Urban Sprawl--Deadlier Than Global Warming?

Whether or not humans are completely responsible for global warming is still a maybe. The whole thing could possibly be part of a cycle that hits us every few thousand (or million) years. I’ve heard enough scientific pronouncements to know they don’t really know either.
We don’t want to think about the last possibility because it’s too scary—if it’s part of cycle we are truly helpless and there isn’t much the savants at Copenhagen can do. But there is a problem (and a big one) we humans really ARE responsible for—and it could kill us.
I got my first sense of it back in 1956 when I was asked to chauffer a visiting Dutch artist from Rotterdam around the city of Grand Rapids. He kept exclaiming to me how BIG Grand Rapids was compared to his home town in Holland. This startled me because I knew Rotterdam had several times more people than Grand Rapids had.
He explained that Americans spread their cities out much more than Europeans do (or did). Lawns, parking lots, mega-stores, and four to six lane streets all mean that a quarter as many people take up several times the space.
I kept that in mind as I watched Grand Rapids sprawl miles and miles further. Twenty-eighth Street, which became the busiest street in Michigan by the 1980s, was a two lane road with truck farms and nurseries along it in 1956. Some of the richest farm land in the world bordered that street—vegetable muck land.
Today it is all stores and parking. The food producing muck is gone forever. East of Kalamazoo Avenue, there was nothing but open farm land, for miles and miles. Today that land is gone, too, as malls, restaurants, used and new car lots, motels and what all stretch for miles and miles.
There was an intersection several miles north of Twenty-eighth Street and east of Kalamazoo. In 1960 it was bordered by four wheat fields that stretched as far as you could see. In a few decades, there was a mall on one corner, an apartment building on another, office buildings on the other two—and the houses and lawns stretched as far as you can see.
By now 28th Street is worn out. Empty store fronts and signs of decay are everywhere. They’ve just opened a new highway, parallel to 28th Street, miles to the south. That’s where everyone is moving now –far out in what only recently was country. No one doubts that this will replace 28th Street as the commercial center of the city within a decade or two.
If my Dutch friend was startled in 1956, he would be stunned now. Grand Rapids isn’t alone. When I moved into my present house in 1981, I was in the country. No paving, no street lights, not even gravel. I was told that we lacked the housing density to merit cable TV.
Boy, have we got it today. I really cannot count the number of new developments that use this (now paved and lit) street to get to the highway and work. This used to be farm land and forest land not that long ago. (Every now and then a raspberry bush pops up in my backyard to remind me of what once was and will never be again.)
In 1962, I stood at an intersection within the corporate limits of New York City—like the intersection in Grand Rapids, it had four farms bordering it, as far as I could see. That’s all houses, lawns and stores today. No one will ever grow food there again.
I visited a friend in Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1971. He took me to a nearby mall. As we stood in the parking lot all we could see was new housing and lawns. “This,” he told me, “was all farm land only about six or seven years ago.”
In 1966 when they completed the beltway around Washington, it was such isolated farm country that the government installed a phone every mile for the use of broken down motorists. Have you driven it lately? Miles of buildings have replaced the phone booths.
Let’s take a further look at this really man-made disaster tomorrow.