Sometime next month, the U.S. Census Bureau will announce that the population of the United States has reached 300 million. The USA has the world’s third-largest population, trailing far behind China (1.3 billion) and India (1.1 billion). Accompanying the 300 million milestone will be numerous complaints about the supposed overpopulation and overcrowding of America, yet the United States, on a list of the world’s 193 nations arranged by population density, ranks only 143 and has one of the world’s richest sets of natural resources to boot. Despite suburban sprawl and rapid population growth in some metropolitan regions, the United States as a whole is far from overpopulated. The world’s population density is 43 people per square kilometer. That includes the vast areas of land — the Sahara desert, the Australian interior, Greenland — where almost no one lives. The USA’s population density is 30. One of the paramount complaints made about America’s population expansion will be environmental: Population growth is making our environment unsustainable. Yet many nations with environmental records equal to or superior to our own, in most environmentalists’ eyes, have far greater population densities: Austria, 97; France, 110; Denmark, 126; Switzerland, 181; Italy, 192; Germany, 230; […]