environmental facts
LAND USE
Like all advanced nations, the United States is using land more extensively than
ever before. Certain kinds of land resources are becoming scarcfe—land within a reason-
able distance of urban centers available for housing, recreation and waste disposition;
land within cities that can be used for transportation networks, parks and open space;
and land to accommodate commercial facilities, housing and centers of higher education.
At the same time we must conserve valuable farm land in order to provide food, feed and
fiber for our still expanding population and world markets.
Some salient facts:
—4 billion tons of sediment are washed into streams annually as a result of land misuse.
—1,687,288 acres of wildlife habitat have been destroyed by surface mining.
—3,187,825 acres of land have been despoiled by surface mining.
—17,197,531 acres of wetlands have been destroyed in seven states alone (45.7 percent
of the wetland area of Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and
Missouri).
—25 million tons of logging debris are left in forests every year.
—4 million acres of right-of-way are traversed by over 300,000 miles of overhead
transmission lines.
—1 million (approximately) acres of forests are clear-cut annually.
—4 billion tons of raw materials are consumed annually in U.S. production, most of which
are eventually disposed of as waste on the land.
Our intensive and consumptive use of the land is expected to escalate dramatically
in the next 27 years. In fact, all that has been built in the history of this Nation
may have to be duplicated. That is, the equivalent of every school, pipeline, power-plant,
office building, airport, shopping center, factory, home and highway that has been built
during our first 200 years may have to be matched to accommodate population and market
demands projected for the year 2000.
Here are some conservative projections for land use in the U.S. over the next generation.
—19.7 million acres may be consumed by urban sprawl by 200C—an area equivalent to
the states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
—3.5 million acres may be paved over for highways and airports by 2000.
—7 million acres may be taken from agricultural use for recreation and wildlife
areas by 2000.
—5 million acres may be lost to agriculture for public facilities, second home
development, and waste control projects by 2000.
—492 power stations may be built by 1990, many of them requiring cooling ponds of
2,000 acres or more.
—2 million acres of right-of-way may be required by 1990 for 200,000 additional miles
of power lines.
It will be up to the people and their elected representatives to decide whether the
land is to employed in this way, but presently there is no adequate mechanism to plan
or. control land use.
UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20460
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—Municipalities often lack the resources to manage the -development of land use
systems that are regional in scope. Furthermore, local government critically
depends upon development-related property tax revenues, so there are powerful
economic incentives to develop everything in sight regardless of the consequences.
—Governmental policies are made, legislation is enacted, and programs are funded
without regard to how they affect land use and influence growth patterns.
—Local land-use decisions can have a greater-than-local impact on the environment.
—Many land-use decisions represent an irretrievable use of the land resource and
create irreversible environmental damage.
Under authority of the new environmental laws EPA has a mandate to encourage the
modification of certain kinds of land use which aggravate air and water pollution.
However, the main deficiency of existing land-use authority is that it is fragmented and
incomplete. At this point in its history, the Nation needs a comprehensive land-use act
that will embrace the land aspects of all environmental problems—air and water pollution,
noise abatement, waste disposal, management of toxic substances, outdoor recreation, urban
planning, population dispersal and control of growth itself.
We must protect assets which, once developed, will in all probability never be avail-
able for broad public purposes again. Among these are estuaries, wetlands, beaches, flood
plains, swamps, river and lake fronts, productive farms, forests and scenic uplands
threatened by untimely or rapacious development. Unlike air and water pollution the
results of land spoliation are often irreversible: we must live with them for generations
and in some cases forever.
We must provide the States with incentives to regulate activities that are important
on the State level as well as those having interstate significance. The President has
therefore proposed legislation which would provide $100 million during the next five
years to help the States assume land-use planning and regulatory authority over the most
critical and diminishing of our land assets. The great majority of land-use decisions
are of significance only to the immediate neighborhood or community so they would remain
in local hands.
But under the President's proposal States would be encouraged to control projects
whose scope and impact extend beyond the community, such as airports, highway inter-
changes, shopping centers, sports stadia, college campuses and tract housing. States
would get Federal grants to inventory their land assets, and redirect growth so that it
meets our needs without destroying cultural, historical and aesthetic values or unique
life systems.
If the President's bill—or any similar bill—should pass, we will have an
essentially complete package of air, water and land acts which, once fully implemented,
can ensure that our life-giving environs will be saved for posterity.
July 1973
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