2 ms·

I wouldn't go so far as to say it had anything to do with global warming or climate change. Urban sprawl is terrible for the environment in so many other ways,

• CSSer 4y ago
  Most people appear to have a very one-dimensional view of the environment overall. If this is true, it means that even if most agree urban sprawl is bad people still struggle to agree on how to fix it. Have you ever read William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness? It was published in ‘96. The core idea still doesn’t seem widely accepted or even acknowledged. For a humorous anecdote to support this, I once matched with a girl on a dating app who did so only to lecture me about building cairns because I had a picture containing one (dodged that bullet). She had no idea I was within city limits and didn’t seem to care. I had violated the sanctity of nature because someone had told her that she should think so.
  • QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
    From a hacker news pragmatism point of view, I wonder which wins a marginal ratio of amphibian lives saved to economic damage contest: shutting down or regulating polluting industries vs imprecisely lecturing cairn builders on tinder
• nine_k 4y ago
  Urban sprawl, among other considerations, was seen in 1950s as a way to save more lives in an event of a possible nuclear war. It is easy to destroy the entire Manhattan with a couple of nukes, but it won't have the same effect over Houston or Bay Area. Now this consideration is moot, but the planning decisions made back then took root. Powerful interests like car makers, NIMBYism, white flight, etc all played to that same hand.