Here are some interesting thoughts to consider next time you hear the words "Urban sprawl" or "Over-development" or just feel that things are getting too crowded around your house:

  The fifty US states comprise just over 2.27 BILLION acres of land - of that, 25 percent is owned by the US Government in one form or another - from Liberty Island in the New York Harbor to damn near all of Nevada. The BLM owns most of it, but the DOD has a big  chunk too - about 30 million acres of Army and AIr Force bases, Pentagons, and such.

  Of the remaining 75% (about 1,700,000,000 acres), just over 6% is classified by the federal government as "Developed"   - e.g., buildings, roads (paved and unpaved), streets and highways, (including median strips between non-Federal divided highways), single family homes, parks, golf courses, baseball stadiums, factories, cultivated farm land, federally subsidized housing projects, the Indianapolis Speedway, billboards, parking lots, shopping centers, mobile home parks,  toxic waste dumps, landfills, cemeteries, your college cafeteria building, strip malls, dry cleaners, condominium complexes, railroad tracks, airports, Disneyland, Disneyworld, Epcot Center, the Las Vegas Strip, and Times Square..et cetera et cetera et cetera...in other words, "where we live".

  I live in the most densely populated, and most highly 'developed' state of New Jersey - but even the Garden State is less than 50% developed land - not that I'd recommend that density to anyone, but hell, 15 feet from the side of my house a densely wooded forest borders my property, and there isn't anything but trees for about four miles to the east, and two miles to the south. If I went 200 yards in, you couldn't tell you weren't in the middle of the jungle. Here's a USGS aerial photograph of my development and the woods surrounding it..  

  Here's a map (from 1997, but I don't really think things have changed that much since.. Note that, apart from the Boston-NYC-Philly-DC megalopolis, parts of the Florida coast, southern California and the San Francisco Bay area,  there are enormous sections of blank...

  In other words, even after four hundred years of colonization in the US, 94% of the land in this country has been untouched by human hand. Even though there is less LAND covered by forests, there are more trees now standing in this country than there were the day the Mayflower miscalculated and hit that rock. 

  We've cut down the junk and planted good stuff  - our total forest GROWTH is nearly double that of harvest - since about 1920, for every tree cut down, two were planted.

  For those people who advocate a "return to the land" or the silly "organic farming" way of life, ponder this: The most forest-destructive period of our history was in the time from 1850 to 1920 - when farmers cut down HUGE amounts of forest land and converted it to grazing or other use. Between 1850 and 1910, farmers cleared more land than had been cut down in the previous 250 years. This trend was only reversed when the internal combustion engine replaced draft animals, and crop science (e.g., hybrids, pesticides, etc etc etc)  allowed ten times as much food to be grown on a quarter of the acreage. So advocating a return to the "Little House on the Prairie" lifestyle  is fine, so long as you accept a total destruction of our woodland. Here's a copy of the full report (a PDF file) that you can download..

There are some interesting statistics here too - a Georgia-based forestry site.

  The reason so many people think things are so crowded is because we live in the crowded part. We tend to drive on the paved roads, go in to the buildings, and live in the houses. But we can't see beyond the property lines. There is plenty of room in this country. We're just not using very much of it - we're crowded in to the developed part.  Is this good? Is this bad? I don't profess to know. But the truth is, with 260 million people, we've still got a way to go before "overcrowding" is anything more than an elitist, if not racist, response to other types of people moving into your neighborhood. Next time you complain to yourself about sitting at a traffic light on your way home, consider that you could be sitting on a horse and buggy and traveling twenty or so miles to the general store in the rain...I'll take an air-conditioned, steel-roofed, CD-playing electrically adjustable bucket seat any day of the week.

  The point I'm trying to make is that "overcrowding" depends on your perspective - and point of view. There is plenty of room for everybody - it's poor planning and bureaucratic 'managed growth' that make it look as though everything is getting built up around us. If you think it's too 'dense' where you live, move somewhere else - but don't deny someone else that same freedom.

9/29/03

Check this site out:  NationMaster.com  - make your own charts and graphs!