SOC301

What good is a house if you don't have a decent planet to put it on?
-Henry D. Thoreau

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-Advertisement by Estrella Mountain Ranch A town in the country Arizona Republic, September 12, 1998.

Urban Sprawl: This is the dark side of the American dream. Sprawl costs us all- more pollution, more traffic congestion, as well as losses of open space, wildlife habitat and productive agricultural land. Taxes are raised to subsidize services (roads, sewer, hookups, etc.) for private developments while America's city cores are neglected. How long can this go on?
-Sierra Club, http://www.sierra club.org/transportation/sprawl/index.htm.

The anti-sprawl campaign [is] a vision of one best way to live, and the determination to impose that way by political action. Like the black-and-white establishment in the movie Pleasantville, the anti-sprawlers are upset with the changes unleashed by other people's choices.
-Virginia Postrel, The Pleasantville Solution REASON Online, March, 1999, http://reason.com/9903/ed.vp.the.shtml

Urban sprawl, the pattern of ever-increasing urban growth into undeveloped areas, has communities, politicians and grass roots groups enmeshed in debate about environmental and social problems attributed to uncontrolled growth. Environmentalists blame urban sprawl (in the form of commercial strip-malls, large subdivisions, master-planned communities, and expanded highway development) for destroying farms, wetlands, forests and desert. Quality of life is said to diminish as unplanned growth drives taxes up, increases the cost for public services, increases population density without developing accommodating infrastructure, threatens animal and plant life, contributes to a decline in health due to pollution, etc.
The Sierra Club advocates against urban sprawl saying that between 1970 and 1990 over 30,000 square miles (19 million acres) of rural lands in the United States were developed; 45.6 acres of undeveloped land is developed every hour in the United States; and between 1982 and 1992 an area the size of Vermont was developed in the United States (Sierra Club, http://www.sierra club.org/transportation/sprawl/index.htm).
Property rights advocates, libertarians, and others present counter arguments challenging the problem of urban sprawl. John Carlisle (1999) writing for the National Center for Public Policy Research, a libertarian group, cites a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service which shows that less than 5% of the United States is developed. Furthermore, Carlisle holds that more land has been preserved than developed:

Between 1949 and 1992, the amount of urbanized land increased from 18.2 million acres to 57.9 million acres, an increase in 39.7 million acres. But the amount of land set aside for parks and wilderness areas was even greater, increasing from 27.7 million acres to 86.9 million acres, an increase of 59.2 million acres. In other words, the nation has protected one-third more land than it has developed since WWII. ( John Carlisle, The Campaign Against Urban Sprawl: Declaring War on the American Dream, National Policy Analysis, A publication of the National Center for Public Policy Research, April, 1999, http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA239.html).

To environmentalists, this is an inconsequential point. After all, they hold, preservation of much more land is necessary in the face of urbanization and all the social and environmental ailments connected with it.
The urban sprawl debate brings up some important questions regarding how Americans perceive the environment and our responses to environmental change. In the language of preservation, smart-growth, responsible development, simple living, economic development, property rights, environmental rights, etc., a discourse of environmentalism and development has grown which shapes perceptions and policy making decisions that affect the future environment and development of our nation.
Watch carefully how the urban sprawl debate unfolds. Getting back to lesson2-1-1 environmental language, recognize how language is used to possibly manipulate the way you understand this debate. Are you feeding into the problems? How? Are you critically thinking about the information? In what ways? While space is often deemed, the final frontier, in terms of the earth, we may think of the desert as the final frontier. Once considered, useless, it is suddenly experiencing accelerated growth patterns. What are we gaining through such growth? What are we losing? What is OUR role? Here are a few articles and websites that will help you think about what can be done:

So What Can We Do About Sprawl? http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/articles/meadows3.asp

EPA- Antidotes to Sprawl http://www.epa.gov/region5/sprawl/

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E-mail Janine Minkler at Janine.Minkler@nau.edu
Call Janine Minkler at (928) 523-7482

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