Urban Sprawl--A Problem We CAN Fix

Yesterday we talked about a man-made catastrophe that humans have caused, are causing—and have the actual capability of stopping. It’s a whole lot more fun to sit in Copenhagen and discuss how to stop the sun from shining so warmly—after all, there’s a good chance you can’t do anything about it anyway. But we can, and had better, start dealing with urban sprawl.
After all, urban sprawl is caused by persons, corporations and (mostly) local governments. The nearer a city gets to a farm, the less likely that the farmer can 1) afford the higher taxes on his land or 2) resist the huge money he is offered to sell his high tax land.
So the rural space that used to exist between Baltimore and Washington back in Lyndon Johnson’s day is now swallowed up in urban living spaces. They don’t produce oxygen anymore; you can’t get food from them any more. All they do is generate municipal taxes.
You can’t eat those; you can’t breathe them. Not in Baltimore, not in New Jersey, not in Grand Rapids, not anywhere. I just mention those few because I lived near them and watched the trees, fertile soil and unpolluted water die—in my lifetime.
We’ve pushed so far into the wild lands of California that the mountain cats have no place left to retreat—joggers become their natural and new prey. Houses in Arizona have gone so far into the desert that commuters wake up to rattlesnakes all over their patios.
Even field mice are displaced—when they built the new development in the woods across from me, the mice had no place to go but the houses on my street. For the first time in twenty-five years, we suddenly had mice. They would run inside when we opened the door.
Of course we’re not even talking about the chemicals we use—on farms and on the lawns that replace them. They shoved a water line down my street three years ago because the lawn fertilizer had made the best water in this county unsafe to drink anymore. No more ground water—treated Lake Michigan water.
There are now so many septic systems, so close together, that I and my neighbors are all tied into the city sewage system. When there’s a major rain storm, or when the pipes break, all the sewage rushes into Lake Michigan instead of leaching into the ground relatively harmlessly.
Shall we talk water? I spent a year living in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Something about driving around the city made me nervous. I finally figured out what. I grew up in Michigan where there’s a lake, stream or river every couple of miles.
I would drive miles in LA and see NO water. (Just the ocean which isn’t drinkable.) I never saw any water flowing anywhere! That made me very uneasy. What comes out of the tap you don’t drink. You buy a stand and they deliver a five gallon jug of water every couple of days or so. Water trucks are as common as mail trucks. They need to be.
What water they get—to fill the swimming pools, water the lawns in desert dryness, and to be filtered into water that people buy to drink—all comes through the mountain pipes from the Colorado River and northern California streams.
Millions of people—all dependent on water pipes that flow hundreds of miles through earthquake country. Now there’s a lethal disaster just waiting to happen. From Tucson to Vegas, millions of Americans are moving into land that has no natural source of water to maintain them.
A little less rainfall in the mountains, an earthquake—and the southwest joins collapsed civilization all over the planet that simply ran out of water. More and more people keep coming to use less and less water. That sprawl could potentially kill thousands or more in moments after an earthquake disrupted the flow. That won’t be brought up in Copenhagen.
Farmland gone forever, water supplies stretched to the breaking point—these are proven dangers that we can do something about. It’s more fun to talk about melting polar icecaps that no one has an idea how to stop right now—but we’ve got real problems to talk about that we CAN cure. Maybe the kind of greening we should do has more to do with moving people off the desert while not destroying farm land. As my Dutch friend seemed to be saying, cities don’t have to spread so far into the country.
Let’s hold another summit—and deal with problems we CAN deal with. More tomorrow.