If Americans, engaged in their current lifestyles, constituted the entire 6.7 billion head population of the world, less land would be required than is required today.
He probably means the amount of acres required to support the suburban lifestyle. For example it demands more roads, more mining operations, more resource extracting for goods and energy. You don't see it as much because that gets outsourced, too. China is already suffering the consequences of this with the worst pollution levels in history. Remember this affects us all in the long run.
to support the suburban lifestyle [...] demands more roads, more mining operations, more resource extracting for goods and energy.
A mine is not a permanent use of land. Greater demand for mined materials does not imply greater numbers of mines. Existing mines might simply be made deeper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_Canyon_Mine And the minerals in greater demand might also be substituted (e.g. copper for telecommunication wires by silicon for fiber optics).
of the 2.3 billion acres in the U.S. as of 1987, all the land taken up by cities, highways, non-agricultural roads, railroads, and airports amounts to only 82 million acres - just 3.6 percent of the total. Clearly there is very little competition between agriculture on the one side, and cities and roads on the other.
Concerning the trends: from 1920 to 1987, land in urban and transportation uses rose from 29 million acres to 82 million acres - a change of 2.3 percent of the total area of the U.S. During those fifty-seven years, population increased from 106 million to 243 million people. Even if this trend were to continue (population growth has slowed down), there would be an almost unnoticeable impact on U.S. agriculture, just as in past decades (see figure 9-2).
Concerning the notion that the U.S. is being "paved over," as of 1974 the U.S. Department of Agriculture's official view was that "we are in no danger of running out of farmland."
You conveniently skipped the outsourced bit (China.) And that is a very shallow investigation. For example, the fertile arable land available is running out. That is as hard a fact as there is.
Cities grow usually on fertile land, and large suburbs make this problem several times bigger.
In the last couple of years there were thousands of protests around the globe because of food prices. You might not notice it as it's probably only a fraction of your costs, but for many (most?) people in the world it is their main expense. And most of the food gets sent to the best payer automagically. The quota system to cope with hunger is gone:
>> all the land taken up by cities, highways, non-agricultural roads, railroads, and airports amounts to only 82 million acres - just 3.6 percent of the total.
> You conveniently skipped the outsourced bit (China.)
U.S. urban sprawl is outsourced to China? If so, how so?
Fertile arable land is made out of rock. The earth is made out of rock. If the earth - as you imply - is running out of itself, where do you suppose it - rock - might be going? Does rock get used up by farming in it, and thereby disappear?
Normally, when something is becoming scare ("running out"), people 1) make more of it, 2) use it more efficiently, and 3) substitute other things for it. In the case of arable land, we have observed people 1) making fresh arable land out of rock, 2) reclaiming arable land from wetlands/lakes/oceans/hillsides/mountainsides, and 3) substituting in the forms of vertical and soil-free agriculture and other forms.
Both ignorance and mysticism enter importantly into conventional thinking about farmland. For example, one hears that "once it's paved over, it's gone for good." Not so. Consider the situation in Germany, where entire towns are moved off the land for enormous stripmining operations. After the mining is done, farmland is replaced, and the topsoil that is put down is so well enriched and fertilized that "reconstituted farmland now sells for more than the original land." Furthermore, by all measures the area is more attractive and environmentally pure than before.
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that is a very shallow investigation. [...] Cities grow usually on fertile land
But what about the fertility of the land used for human habitation and transportation? Even if the total quantity of land used by additional urban people is small, perhaps the new urban land has special agricultural quality. One often hears this charge, as made in my then-home town in the 1977 City Council election. The mayor "is opposed to urban sprawl because 'it eats up prime agricultural land.'"
New cropland is created, and some old cropland goes out of use, as we have seen. The overall effect, in the judgment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is that between 1967 and 1975 "the quality of cropland has been improved by shifts in land use ... better land makes up a higher proportion of the remaining cropland."
The idea that cities devour "prime land" is a particularly clear example of the failure to grasp economic principles. Let's take the concrete (asphalt?) case of a new shopping mall on the outskirts of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The key economic idea is that the mall land has greater value to the economy as a shopping center than it does as a farm, wonderful though this Illinois land is for growing corn and soybeans. That's why the mall investors could pay the farmer enough to make it worthwhile for him or her to sell. [...]
The person who objects to the shopping mall says, "Why not put the mall on inferior wasteland that cannot be used for corn and soybeans?" The mall owners would love to find and buy such land - as long as it would be equally convenient for shoppers. But there is no such wasteland close to town. And "wasteland" far away from Champaign-Urbana is like land that will not raise whornseat - because of its remoteness it will not raise a good "crop" of shoppers (or whornseat or corn). The same reasoning explains why all of us put our lawns in front of our homes instead of raising corn out front and putting the lawn miles away on "inferior" land.
