Defenders Magazine

Taming Sprawl to Save the Wild

Communities wrestling with growth too often pave over open space and wildlife.

By John Ryan

Head west on Florida’s Route 46 and you can be forgiven for thinking that you’re traveling back in time. Once you leave behind the brand-name sprawl of greater Orlando, the road narrows from four to two lanes. Scan the roadside and you might see a majestic pair of sandhill cranes foraging in a pasture. A road sign warns, "Bear Crossing — Next Six Miles," before you pass through pine forests, wetlands and rural communities like Sorrento, where locals actually buy groceries at neighborhood shops that are neither convenience stores nor supermarkets.

Stop at the spring-fed Wekiva River and peer or, better yet, canoe into the heart of the ecosystem known as the Wekiva-Ocala corridor, an important holdout for Florida black bears, gopher tortoises, scrub jays and other protected species with few places left to stand in 21st-century Florida. From its subterranean source, the Wekiva meanders slow and clear past waving sawgrasses and under a moss-draped canopy of oak and laurel and longleaf pine. In places, the jungle-like vegetation surrounds the river so densely it feels like an old Tarzan movie (some of which were filmed just a few miles from here).

But the Wekiva watershed — and its springshed, the area where surface water percolates into the aquifer and recharges the springs — is hardly pristine. Cars kill more bears on Route 46 than on any other road in Florida. Nearby Lake Apopka is the home of alligators devastated by pesticides.

But the rich mosaic of upland and wetland habitats in the Wekiva basin still supports a wide array of rare species and connects them to the larger wildlands of the Ocala National Forest to the north. According to Keith Schue, a local activist with the central Florida chapter of the Sierra Club, "to be able to say that within half an hour of Orlando, you’ve got bears roaming around, that’s really unique. You don’t get that anywhere else."

Florida environmentalists are working to save the Wekiva from what Schue calls "the ultimate threat": sprawl. Local transportation officials have their eyes on the Wekiva as the site for an extension of the Orlando Beltway. The road itself would lead to increased road kills and further splinter an ecosystem where state officials have already bought more than $100 million worth of land to reduce habitat fragmentation. But activists are most concerned that the new highway would induce Orlando’s suburbs to sprawl onto this sleepy rural area and its sensitive spring-fed ecosystems. "The more we pave over and the more water we take for our own use, the more the water tables fall, and the more the wetlands and river flows dry up. We could see the whole ecosystem crash," Schue warns.

It’s a common practice for real-estate developers to name their developments after the natural features that their cul-de-sacs, lawns and driveways replace. In Florida, they’ve taken the practice to new heights. The Wekiva River area not only has streets like "Wildlife Lane" but also new developments — named "Sylvan Lake Reserve" and "The Preserve at Astor Farms" — that pretend to preserve what they have paved over.

The irony, in Florida as elsewhere, is that poorly planned new developments, whatever they’re called, are among the most serious threats to open space and biological diversity. Of the many factors that are unraveling America’s natural heritage, habitat loss is widely recognized as causing the most harm. Nationwide, the expansion of cities and suburbs rivals agriculture as a cause of habitat loss, and according to a 2000 study in Bioscience, sprawl is the leading cause of species’ ending up on the endangered-species list (narrowly beating out agriculture).

As of the mid-1990s, the United States was losing more than 2 million acres of land — mostly forests and farmland — to urbanization each year. The pace of sprawl has accelerated by half since the 1980s and is almost triple the nation’s rate of population growth.

When cities expand onto the open spaces around them — often coastlines, riverbanks and fertile valley floors — they eat into and fragment some of the nation’s most productive and diverse habitats. But sprawl doesn’t just affect the urban fringe of major cities. Even in large protected areas like Yellowstone National Park, nearby development often harms wildlife. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, land occupied by urban areas has more than quadrupled since the 1970s. The relentless spread of development has reduced populations of species like grizzly bears and warblers that frequent both the high-elevation habitats protected within the park and the lower-elevation woodlands on private lands that are being perforated by sprawl.

Even individual trophy homes in resort areas provide a welcome mat to weedy species always looking to spread their range. Colorado State University researchers studying subdivisions around Aspen discovered that most houses were enveloped in a bubble of trash-loving species like crows and raccoons. More sensitive native species stayed at least 300 feet away.

"Studying urban ecology makes you a fan of the timber industry," John Marzluff of the University of Washington, who studies Seattle’s skyrocketing crow population, told High Country News with a touch of irony. "The amount of disturbance we create where we live makes all the other environmental issues we have pale in comparison."

Sprawl’s least apparent impacts on biodiversity may be its most profound: underwater (see sidebar on page 23) and in the atmosphere. Sprawl is helping to disrupt habitats worldwide by leaving people little option but to drive long distances to their destinations — and emit global-climate-altering carbon dioxide from their tailpipes as they do so.

In recent years, a growing number of planners, architects and ordinary citizens have gotten fed up with the traffic, the ugliness, the urban decay, the social stratification and the ecological harm that come with sprawl. They’ve started a movement known as "smart growth" that has begun to change the way America builds its communities. Smart growth has no standard definition, but it usually entails planned development that protects open space, revitalizes existing neighborhoods, keeps housing affordable and makes communities livable.

A compact, livable community can accommodate the same number of people as a low-density development yet consume half as much land. And because residents of compact, mixed-use communities drive less and use other modes of transit more, smart growth also reduces the pollution impacts from driving. It saves habitats near (from sprawl) and far (from global warming).

Yet while smart growth is beginning to reduce our communities’ growing appetite for land, it has been less successful at protecting the land most important for conserving biological diversity. With most development decisions occurring at the local level, both subdivisions and protected areas pop up haphazardly — often simply where political resistance was weakest or land cheapest.

Protecting viable wildlife populations in functioning ecosystems requires thinking on a larger scale. Only by looking at state or regional levels can land managers hope to conserve the large, connected blocks of habitat required for many ecosystems to stay healthy and ensure that rare natural communities don’t fall through the cracks of patchwork conservation.

Many land-management agencies and universities, as well as environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy, have done large-scale habitat mapping and analysis. But these sorts of studies typically only influence how public lands are managed and seldom reach local officials in charge of deciding whether to allow the new subdivision or protect the wetland.

"Not every piece of land is equal," says Harriet Tregoning, Maryland’s Special Secretary for Smart Growth, "and there’s not enough money to buy everything we want to protect, so we really have to be much more strategic." Maryland is one of a small but growing number of states and communities that have started doing just that. Under its GreenPrint program, the state has identified and mapped core habitat areas statewide as well as corridors connecting them. The state is focusing its ambitious land-protection efforts — it protects more acres every year than it loses to sprawl — on these key areas. GreenPrint’s sophisticated maps are also detailed enough to help local jurisdictions make land-use decisions.

Similar efforts have been launched by the states of Florida, Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey, while regional-scale efforts are popping up around the Chicago, New York, Fort Collins and Tucson metropolitan areas, among others.

Though land-use planning remains almost exclusively a local concern, policies set in Washington, D.C., also greatly influence how local communities develop — often for the worse, according to Tregoning. "Right now, almost every single federal policy you can think of, from tax policy to the farm bill, favors the status quo, it favors an increasingly decentralized pattern of development," she argues, "and we’re fighting uphill to try to reverse that."

Smart-growth advocates and highway builders alike are gearing up for a battle in 2003 that comes up only every six years: the reauthorization of federal transportation legislation. Federal spending on roads has been a major driver of sprawl and urban decline ever since the dawn of the interstate highway system in the Eisenhower administration. But twice in the 1990s, environmentalists made headway in transforming a 1950s-era highway building program into a more flexible program for all modes of transportation. Local planners, rather than federal highway officials or pork-barrel congressional delegations, now have primary responsibility for spending federal transportation dollars. And while money from Washington still helps build lots of sprawl-inducing highways, federal spending now encourages fixing existing roads over building new ones and includes environmental protection as well as transit, bicycle and pedestrian facilities.

This time around, highway builders are arguing that delays in getting environmental approval for road projects hurt the nation’s faltering economy. They are pushing for a streamlined permitting process with limited public participation and very short timelines. Environmentalists counter that it’s possible to streamline the process without stripping important environmental safeguards. They point to the example of the Florida Department of Transportation’s new Efficient Transportation Decision Making (ETDM) process.

"Florida is leading the nation in environmentally responsible streamlining," Jennifer McMurtray of Defenders’ Florida office reports. "They’re putting all the environmental issues on the table when road projects are still in the conceptual phase. It makes it easier to design road projects right from the beginning." Early public involvement has led to a smoother process from builders’ standpoint as well.

Back in Wekiva, the long-proposed beltway extension had moved beyond the conceptual phase years before ETDM program existed. The fate of the Wekiva basin and its rare species will likely hinge on whether activists can persuade transportation officials, their elected bosses or perhaps a judge that the Wekiva is too valuable to become just another suburb. "The Wekiva is the only place in Florida with an entire state law devoted to its protection and mandating that the area remain rural in character in perpetuity. It’s not an appropriate place to build a toll road," McMurtray argues.

If the new stretch of beltway does go through, activists insist that it be built on tall supports, with no sprawl-inducing off-ramps, above the current path of Route 46, which would be removed to reconnect the landscape below. With removal of the worst bear-killing road, and mitigation funds to protect more of the watershed from sprawl, an elevated highway might actually represent a net improvement for the health of the Wekiva basin.

Sprawl has decades of momentum behind it, and it will probably take decades more to truly reverse its course. In polls, voters rank sprawl with crime and education as their top concerns and, for each of the past five years, have consistently approved the vast majority of open-space ballot measures nationwide. There's every reason to think that efforts to tame sprawl’s effects on the wild will increase both in number -- and urgency -- in the years ahead.