Compare, say, 1980 with 2000. Image source: The Sustainable Scale Project

Part I of this article offered a snapshot of Boulder’s open space acquisition program. I suggested that an understanding of any such effort to fight sprawl ultimately connects with larger issues such as population growth and per capita resource consumption. The work of Boulder residents, Al Bartlett and Bob Cohen provides a look at these issues, their interconnections and how they deepen our understanding of sprawl and other needless and destructive “development” such as that which we see today in Mount Vernon and Lisbon.

Let’s learn from a sprawl fighting pioneer
I mentioned in a recent post Al Bartlett’s famous talk, Arithmetic, Population and Energy. (Go there to learn about the talk’s history.) It’s one of the best sources for a clear, concise introduction to the problem of continued growth. In this case, the growth in question is both population growth and growth in our per capita resource consumption. They are, after all, the two leading culprits in the growth problems we face. Working together, they magnify the problems with which we’re dealing. And lest we lose sight of the focus of this website, we have to recognize that population growth and growth in per capita land consumption (an example of increasing per capita resource consumption) are the primary root causes of sprawl.

It’s clear enough that without population growth and land consumption growth as driving forces, sprawl would not be the pervasive problem it is today. There would of course remain certain areas of residential and commercial growth, but nothing like the ubiquitous creeping (or is it galloping?) suburbia and environmental destruction you see in the U.S. today. Without the demand for housing created by a national population increasing by 3.2 million people per year combined with an appetite for greater square footage in homes and land, developers would have far less opportunity to spread sprawl. (Note well, though, that on the town or city level, our focus must be less on root causes and more on concrete tools designed to put a stop to local sprawl.)

But population growth doesn’t drive only sprawl. If you listen to the Bartlett talk you’ll hear how, over recent history, population growth has increased exponentially concurrently with growth in our per-person consumption of finite resources such as oil and coal. These two kinds of growth combine to create a very serious problem. Oil, coal, and natural gas are among the finite resources. If we continue increasing consumption as we have, they will run out — sooner than most people realize. That is indisputable.

Magnifying the problem terrifically for us in the U.S., we have one of the highest consumption levels in the world. Our per capita “ecological footprint” is simply far greater than our fair share. This makes our population growth arguably the most problematic in the world today. With regard to resource consumption, adding one more person to our population (or that of a few other affluent nations) is like adding multiple people to the populations of most other countries.

Books on peak oil are not on the developers’ best seller list
Returning to sprawl, we find that American suburbia interacts almost catastrophically with our already incredible levels of resource consumption. We’ve touched previously here on how suburbs, owing to their automobile dependency, are tremendous drivers of oil consumption. (This of course is to say nothing of the tendency in today’s suburbs toward increasing square footage occupied by fewer people, causing still more energy consumption.) This, at a time when, by many expert accounts, we’re very near the peak of world oil production, and are facing steeply rising oil prices, a gradual decline in oil production, and concomitant social change in the near future. (A recent item appears to add to the evidence.)

By making the obvious decision to avoid constructing suburbs, then, we not only reduce local population growth (thereby exerting pressure on state and federal governing bodies to address the population problem) but prevent a considerable increase in the local consumption of a finite resource. In this way we do our part to help buy more time — time needed to develop alternative energy sources and to engineer the societal adjustments we’ll need to make to weather the impact of peak oil.

Once we begin to explore the larger, root causes of sprawl, then, we arrive quickly at the larger topics of which Al Bartlett speaks. As I mentioned in Part I, Dr. Bartlett was one of the co-founders of the citizens’ group which managed to bring Boulder’s open space acquisition program into being. You can learn more about that and the other topics he discusses in this recent interview he did while lecturing in Australia and New Zealand.

In Part III we’ll use some of Bob Cohen’s areas of interest as a springboard for examining how sprawl links to still other larger issues. With any luck we’ll be able to bring it all together as one cohesive “big picture” before this series ends.