These are the CASSE blog articles on population.
For some reason, recognizing planetary boundaries, including support for a steady state economy, is seen by some as a “progressive” cause. And granted, some steady staters and degrowthers seem to have a checklist of “progressive” causes they identify with. Perhaps adhering to these checklists helps them avoid unwanted labels.
This is a big mistake. Support for a steady state economy is no more “woke” than the laws of thermodynamics.
Housing in the United States (and in many other nations) is plagued by many problems and shortcomings. Among the most critical are increasingly unaffordable prices and bewildering geographic cost variations. Connected to these are additional problems associated with forced sprawl, the needless destruction of vital ecosystems, and labor market rigidity.
The residential cost problem is paramount and can no longer be dismissed as a predicament limited to isolated markets.
Like many coastal communities, the county of New Hanover, North Carolina, is rich in habitat diversity. Its coastal plain is dominated by estuaries, marshes, and swamp forests and is considered a global biodiversity hotspot. The county is home to a number of threatened and endangered species, with mounting human pressures of a growing population and economy.
The county’s growth has accelerated over the past twenty years.
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.
CASSE encourages members and readers to hold their government agencies to account on the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Last week, Brian Czech presented Gag-Ordered No More to the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome, concluding with recommendations for engaging agency directors. We follow up this week with a letter from the Qualicum Institute (British Columbia) to Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change,
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,
Vermont takes its name from the French Monts Verts, or Green Mountains, the state’s rolling hills that host maple, birch, and beech forests in the south and spruce and fir in the north. Quaint towns and farms, many retaining their historic structures, are nestled in the mountain valleys. Lakes, streams, and wetlands are plentiful. And farms are everywhere: Vermont consistently ranks as one of the top states in the nation for local food production.
The USA, Canada, and other countries have long recognized sprawl as a vexing dimension of urban development. Especially challenging is the difficulty creating the public consensus needed for political and planning responses to the problem.
But growing numbers of residents today are expressing their distaste for sprawling approaches to development and are primed to resist it. Perhaps surprisingly, sprawl afflicts a U.S. state better known for its natural beauty and its potatoes: Idaho.
Times are evidently rough for our natalist, growthmaniac friends.
More people than ever are questioning their agenda of increasing the planet’s population beyond the current 8 billion people (double the level of less than fifty years ago) in the name of “progress” and profit. Yet the growthmaniacs’ only response to anyone who links human population and ecological overshoot is to scream “Malthus!” at the top of their lungs (although some Marvel fanboy growthmaniacs have been known to respond “Thanos!” instead).