Pick up any newspaper or scroll through any major news outlet and you will encounter the consequences: species extinction, habitat loss, polluted waterways, collapsing ecosystems. What you are less likely to find is a direct accounting of how population growth contributes to these outcomes. That gap between environmental consequences and their underlying causes is exactly the space the Colcom Foundation was created to occupy.

A FOUNDER WHO SAW IT COMING

Cordelia S. May established the Colcom Foundation in 1996, drawing on more than four decades of personal engagement with population and environmental issues. She had begun supporting family planning in 1952, at 23, out of charitable concern for the natural world. Over the years, her thinking deepened: she came to see population growth not as one environmental factor among many, but as a force that compounds every other pressure on natural systems.

May was particularly attentive to the way growth disguises itself. Incremental and imperceptible from one day to the next, it builds quietly until its cumulative weight becomes impossible to ignore. By the time it is widely recognized as a problem, the damage is often already underway. She spent her life trying to move that recognition earlier in the process.

THE FOUNDATION’S WORK

Colcom Foundation’s primary mission is to foster a sustainable environment to ensure quality of life for all Americans by addressing the causes and consequences of overpopulation and its adverse effects on natural resources. The foundation also supports regional conservation efforts, environmental projects, and cultural assets.

Grantmaking is explicitly framed as an expression of May’s humanitarian objectives honoring both her foresight and the compassion that drove her work. Their grants to organizations such as the Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Funders have helped to build strong local food systems and promote sustainable agriculture practices.

LOOKING AT THE PRESENT

The environmental conditions May anticipated are now measurable realities. Aquatic and terrestrial habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse are among the documented consequences of population-driven stress on natural systems. The Colcom Foundation continues to fund work aimed not just at treating those symptoms, but at understanding and addressing the dynamics that produce them. Read this article for additional information.

Find more information about Colcom Foundation on  http://conservativetransparency.org/donor/colcom-foundation/