Re: Urban Sprawl
From: Stuart Staniford-Chen (staniforcs.ucdavis.edu)
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 14:27:53 -0600
James Kalin writes:

> Urban sprawl is abating in regions and communities with strong open-space
> and farmland preservation laws and regulations.  It can and is being
> controlled where citizens are active and working smart and hard to make it
> so.

> For example, in the greater SF Bay Area a citizens group called Greenbelt
> Alliance has for years been instrumental in enacting effective anti-sprawl
> laws and government regulations.  In California, the Williamson Act

The impression your words create is that urban sprawl is under control
in the SF bay area.  Nothing could be further from the truth as a drive
up I-80 from San Francisco to Davis will convince you.  We are not far
from connecting San Francisco to Sacramento with nearly continuous
sprawl (of the most ugly, alienating kind - I can't think about it without
getting angry).
 
> The loss of America's, and the world's, farmland, through paving,
> residential and industrial development, industrial ground water depletion
> or pollution, acid rain, etc, will this decade cause global food supply
> disasters, and political and military repercussions, of unparalleled
> proportions.  There are NO technofixes available, now or in the foreseeable
> future, that will handle the global food supply shortfalls caused by
> farmland loss.

> As an ex-farm advisor, with extensive knowledge of alternative
> agritechnologies, I am convinced that loss of farm land is one of the most
> critical global environmental problems we face on our small planet.  And
> urban sprawl, in the US and elsewhere, is a leading cause of farm land

I agree with you about the seriousness of this problem, though I'm not
quite sure about "this decade".  A good reference for folks concerned about
this issue is "State of the World 1995" by the Worldwatch Institute
(ISBN 0-393-03717-7).  The first chapter especially is a good overview of
the problem in a rational, non-alarmist (yet alarming) manner.

However, I'm not sure that this problem will have much effect on Americans.
Rich people such as us will always be able to buy what food there is.  Since
when did we change our behaviour much because poor people were starving?

Stuart.




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Stuart Staniford-Chen                   | Dept of Computer Science
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http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/ | N St Cohousing Community
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