The Northeast Megaregion, also referred to as BosWash, extends from Boston to Washington, DC, and is populated by more than 55 million people. It is the largest contiguous urban area in the United States. BosWash has the largest population of the eleven U.S. megaregions, which together hold over 76 percent of the nation’s population. BosWash has the highest GDP of any megaregion in the world at some $3.75 trillion.
Allamakee County lies in the northeast corner of Iowa, bordering Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is part of a three-state region that, unlike most of the upper United States and Canada, escaped glaciation during past ice ages. This geological oddity is immediately obvious to visitors by the dramatic terrain of bluffs, hills, and valleys. Expansive plains characterize most of the rest of Iowa, where miles-thick glaciers moved over the land like a bulldozer,
El Paso County is in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a region known as the “Front Range,” the mountains first encountered by settlers traveling westward from the Great Plains. The Front Range includes such wonders as Mount Blue Sky and Pikes Peak. But it also refers to a chain of cities and the urban spatial expansion between them that has propagated within and along the foothills.
As the setting for Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Sauk County, Wisconsin, holds a special place within the pantheon of environmental literature. Leopold’s writings on ecology and forestry brought an understanding of land repair and remediation to academic and general audiences. It is difficult to imagine the fields of wildlife biology, soil conservation, or restoration ecology without Leopold’s contribution.
Likewise, the moral basis for the environmental movement in later decades owes its origins in part to Leopold’s land ethic.
Okeechobee County is located in Florida’s Heartland Region, within the 3000-square mile Kissimmee River Basin. The Heartland stretches from Orlando in the north to the intertidal coast of mangrove forests to the south, forming an area commonly referred to as the “River of Grass.” Water flowed hundreds of miles through this enormous network of marshlands, helping to shape an ecosystem of unrivalled subtropical biodiversity.
Today,
The Finger Lakes region of western New York State is distinguished by a series of long and narrow glacial valleys, dammed by moraine, that now contain lakes. Glacial scouring created some of the deepest lakes in North America, including Seneca, Cayuga, and Skaneateles lakes. These spectacular natural features give the region its identity.
The region features ample farmland and forest and a relatively sparse population. Tompkins County,
Bayfield County, Wisconsin is situated on the shores of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. Deep in the heart of the Great Northwoods, the county is unique in its glaciated beauty. It also happens to be a rare example of a county in harmonious balance between its natural and constructed communities.
Bayfield County has been refreshingly free of growth controversies and displays key attributes that approach the characteristics of a steady-state county.
Imagine a landscape with some of the richest wildlife habitats in North America. Settlements are scarce and water is plentiful. Birds dot the skies, mammals abound on the ground, and fishes fill the rivers and lakes.
That’s Tippecanoe County, Indiana. In 1800.
The county’s transformation over the past two centuries would make it unrecognizable to its original inhabitants. Today, much of Tippecanoe consists of flat plains of fertile soils.
It would be difficult to match the pastoral majesty of northwest Virginia, with its rolling hills covered in forests and prime farmland at the northern foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The region boasts the Shenandoah Valley to the west and Shenandoah National Park (SNP). Sitting at the eastern doorstep of the Park is Rappahannock County, part of the Piedmont region of the state,
”Economic growth” is commonplace in the daily news. We assume it’s a good thing, that a 2–4 percent increase in GDP is beneficial to all. Likewise, we hear that our communities are growing, and we see a 2–4 percent increase in population as reasonable and benign. Meanwhile, visionary community leaders are busy planning for a steady feed of single-digit annual growth. So we’re in good hands, right?
But what the news reports miss is that any steady rate of growth is an exponential function that contains within it a knowable doubling time.