residents are just as happy as their wealthier counterparts.

You may think it’s odd to focus efforts on attracting, retaining, and nurturing the less fortunate, but I can think of at least one nation that has done pretty well by positioning itself as a mecca for the poor. Perhaps someone could erect copies of the Statue of Liberty along Highway 99, visible to anyone approaching Fresno, alongside signs with the famous sonnet of Emma Lazarus, transported from New York Harbor to a new California context:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

The post Why California Should Position Itself as a Mecca for the Poor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.