Tag Archives: sprawl

Thumbing-your-nose-at-nature sprawl development

ImageI found this roadside billboard in the sprawl-happy former sagebrush-dominated desert south and west of Boise, Idaho, a few months ago. It reminds me of the bumper-sticker slogan, “Cut down all the trees and name the streets after them.” Welcome to McMansion USA.

How green was my lawn?

This op-ed explores the current direction of “environmentalism” in light of the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”

Matches made in the wilderness, in the name of science

Of one thing we can be certain, dismally certain: With each passing day, there is less wilderness, both the officially proclaimed wilderness and the not-protected-but-still-wild kind. The culprit, of course, is the human growth machine. It’s not hard for today’s conservationists to realize what Ed Abbey would think and say if he were to see North America today, whether the land of his home state of Pennsylvania or the sprawling exurbs wrecking the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Some recent wilderness literature can be read here.

EPA wants further review of water-diversion project to protect Colorado River

Jeez, it isn’t rocket science. Diverting more of nature’s water from western Colorado to quench the everlasting thirst of exurbia is a no-winner. “Federal authorities say a long-planned project to divert more western Colorado water to growing Front Range suburbs may cause ‘significant degradation’ of already deteriorating ecosystems along the upper Colorado River,” the Denver Post reported today. The sprawl I saw spreading across former prairie just east of the original Colorado Springs last fall is absurd. One can’t hardly move there without driving a motor vehicle.

The Colorado: A river no more

Every year lessens the Colorado River’s flow. The reasons, as this op-ed makes clear, are over-development (sprawl), climate change (as in declining rainfall and snow melt) and a few other factors like dams (Glen Canyon and Hoover among them). The river that once defined a whole one-third of North America is no more.

Invasive species, development threaten forests in Va.

Of course, the threats are hardly limited to Virginia, despite what the headline writer at the Virginian-Pilot paper would have us believe. Read the article (actually a brief that was probably good enough to simply fill a hole on an inside page somewhere).

Welcome to America, land of the car and the car and . . .

This is what results, almost always, when lanes are added to an existing roadway in hopes of relieving congestion: More congestion. And more sprawl. Andmore strip malls. And more gas stations. And . . .Image

Big-box store hysteria – in VT and PA

I have written more than a few columns over the years about this topic, but sprawl marches on between each essay’s appearance in the daily newspaper of Hazleton, Pa. In any case, here’s my latest effort.

Sprawl, sprawl and more sprawl

Hi all. Just back home from two weeks in Idaho and a week in Colorado. My old hometown of Boise is now a sprawl monster, but it’s a distant also-ran when it comes to Colorado Springs and the Denver metroplex in Colorado. The loss to sprawl of wildlife habitat there is astounding, but shows no signs of letting up. The growth machine is in ovrdrive and the number of motor vehicles plying Colorado Springs-area highways is proof of the unsustainability of the “growth” monster. The proof? Each car, probably 99 out of every 100 autos, has only one person in it.

With deaths of forests, world losing climate protectors

This in-depth science feature, from the NYT, spells it out in quiet detail. I wish, though, that the authors of the feature had also talked about how sprawl development and attendant road-building is fragmenting and destroying native forests. Hell, I saw this kind of thing going on all the time while living in northeastern Pennsylvania, a region that had already lost much of its native forests from anthracite coal-mining stripping operations over the decades. And still, the public motors on as is if there is no harm to their carbon dioxide-creating activities.