Tag Archives: sprawl development

Here’s the comment I offered to NPR after hearing yet another report card on the national obesity epidemic on this morning’s Weekend Morning Edition show.

Nice piece this morning on this topic, but you completely missed a key aspect to the story: A majority of Americans now live in suburbia where the car, not pedestrians, rule the world. I live in a small Pennsylvania town that is nearly surrounded now by sprawl development. The folks who live in places with names like The Meadows (no meadows there, just lawns which are fed a diet of petrochemicals). The people who live in places like this can’t and don’t go anywhere unless they are in the family car. They are dependent on gasoline/oil for fuel. Even the kids are driven to huge centralized schools which have zero charm as places for humans to congregate. When I was a kid growing up in New Mexico and Idaho, I walked or bicycled and I burned calories, not gasoline. And don’t you dare mention what sprawl has done and continues to do to wildlife habitat. And then there’s the carbon footprint of the typical exurban “development.”