The Daily Press featured a front page article about the Bay’s report card and it looks like our land use policies should be grounded. While James is right that overpopulation is a problem, it’s also true that sprawl is outpacing population growth, which is thrusting us ever more forcefully towards K.
In the DP article Bill Dennison (Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science) stated that “in the 1990s paved surfaces expanded by 42% in the watershed while population grew only 8%”.
And from the Bay Program news release:
“…if current development trends continue, an additional 250,000 acres of watershed land will become impervious between 2000 and 2010 and 9.5 million more acres of forests will be threatened by development by 2030.”
What’s depressing is that I feel we’re hampered by the sprawl industrial complex, analogous to the military industrial complex. Sprawl is a major economic force. People need jobs and building everything up provides jobs.
It doesn’t seem like we’re close to change, barring some catastrophic event, which may or may not already be underway (global warming). Regardless, we pay a huge cost. The ick that we produce sluices uninhibited over impervious surfaces into our waters, which kills our fisheries, degrades our water, reduces our quality of life, and makes us sick.
This is a huge problem that we’re all part of and it will take everyone’s efforts to change. Unfortunately, I fear that we’ll reap misery before we unite on this.
Here's a related story about watermen who are considering suing over the bay's pollution.
2 comments:
That's an awesome aerial photo! Agree on all counts of sprawl being bad. It's also ugly to look at, in my opinion...
Great post, Paul! It's not just the NUMBER of people that cause the problem, it's our increasingly wasteful use of land and resources. 'Used to be when people needed a cup of sugar they'd amble down to the little store at the corner of their tree-lined neighborhood. Now they blow out of their sprawling McMansion subdivision in a Ford Excursion and chug 20 miles around the 8-lane beltway to a walmart the size of Rhode Island, to pick up a cup of sugar. And the repugnicans have the nerve to call that "economic growth". Sheesh.
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