Cost of Suburban Sprawl

One option is to let people build only what they need. Laws which ban buiding anything which is under a certain size, are often a blatant attempt tpo change what are political swing ridings into right wing ridings , and concentrate left wing thinkers into left wing strongholds, where a huge left wing vote won't change the total number of seats they hold. The feds should outlaw municipal laws which forbid anyone from building a 300 sq ft home, anywhere in Canada , if that is all they really need. However people are gently tiptoeing around the real issue , there are simply too many people for us to continue congratulating people when they have their third child, instead of calling them the totally irresposible assholes that they clearly are. Patrick Watson of the Sea Sheppherd society said Green Peace are far too gutless to deal with overpopulation as THE cause of environmental problems, period.The world cannot sustain the huge overpopulation we have, indefinitely. We are living off the principle, not the interest.Living off interest is sustainable, principle is not. Brent

Perhaps zoning issues such as minimum house sizes, lot sizes, setbacks, &c. have more to do with a municipality trying to preserve neighbourhood characteristics (or more crassly, property values) than with indirect gerrymandering of provincial or national ridings? I agree with you that if someone decided to build a 30 m² home, it shouldn’t be forbidden due solely to its size. However, there might be other valid reasons to not do so — e.g. if it were to be built on a wooded 40 m² lot, there would essentially be no firebreak. I disagree with you that Ottawa should trump municipal regulations on this issue; don’t the provinces have exclusive jurisdiction over property rights? (Even now, with no such trumping law at either the national or the provincial level, isn’t there typically a municipal process to request variances to zoning regulations?) It isn’t “overpopulation” that’s the cause of environmental problems; I myself am that cause. As long as I continue to choose petroleum-based pleasures/conveniences over petroleum-free pains/inconveniences, e.g. eating oranges (that were transported at least 1500 km to my village by polluting vehicles) vs. doing without, I need look no further than my mirror for the cause.

Whatever lifestyle you choose, the fewer the number of people , the less environmental impact they will have, period . Shipping oranges to a population which is half the size has half the impact, period.The bureaucratic government intrusion needed to prevent us from adversely effecting each other also grows in direct porportion to our population.If the population was 1 /10th of what it is today, you could do whatever you please and still have less environmental impact. We complain about overfishing. What are people doing with those fish? Eating them. What will they do if we stop fishing those species . Stop eating? Not likely. They will simply eat something else into extinction , legally or otherwise. Our population is far beyond being sustainable, far beyond the point where changes in lifestyle will have any real impact on the environmental devastation that we , in such numbers ,unavoidably do to the planet. To look elsewhere than population control for solutions is to burry our heads in the sand and deny reality ,for a fantasy solution. Yes , spending less will reduce our environmental impact, but not anywhere near enough to stop it. It will only slightly delay the inevitable disaster. Brent

Living in Toronto I can assure you that a sole cause of urban sprawl is unrealistic immigration targets. Over 100,000 people from around the world, literlaly a small city, settles in Toronto each year. This is threatening, and has destroyed, some of the most fertile agricultural land in the country (found in the Niagara region). Farmland north of the city is being laid to waste so that developers can sell houses to Canadians escaping the high housing prices mass immigration to Toronto has created as well as to sastify the material dreams of upper class Third World immigrants and the relatives they import. Similar effect are being felt in B.C. where prime farm land is being eliminated to accomodate immigrants and the Canadians their presence displaces into communities outside of immignant heavy areas. Mass immigration to Toronto has put more cars on the road, further polluting the air through idled traffic and killing about 1,000 Ontarians prematurely a year. The Ontario Environment Commisioner reported that population growth, mass immigration being the principal cause, is having an adverse effect on the environment and thus to the quality of life of those who live in southern Ontario. The Rockies provide some beautiful scenery but decreases the amount of farmable and liveable areas in B.C. Being left with little area to build the farmlands of B.C. as well as old growth forests will be destroyed to clear ways for housing. Enjoy the scenery while you can and make sure to take plenty of pictures because the material dreams of immigrants to B.C. (primarily South Asians and Chinese) are more important than the right of future Canadians to enjoy the nation's natural wonders. If we are serious about our environment and the natural beauty that Canada is famous for then we should be dilligent on all fronts to protect it. We should consume less and we should demand less immigration. We cant be active in one are and lax in the next.

[QUOTE BY= badsector] Please stick to the topic.[/QUOTE] All right Comrade Stalin.

[QUOTE]One option is to let people build only what they need. Laws which ban buiding anything which is under a certain size, are often a blatant attempt tpo change what are political swing ridings into right wing ridings , and concentrate left wing thinkers into left wing strongholds, where a huge left wing vote won't change the total number of seats they hold. The feds should outlaw municipal laws which forbid anyone from building a 300 sq ft home, anywhere in Canada , if that is all they really need.[/QUOTE] Are you crazy??? That has nothing to do with it. It is the LIBERAL immigration policies which were designed to ensure that Urban ridings never go Conservative again, and it worked. The Conservatives won no seats in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, yet formed a government against all odds. This would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. [QUOTE]However people are gently tiptoeing around the real issue , there are simply too many people for us to continue congratulating people when they have their third child, instead of calling them the totally irresposible assholes that they clearly are.[/QUOTE] You are quite misinformed and very ideologically disturbed. Canada's birth rate is about 1.5 kids per couple, which means most Canadian couples don't even have 2 kids, let alone 3. Nearly all of our population growth is due to immigration, at 250,000 a year. That is your culprit in Canada. We should be congratulating people who help sustain a depopulating and aging western world. 3 kids is NOT too many. Not at all. Even if people had 11 it would make little impact, and I see little congratulating going on. Mostly feminism. [QUOTE]Patrick Watson of the Sea Sheppherd society said Green Peace are far too gutless to deal with overpopulation as THE cause of environmental problems, period.The world cannot sustain the huge overpopulation we have, indefinitely. We are living off the principle, not the interest.Living off interest is sustainable, principle is not. Brent [/QUOTE] There are lots of causes of environmental problems. The majority of the overpopulation problem is in Africa and Asia--the 3rd world. Yet they consume much less, so it is a problem, but not simply an environmental problem. If you believe the world's population should be reduced, the way to do it is NOT for the western world to reduce their birth rate even further--we are only 10% of the world's population. The solution would be to lower the 3rd world's birth rate, but they have so far resisted much efforts to this end. Unless you want us to bomb them, stop talking.

[QUOTE BY= Brother Jonathan] Perhaps zoning issues such as minimum house sizes, lot sizes, setbacks, &c. have more to do with a municipality trying to preserve neighbourhood characteristics (or more crassly, property values) than with indirect gerrymandering of provincial or national ridings? I agree with you that if someone decided to build a 30 m² home, it shouldn’t be forbidden due solely to its size. However, there might be other valid reasons to not do so — e.g. if it were to be built on a wooded 40 m² lot, there would essentially be no firebreak. I disagree with you that Ottawa should trump municipal regulations on this issue; don’t the provinces have exclusive jurisdiction over property rights? (Even now, with no such trumping law at either the national or the provincial level, isn’t there typically a municipal process to request variances to zoning regulations?) It isn’t “overpopulation” that’s the cause of environmental problems; I myself am that cause. As long as I continue to choose petroleum-based pleasures/conveniences over petroleum-free pains/inconveniences, e.g. eating oranges (that were transported at least 1500 km to my village by polluting vehicles) vs. doing without, I need look no further than my mirror for the cause.[/QUOTE] I agree on these counts....and if anything, municipalities don't restrict development enough...they choose the higher tax revenue over preserving neighbourhoods.

[QUOTE BY= Brent Swain] Whatever lifestyle you choose, the fewer the number of people , the less environmental impact they will have, period . Shipping oranges to a population which is half the size has half the impact, period.The bureaucratic government intrusion needed to prevent us from adversely effecting each other also grows in direct porportion to our population.If the population was 1 /10th of what it is today, you could do whatever you please and still have less environmental impact. We complain about overfishing. What are people doing with those fish? Eating them. What will they do if we stop fishing those species . Stop eating? Not likely. They will simply eat something else into extinction , legally or otherwise. Our population is far beyond being sustainable, far beyond the point where changes in lifestyle will have any real impact on the environmental devastation that we , in such numbers ,unavoidably do to the planet. To look elsewhere than population control for solutions is to burry our heads in the sand and deny reality ,for a fantasy solution. Yes , spending less will reduce our environmental impact, but not anywhere near enough to stop it. It will only slightly delay the inevitable disaster. Brent[/QUOTE] People have talked of the population disaster for a long time....it may come, but your problem is you think of the world like a globalist "one worlder". Canada is not overpopulated at all, far from it. Without immigration, Canadians could easily afford to have bigger families space wise, not smaller.

There is only one planet , period. We have ten times the per capita environmental impact of third world countries , so saying we can have larger families is bullshit.That is because we have bought into the new religion called consumerism and spend an inordinate amount of time working to buy useless consumer goods that we've been sucked into buying , goods that we'd often be better off trading for free time to enjoy what we have. I aggree that as long as we have smaller families , we should be entitled to reap the benefits without having them undermined by immigration undoing the good we've accomplished. Aids , war and starvation seem to be reducing the population of Africa, a lesson that we'd best learn from before we are so foolish as to believe that we can have an unlimited population without suffering the same consequences.China is headed for an environmental meltdown. I remember that in a Canada with 20 million people , we had far less government intrusion into our daily lives .As population , and our potential impact increases ,government intrusion into our daily lives will inevitably increase.It already has. We have the highest per capita number of resources in the world and thousands of square miles of vacant crown land. So why do we still have homelesness, and have people working 60 hour weeks? Greed , and poor distribution of wealth. Brent

[QUOTE BY= Brent Swain] There is only one planet , period. We have ten times the per capita environmental impact of third world countries , so saying we can have larger families is bullshit.That is because we have bought into the new religion called consumerism and spend an inordinate amount of time working to buy useless consumer goods that we've been sucked into buying , goods that we'd often be better off trading for free time to enjoy what we have. I aggree that as long as we have smaller families , we should be entitled to reap the benefits without having them undermined by immigration undoing the good we've accomplished. Aids , war and starvation seem to be reducing the population of Africa, a lesson that we'd best learn from before we are so foolish as to believe that we can have an unlimited population without suffering the same consequences.China is headed for an environmental meltdown. I remember that in a Canada with 20 million people , we had far less government intrusion into our daily lives .As population , and our potential impact increases ,government intrusion into our daily lives will inevitably increase.It already has. We have the highest per capita number of resources in the world and thousands of square miles of vacant crown land. So why do we still have homelesness, and have people working 60 hour weeks? Greed , and poor distribution of wealth. Brent[/QUOTE] What the hell are you talking about??! If we had larger families we would reduce the consumerism, reducing our environmental impact. The western worlf needs a higher birth rate. I would much rather see Europeans dominating the world than the Chinese. We need young people to survive. You need to think more as a realist and stop being so suicidal.

Unlimited population growth is suicide.All past civilisations collapsed due to environmental meltdown.Then it was civilisations, now it's the entire planet. Read " A short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright. Since when will more people have less environmental impact? Since when will having a bigger population mean having fewer homes and thus less urban sprawl?You are not being rational. We need fewer people if we are to survive, period. The carrying capacity of the planet is 1/3rd the current population.Anything more is unsustainable.Promoting the making of more babies is totally irresponsible, and ignorant in the extreme . Brent

[QUOTE BY= Brent Swain] Unlimited population growth is suicide.All past civilisations collapsed due to environmental meltdown.Then it was civilisations, now it's the entire planet. Read " A short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright. Since when will more people have less environmental impact? Since when will having a bigger population mean having fewer homes and thus less urban sprawl?You are not being rational. We need fewer people if we are to survive, period. The carrying capacity of the planet is 1/3rd the current population.Anything more is unsustainable.Promoting the making of more babies is totally irresponsible, and ignorant in the extreme . Brent[/QUOTE] I think the point I am trying to make Brent is that we don't have to live in sprawl. I agree that the population issue is a problem, but you must be an insane masochist to actually think that for "us" to survive we must produce FEWER pf ourselves. There will one day likely be wars that reduce the population of the world drastically, and the only quesiton is what groups will survive and which will not. I'd choose my own side if I were you. It is not our job to birth control ourselves out of existence.

The smaller our population the less liklihood of wars, plagues, etc etc. Mass starvatuion is brought on by overpopulation, more population than the planet can sustain and feed. Believeing that more people eating and polluting the world's food supply and reducing the planet's ability to sustain us,will reduce the liklihood of mass starvation is being totally irrational. You live in a fantasy world. Brent

I don’t quite agree with a lot of things being stated in this thread. I think the belief that we are at some kind of food/overpopulation crisis is a neo-Malthusian myth. Here is my opinion, based on my own observations: <ol> <li>Humans produce way more food than what we need globally. Most of it gets sent to large urban centres in 1st-world countries where a lot of it is wasted. <ol> <li>I’m in Winnipeg. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of grocery stores here, ranging from mom & pop stores to massive omnimarts. Each one is filled with food that will most likely expire on the shelf. Imagine what the effect is in really big cities like Toronto, Vancouver, or Los Angeles. <li>We have federal agencies that purposefully restrict the amount of food that our farmers grow to ensure that the agricultural market remains stable (i.e. that there isn’t too much or too little of one type of product produced, thus ensuring that supply and demand variables stay more or less constant). If we were on the verge of being unable to feed the population such caps would be unnecessary due to the demand for food. <li>I would imagine that most of our foreign aid in the form of food is either too little (because we restrict how much our farmers can grow), or ends up in the hands of corrupt 3rd-world political leaders who do not allow the aid to reach those who truly need it (a distribution of wealth problem). <li>Sadly, there may be organizations with a vested interest in ensuring that portions of Earth’s human population remain hungry. 3rd-world famines make good commercials for Foster Parents Plan and Christian Children’s Fund. Video footage of well-fed, healthy children would cause one to be less likely to cough up the “about the cost of a cup of coffee per day” to these organizations (not to accuse any organization in particular of corruption). <li>Last year I had the privilege of touring a Hutterite colony just west of Winnipeg and learned about how they are able to produce all the food they need as a community and still have enough left over to sell and enjoy large profits. Since they share all their wealth, they do not suffer from issues such as homelessness, poverty, or starvation. When their population starts getting bigger than the colony can handle, they split the population and half starts another colony elsewhere. The point is that humans can handle population growth if they do it intelligently, instead of cramming everyone into a city and importing their oranges from 1,500km away. </ol> <li>Overpopulation on a global scale is at worst a myth and at best a distant-future scenario that future undreamt-of technologies may mitigate (such as colonization of the solar system or other solar systems). <ol> <li>Human beings love to cluster around volcanoes, settle on flood plains, build on top of fault lines, and congregate along hurricane-prone coastlines. While problems of micro-overpopulation (too many people in one small are) are real, there is a lot more Earth to go around. For example, China may have the bulk of the world’s population, but it is smaller than Canada (size-wise) and still has a lot of wilderness. The fact that we all try to cram ourselves into tiny areas speaks more to our genetic fear of isolation than to the doom of overpopulation. <li>Allow me to perform a simple mathematical experiment: - There are roughly 6.6 billion on Earth - Canada has an area of 3,854,082 square miles - There are 2,466,612,480 acres in that many square miles - My home in Winnipeg sits on a 5000 square foot lot - Thus, there is roughly space equal to 107,445,640,000,000 Winnipeg city lot-sized properties in Canada (1 lot for each person in the entire human race with tons of room to spare) While this does not consider the fact that much of Canada’s land area is water, you get the general idea; we haven’t begun to fill up the space that was given to us. We could put every human in Canada (or the US, or Russia) and use the rest of the planet as farmland to produce our food and still have tons of room to spare </ol> <li>Plagues and sickness are generally caused by unclean living conditions, lack of basic personal cleanliness, unfettered sexual contact, pollution, and inadequate treatment of human waste. Most, if not all illnesses could be avoided by maintaining a clean (but not sterile) environment and ensuring that people are a little better-educated. <ol> <li>A lot of the effectiveness of past plagues in our history stems from our ancestor’s ignorance surrounding disease. Today we know that rodents and other animals can carry disease (or carry insects such as lice which can transmit disease) and we have the capability to greatly reduce our contact these creatures and to avoid providing them with environments where they can proliferate. <li>I would be far more worried about military (or dare I say the word, terrorist)-engineered bio-weapons than another Black Death threatening our population. </ol> </ol> Getting back to the topic of suburban sprawl I would argue that it is a problem caused by two main factors: the belief that living in the suburbs is the “ideal” that we should all strive for, and that poor city planning and lack of enforcement of housing standards (especially in Winnipeg) leaves pockets of dilapidated neighbourhoods that, while cheap to live in, are so filled with crime, filth, and poverty that no one who can afford better is going to live there. If you’re worried about where the next plague is going to come from, that’s where I’d recommend looking. Despite my classification of suburban sprawl as a “problem” in the last paragraph, I don’t necessarily consider it a bad thing. Like I’ve pointed out, we’ve got plenty of space to spare. The fact that it puts a greater reliance on us using our polluting vehicles isn’t a problem of urban sprawl; it’s been the suppression of (or lack of interest in) non-polluting energy sources. There are probably more philosophical or sociological issues related to suburban sprawl, such as the lack of a sense of community and the disconnectedness from one’s community, but that’s a problem that exists even in the city and has more to do with our culture than our geography. I guess a big issue with it is that most 1st-world governments expand exponentially with suburbia, and I think we all can agree that increasing the size of our already bloated bureaucracy is hardly a good thing (I’d be more inclined to believe that systemic bureaucratic failure has been the cause of previous civilizations’ failure than overpopulation). In summary, I would say that the real problem is not suburban sprawl itself, but the inability of our society to effectively cope with it. Before I end this rant, I’ll just touch on a few of the other topics I’ve read here: Do I think Canadians should be having more children? Yes. Do I think our current culture and social systems support the idea of us having more children? No. That’s why the immigrants who come here end having just as many children as we do, if not less. State-imposed daycare is not an answer (how does it end up being different than residential schools – you turn your children over to the state and it’ll raise them for you while you work? We know how wonderful that is). A real social and culture paradigm shift is required to re-establish conditions where having large families works in our society. Unless we fix these issues at the core we’ve ultimately engineered our society into extinction. Do I think we should be allowing more immigrants entry into Canada? Of course! My ancestors were immigrants to this land (I’m a 4th or 5th generation Canadian) and I would not have the opportunities I have today if they were turned away at the border. Immigration brings fresh ideas, fresh blood, and diverse genetic material (an excellent source of plague avoidance, by the way). I say that we should take in immigrants and refugees and instead of dumping them in cities where many of them feel isolated (socially and economically), we give them larges areas of rural land and allow them to construct their own communities outside of our cities, persuading them to farm and even letting them live their traditional way of life. Thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans did that one hundred years ago and it didn’t destroy Canada then and it won’t destroy Canada now. Their communities will simply add to our mosaic and probably end up being a tourist destination for Canadians and foreigners. Not to mention the fact that more people means more spending which means a stronger economy. That’s just my two long, rambling cents on the topic. Thank you for reading this far. Feel free to point out where I’m wrong; I’m here to learn.

You talk of the sustainability of hutterite colonies , then talk of the land area of Canada as if it could all be sustainably occupied that way. The land areas that you quote include Ellesmere Island, and the top of Mount Robson. So try going there and feeding yourself with so called Hutterite sustainable agriculture. It's time you got back in touch with reality( if possible) and considered how litle of Canada is as suitable to food production as Winnipeg. When Palisser first came to the prairies he said that it was totaly unsuitable for agriculture. Since then it has been, historically ,unusually wet. Now it is threatening to go back to it's normal desert conditions that it was for the previous ten thousand years.Palliser was right, for the normal prairie conditions he saw. The South Saskatchewan River has one tenth the flow it had in 1900 ,and the Columbia ice field ,which keeps it in existence ,is rapidly disappearing. The bigger the population, the more vulnerable we are to environmental change.The more people the faster the acceleration of that change. The Hutterite lifestyle for everyone is the fantasy world you live in. Basing our policies on wishfull thinking fantasies is suicidal.Such may limit the future of humanity to about another 100 years. Making more babies ,who are extremely unlikely to live the Hutterite lifestyle and will probably live the consumer lifestyle we introduce them to ,with ten times the per capita consumption and pollution of third world countries ,is totaly ignorant and irresponsible ,as is promoting such suicidal foolisheness. Immigration increases the per capita environmental damage of the individual third world immigrant by a factor of ten. The creation of the middle class in China , with it's population ,is a major threat to the life expectancy of the human race.