Species and Sprawl: A Road Runs Through It
Species and Sprawl: Humans
Homo sapiens is particularly noted for its survival instinct, even when faced with some of the most perilous habitats on Earth. Consider Craig Mayhew, a long-time car commuter on the treacherous and tangled tarmac of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. In 1997, Mayhew’s 56 km one-way commute along a toll road and the eight-lane beltway from Reston, Va., to Greenbelt, Md., usually took him 45 minutes. But as the 75-minute “bad days” grew more frequent, he began to telecommute two days a week, and then three.
Drivers in the Washington, DC area waste 67 hours per year in traffic. Only two other metropolitan areas have it worse: Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In the last five years, Mayhew has had more opportunities than ever to employ his cunning, outwit the competition, and abandon the pack on his two weekly travel days. Around 1999, a new tech hub near Dulles Airport, including new headquarters for America Online and MCI, seemed to mushroom overnight. Development in a new suburb called Ashburn exploded to house the added workers. Loudon County, Va., saw its population hurtle from 57,000 in 1980 to nearly 222,000 in 2003, making it the fastest-growing county in the nation. “My commute grew to nearly two hours,” says Mayhew. He began hunting for alternatives to the highway, ferreting out labyrinths of local roads to avoid highway clogs. “I have become a master at interpreting traffic reports,” he says.
A move to a subdivision in Herndon, Va., 8 km further from work, required wilier tactics. One day, Mayhew abandoned his car for a 20-minute bus ride to a 1½-hour subway ride to a 45-minute local bus ride to a 10-minute walk to his office’s main gate. “Two hours, 45 minutes!” he fumes. “Impossible.” Two trials on his bicycle clocked in at two hours one-way.
“I can guarantee I’ll be out of my job by spring and out of the region by the end of 2005,” says Mayhew. “But does that mean I will contribute to and suffer from sprawl in another region?”
Given the current statistics on sprawl in the United States, it’s not unlikely.
For example, Mayhew could move to Phoenix, which is developing open land at a rate of 1.2 acres an hour. Or he could follow the masses to Atlanta, which, free from natural barriers to meandering development such as mountains or a limited water supply, expects to see its population double in the next 50 years. Odds are, Mayhew wouldn’t head to Cleveland—it’s been declining in population since 1970—but if he did, he could buy plenty of square footage; developed land in the city grew 33 percent during the same period.
Sprawl takes all in San Diego, California.
Humans are shaping, and shaped by, sprawl—the rapid, poorly planned, low-density growth of homes and businesses far from urban centers. Sprawl is affecting Homo sapiens, just as it does many other species on this planet. It permanently alters our habitat, hampers our mobility, and diminishes our odds for survival. Here’s how:
An Altered Landscape
The desire for a safe habitat with ample food, shelter, protection from predators, and means of escape is instinctual for all living things. For many Americans, this instinct manifests itself as a single-family dwelling outside the city, with a patch of grass, a car in the driveway, and a mega-supermarket a few miles down the road. Yet each U.S. citizen today uses four to five times more land than he or she did in 1940. Construction of homes, pavement, and businesses is incurring a staggering, permanent loss of natural open land—more than 2 million acres of forest, prairie, desert, wetlands, and farmland are developed every year. Ecologically, economically, and aesthetically valuable wild lands such as the Midwest’s virtually vanished tallgrass prairie and Arizona’s diverse, fragile Sonoran Desert are at risk of disappearing or degrading completely.
