A week before Earth Day, the U.S. government announced a major new commitment to environmental stability. It officially joined the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, a group of more than 90 countries seeking to protect at least 30% of the planet from development by 2030.
Unfortunately, the current rate of urban sprawl devouring America's natural habitat and farmland gives conservationists plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the federal commitment to these so-called "30x30" goals.
Our nation lost an additional 17,800 square miles of natural habitat and agricultural land to development between 2002 and 2017, according to the latest 15-year dataset from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. That's an area larger than New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut combined.
Developers continue to apply chainsaw and bulldozer blades to about 1,200 square miles of rural land each year. And this sprawl shows no signs of stopping, because policymakers refuse to address the major root cause — population growth, which is mainly a product of federal immigration policies.
My organization has been conducting national, state, and regional studies of American rural land loss for two decades. Our newest study, examining every county in the country outside Alaska, found that 67% of rural land loss from 2002 to 2017 was related to U.S. population growth. About 11,950 square miles were developed to satisfy the needs of the additional 37 million residents of the United States in 2017, compared to 2002.
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