"Environmentalists
Killed the Large Lot Single Family
Home?"
from "In Defense of Rural
America"
By Ron
Ewart, President
National Association of Rural
Landowners (www.narlo.org)
and
nationally recognized author and speaker on freedom and property rights
issues for over 10 years
© Copyright Sunday, August
23, 2015 - All Rights Reserved
This article is also
available on our website at:
In a little over 230 years, Americans conquered half of the
North American continent at great risk and began to spread out. The
massive land areas they tamed were equated with freedom, freedom to move freely,
freedom to raise your own food and be self-sufficient and independent and
freedom to engage in farming, ranching, mining and building homes and raising
families. Until the industrial revolution, America was an agricultural and
a free nation.
All that changed when larger-than-life industrialists learned
how to forge steel in vast quantities from coal and iron ore that built
locomotives, railroads, bridges and buildings and drew people off the farms for
factory jobs, giving rise to growing population centers. But large
population centers began to eat away at the freedom Americans once equated with
space.
Part of the evolution of the industrial age was the scourge
of technological advances and changes in markets, leading to large factories
going out of business, which then led to massive unemployment, urban poor and
urban blight. Detroit is a glaring example. The urban poor do not
have the "space" to raise crops to be self-sufficient and independent. They
could not feed their families and had to call on government for help when the
jobs dried up.
This led to greater dependence on government just to
survive. Dependence on government leads to socialism as is evidenced by
the 13 colonies that started this nation in freedom, becoming socialist hotbeds
in American society. Since the East Coast states, including the original
13 colonies, are the center of government control in America, government created
more and more socialist policies to meet the demands of a dependent urban
society.
But alas, many people still wanted their space because they
equated that space with their freedom, as they had for over 150 years.
They started spreading out into the areas around the urban population centers to
escape the urban poor, urban blight and urban crime.
Large houses were built on large lots that gave the people
that space they craved and allowed their children to grow up in clean, low-crime
neighborhoods. The paved streets, sidewalks, houses and yards were well
kept through pride of ownership. This image of suburban living
became the American Dream.
The only draw back was, that the people had to drive their
cars into the big cities for the jobs that existed there, until the jobs and the
stores and shopping began to move out to the suburban areas.
SIDEBAR: We were developing land in the
suburban areas around Seattle during the socialist busing movement of the
1980's. Most of the people that purchased our 2.5 and 5-acre tracts were
escaping Seattle busing.
But during the 1960's the environmental movement was gaining
ground in America, initiated by the passing of the National Environmental Policy
Act of 1969. The premise was and still is, humans are a scourge on the
planet and must be rigidly controlled. In fact, the United Nations policy on
land ownership essentially states that all land must be owned and controlled by
government to protect the environment. The environmentalists hailed the
policy and new buzzwords entered the vernacular; words like smart growth,
sustainable development, along with social and environmental justice.
We once asked seven environmental groups what "sustainable
development" meant and we got seven different answers.
To protect the environment, according to this radical
environmental ideology, endorsed by mostly liberals, people must be herded,
stacked, pushed, cajoled, bunched, stuffed and crammed into big cities in high
rise apartment buildings where they take buses, mass transit, or their bicycles
to work and shopping, to allegedly protect the environment.
Suburban sprawl became a pejorative and was soundly berated by
the environmentalist and government, parroted by academia and the news
media. If you lived in suburbia, you were vilified for taking up so much
of the earth for your large lots and big energy guzzling homes and your cars,
but mostly your cars.
The United Nations (UN Habitat), called
"Urban Sprawl A Global Problem" and wrote
this:
"In many developing countries, urban sprawl
comprises two main, contrasting types of development in the same city: one is
characterized by large peri-urban areas with informal and illegal patterns of
land use. This is combined with a lack of infrastructure, public facilities and
basic services, and often is accompanied by little or no public transport and by
inadequate access roads."
"The other is a form of "suburban
sprawl" in which residential zones for high and middle-income groups and
highly-valued commercial and retail complexes are well-connected by individual
rather than public transport."
"Urban sprawl adds to the urban divide, pushing
social segregation along economic lines that result in spatial difference in
wealth and quality of life across various parts of cities and metropolitan
areas, run down inner cities and more suburbs."
"Suburbanization in developing countries happens
mainly because people – rich and poor – flee poor governance, lack of planning
and poor access to amenities. "In a nutshell: sprawl is a symptom of a divided
city," the report says."
"Urban sprawl involving the poor occurs because
authorities pay little attention to slums, land, services and transport.
Authorities lack the ability to predict urban growth and, as a result, fail to
provide land for the urbanizing poor. In addition, the urban poor are
denied land rights which is one of the main factors driving people to the
periphery of towns, associated with urban sprawl in developing
countries."
"Other features typically associated with sprawl
include overdependence on personal motorized transport coupled with a lack of
alternatives, limited housing options and urban spaces that discourage
pedestrian traffic. Most South African cities are an example of
this. They are expanding primarily through development of new housing
areas which, being located beyond the existing urban periphery, are relatively
unplanned. As a result, the urban periphery consists of pockets of housing
developments that are isolated and separated from each other by trunk roads or
open spaces."
OUTCOME OF SPRAWL
"Urban sprawl has a negative impact on infrastructure and the
sustainability of cities. In most cases, sprawl translates to an increase in the
cost of transport, public infrastructure and of residential and commercial
development. Moreover, sprawling metropolitan areas require more energy,
metal, concrete and asphalt than do compact cities because homes, offices and
utilities are set farther apart."
"In many places, urban sprawl encourages new developments that
cause significant loss of prime farmland. When cities are improperly planned
urban sprawl also adds to environmental degradation. Such is the case
around several cities in Latin America where sizeable damage has been caused to
environmentally sensitive areas
."
Are you getting this radical environmental, socialist
picture? It "ain't" American freedom folks!
This flawed ideology, that is in direct conflict with
America's foundation of liberty, property rights, led the Sierra Club to come up
with optimum densities of urban centers equaling up to 50,000 people per square
mile, or a little over 78 people per acre. Densities like this don't exist
in some of the largest cities on the planet.
But here are the facts. Look at the map!
Does this map of urban centers portray a serious impediment to
wildlife?
The urban centers in America take up only 2.62% of the land
mass. Agricultural areas take up another 44.7%, leaving over 50% of the
landmass for wildlife. The Census Bureau reports that 94.6% of the U. S.
is rural open space. Ladies and gentlemen, how much open space does the wildlife
need to survive?
There are approximately 320,000,000 people in America today,
occupying 3,806,000 square miles, or 2,435,840,000 acres. That works out
to 84.1 people per square mile, or 0.131 people per acre, but that is too high
for our government, the environmentalists, academia, the United Nations, the
Sierra Club and the news media. Keep in mind that it took us over 200
years to reach these low densities.
But suburban sprawl, according to these groups, is taking up
more land that the animals and animal habitat should be able to occupy,
while they cram (force!) people into denser and denser populations, where
anti-social behavior, urban mental problems, urban poor, urban blight and urban
crime are a direct result of those densities.
Are you aware that it is much easier to control people in
large urban centers than it is to control people living in rural areas? Now do
you get why government and environmentalists want to cram you in concrete and
steel jungles that tower into the skies, with high crime, high noise levels and
little open space?
National and international environmentalists have come up
with even more draconian policies to relieve you of your property rights and
force you into big cities. They invented UN biospheres that include all of
the national parks in America. Parks are great, but, through legislation,
they ringed the biospheres (parks) with three large tiers of buffers. God
help you if you live near or adjacent to biospheres, rivers, lakes, or scenic
and designated heritage areas. Just ask the people who live in the
Columbia River Gorge between Washington State and Oregon about what they can and
can't do with their land.
But there is more. The biospheres have to be connected
with wildlife corridors and the environmentalists have a plan on how to connect
those biospheres that include conservation easements, scenic rivers and heritage
sites and even eminent domain. If you own private property in their way,
the environmentalists sue the government and have the government force you out
of the way.
Man-caused global warming is the environmentalists' other
tool to protect the environment by regulating you to death, taxing the Hell out
of you and relieving you of more of your freedoms.
Talk about brainwashing, indoctrination and fear
mongering! National and international elitists, money changers, power
brokers, the United Nations, Europe, socialists, radical environmentalists and
the one-world-order crowd, aided and abetted by academia and a news media that
has lost any semblance of journalism ethics, have perpetrated one of the
greatest frauds in the civilized history of mankind. But worse, the
American government, at every level, (who is supposedly
constrained by our Constitution) and every American politician who
espouses, supports or endorses this nonsense, is complicit in this fraud.
Little kids are scared to death that the boogie-man of
man-caused global warming is going to flood their homes, kill their parents and
leave them destitute, hungry, homeless and all alone ….. or dead.
Disenfranchised and unrepresented rural American landowners
have lost virtually all of their property rights, due to draconian environmental
land use regulations ..... regulations that are based on another fraud, that we
must protect every damn wetland in existence today, even if the wetland was
caused by man in the first place.
It is a fraud for one very basic reason that no one ever
mentions. Just a short 10,000 years ago in geologic time, one-third of the
Earth's surface was covered by an ice sheet over one mile thick.
Underneath that ice there were no lakes, streams, rivers, or wetlands and there
was little to any wildlife. Somehow the Earth managed to survive without
all those wetlands and it will continue to survive whether we save wetlands or
not. In fact, the Earth will even survive the minuscule effect that
mankind inflicts upon it.
As we stated earlier, man's footprint on the North American
Continent is less than 3% of the total land mass and that footprint took over
200 years to materialize. Don't you think that if that footprint rose to
say 5% or even 8% over the next 200 years, there would still be a whole lot of
land left for the wild creatures and all their little creatures?
So if you want to know why the American dream of owning a
home on a large lot in suburbia has been shot down and essentially been made
illegal, blame the environmentalists and the government they control. Once
again, government is guilty of taking away your "space" and your right of free
choice ….. and YOU LET THEM!
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As an aside, our next target for accusing the governor of a
state with violation of oath of office and criminal negligence in discharging
their duties, is Governor Jerry Brown of California. To learn more, click
HERE.
The following sources were used in the
construction of this article.
http://news.heartland.org/
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Ron Ewart, a nationally known author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues and author of this weekly column,
"In Defense of Rural America", is the president of the National
Association of Rural Landowners (NARLO) (http://www.narlo.org) an advocate and consultant for urban and rural landowners and a
non-profit corporation headquartered in Washington State. He can be
reached for comment at: info@narlo.org.
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