# Stop suburban sprawl!!! (Can we? Should we? How?) **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 1, 2000, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stop-suburban-sprawl-can-we-should-we-how/21144 "2000-06-01T19:58:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2000, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stop-suburban-sprawl-can-we-should-we-how/21144/101 "2000-06-15T20:42:33Z")
**Mr Zambezi** wrote: > [@](#): > > I saw a program on panama last night on Scientific > American Frontiers. A geologist said that before Central America was created, the gulf stream used to flow between north and south america into the pacific. > > When CA came into being, the gulf stream was forced to curve back to the north. Off the coas of Europe it split with part going to europe and part flowing down to Africa. > > His theory is that this change in ocean currents caused a change in the climate of north Africa. Before Central America formed? Then you’re talking about a time before humans were around, right? That hardly explains why you can go to parts of the Sahara today and find rock paintings of wildlife scenes in what is now a desert. Within the span of human history, the Sahara has _grown_ significantly, and areas that once supported abundant wildlife and vegetation are now covered with sand. Also within the span of human history, the area known as the Fertile Crescent has gone from being actually fertile to largely desert and scrubland. How did this happen? Irrigation, over thousands of years, left the soil highly saline and infertile. It didn’t happen overnight. I’m sure ancient Sumerians thought “Look at all those wheat fields! We’ll never run out of good farmland!” (This is covered in Jared Diamond’s **Guns, Germs and Steel** , if you need a cite.) Lebanon’s cedars were lost to logging, not climate change. You can find Biblical passages referring to the magnificant cedars of Lebanon. (In fact, I believe the first Temple was built from these cedars. I may be mis-remembering on that one…)The cedars are no longer there. Lebanon is now a desolate place. Point is, Mr. Z, history shows that humans are perfectly capable of destroying their own environment. Often, it happens so gradually, over many generations, that we only realize what happened in hindsight. What I am suggesting with this thread is that we humans are also smart enough to use a little _foresight_ to try to ameliorate some of the cumulative impact we have on our surroundings. We can do that, or we can wind up like the Sumerians. ---
**Author:** ![waterj2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/858c86/32.png) [@waterj2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/waterj2)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2000, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stop-suburban-sprawl-can-we-should-we-how/21144/102 "2000-06-16T05:28:44Z")
You know, I think I agree with spoke- for the most part. Any flippancy on my part, and a number of the objections I raised were based on my mistaken belief that he was proposing to radically restructure the entire way government works (or fails to work, as the case may be) for the sole reason of reducing suburban sprawl. Hopefully, you’ll grant me that I did raise some reasonable objections to that concept. Our approaches differ in one major aspect. I want to reduce the power of the government so that it stops doing the things it has been doing to increase suburban sprawl. He wants to give all sides a say in how the government uses its power, so that the suburban development is done with the interest of the city dwellers in mind. Perhaps we also disagree on more than that. I don’t see the number of people living in the suburbs as the primary, I see low density that the suburbs try to maintain as the primary problem. I think that if the highways (and sewer and water connections, and all that) were not free, and higher density development was possible within the suburbs, the market would encourage pockets of higher density developmeent that could be effectively served by light rail, with low density development and parkland that could be better served by roads. I trust a free market more than I trust the government. I’m guessing that spoke- is the reverse. For a better view of “practical” libertarianism, check out the Cato Institute at [http://www.cato.org](http://www.cato.org). There you will find well researched articles tackling current problems from a libertarian perspective. Not enough to make you a convert, but perhaps show you that libertarians do more than talk about their utopia with their hands in their ears going “lalalalalala”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stop-suburban-sprawl-can-we-should-we-how/21144.md?page=5)