# Zero Population Growth **Zero Population Growth (ZPG)** — since 2002 **Population Connection** — is the U.S. population-stabilization advocacy group founded in 1968 by [[Paul Ehrlich]], the lawyer Richard Bowers and the Yale entomologist Charles Remington, in the wake of [[The Population Bomb]]. Its founding demand was in its name: end American population growth, through contraception access, legal abortion, family planning and, in its early rhetoric, the two-child family as a civic norm. It became for a few years one of the largest environmental membership organizations in the country, and it is the principal **mainstream on-ramp** in the vault's account of how population politics became immigration politics. ## The 1970s: the on-ramp ZPG's first decade was the moment when neo-[[Malthusianism]] was respectable liberal environmentalism: Earth Day, the Club of Rome, the Ehrlich-vs-Commoner debate. It was also the decade in which the arithmetic turned. By the mid-1970s U.S. fertility had fallen below replacement — the organization had, on its own terms, won — and the only remaining lever on national headcount was immigration. [[John Tanton]], who had chaired the [[Sierra Club]]'s population committee, was ZPG's national president in **1975–77**, the same years he wrote the "passive eugenics" memorandum that gives the [[Passive Eugenics]] page its name. He tried to move ZPG and the Sierra Club to an immigration-reduction position; the organizations declined; and in 1979, with $50,000 in seed money from [[Cordelia Scaife May]], he founded [[FAIR]] — the first node of the [[Tanton Network]]. ZPG's refusal was the fork in the road, and FAIR is what walked down the other branch. ## After Tanton The organization kept a population-stabilization mission while moving steadily away from the restrictionist frame, dropping immigration-reduction advocacy and repositioning around international family planning, Title X, comprehensive sex education and reproductive rights. The 2002 rename to Population Connection completed the separation from the ZPG brand — and from the Tanton lineage that had by then made "population" a nativist keyword. As of 2021 it reported revenue of about $14.9M under president John Seager. Critics such as Betsy Hartmann note that the early organization "blamed just about everything on population growth," from traffic to famine, which is the crisis framing the vault's [[Carrying Capacity]] page dissects. ## Why the vault cares ZPG matters less for what it is than for what left it. The [[Eugenics Timeline]] and [[Elcioglu 2025 - Seeding the Divide]] pages place it as the incubator: the ideas that became the modern anti-immigration movement were developed *inside* mainstream environmentalism in the 1970s and exported when the host institutions would not adopt them. [[Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization]] (1996–2004) was the later attempt to reverse that export by capturing the Sierra Club from within; it failed by the same margin ZPG's membership had implied a generation earlier. [[Colcom Foundation]] is where the money went instead. And [[Barry Commoner]] is the road not taken — the environmentalism that located harm in production rather than headcount and therefore never had to answer *whose*. ## See Also - [[The Population Bomb]] · [[Paul Ehrlich]] · [[Malthusianism]] · [[Carrying Capacity]] - [[John Tanton]] · [[Passive Eugenics]] · [[Tanton Network]] · [[FAIR]] · [[Cordelia Scaife May]] · [[Colcom Foundation]] - [[Sierra Club]] · [[Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization]] · [[Barry Commoner]] - [[Eugenics Timeline]] · [[Elcioglu 2025 - Seeding the Divide]] · [[Pronatalism]]