Sprawl and quality of life in northern Vermont

A daily fitness walk route into and through the village of Essex Junction includes a hilly street named “Woods End” (the apostrophe is missing on the street sign). It’s truth in advertising because the landscape at the top of this street, where it transitions into Briar Lane, is indeed the “end of the woods.”

They’ve all been cleared, save for a few tiny woodlots. The reason? To make way for a new sprawl subdivision named “Village Walks.” The irony? Residents of Village Walks aren’t very likely to walk for groceries or anything else related to being consumers and members of society. But they are extremely likely to drive their personal motor vehicles; and not just to commute to workplaces, but for all the chores of daily life.

Sprawl practically mandates the use of cars. And it reinforces our ongoing proclivity to destroy wild nature, while sprawl itself ruins what at least some folks claim is their reason for moving into exurbia in the first place.

To be fair, it’s not just Essex Junction or even the wider stretch of land called Chittenden County. The sprawl machine is churning out more single-family homes this very minute. Sprawl, because of its reliance on the private automobile, also entails paving over the natural land, and that, in turn, means more storm water tainted with pollutants entering the watershed. In this case that’s Lake Champlain.

As was documented in the field work leading up to publication of The Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Vermont, the fragmentation and outright loss of the natural landscape leads to population declines of Vermont’s native birds. It’s hard now to find Vermont’s state bird, the Hermit Thrush, nesting anywhere in the town of Essex.

More than that, though, the sprawl machine diminishes the natural heritage of Vermont – the heritage the older generation should be caring for on behalf of generations to come.

Someone has to pay for the services demanded by new development, and that burden goes to the people who already live in a municipality. Think new schools, new teachers, more school buses, police and fire protection, the sewer lines, street construction and maintenance, more street lights, more power lines, the public library, etc.

And because sprawl demands the use of cars, its carbon footprint is sizeable and ever-growing. That relates to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into our atmosphere by a single household, or neighborhood, or municipality, etc.

As the sprawl machine leapfrogs from yesteryear’s development to this year’s, everyone’s quality of life is harmed: Noise pollution, diminished water quality and loss of outdoor recreational opportunities like favorite fishing holes and hiking trails.

Yes, we’re all deserving of good homes, both for ourselves and our children. But shouldn’t we get people into the many existing houses now on the real estate for-sell lists before wrecking more of our natural countryside?

“Sprawl is expensive. It costs more money to pave a road and connect a sewer line to five families each living a block apart on wooded lots than to build public infrastructure for those same five families living in a condo. It costs more money (and takes more time and gas) to serve those families with garbage trucks, fire engines, and ambulances. And in return . . . those five sprawling single-family homes likely yield less in tax revenue per acre than the apartment building that could house our fictitious residents downtown,” writer Emily Badger states in her “Quantifying the Cost of Sprawl” article for the CityLab Web site (www.citylab.com/).

It’s not difficult to determine whether a neighborhood falls under the heading of “sprawl.” Take a look at it how friendly it is to the wonderful pastime and transportation choice of walking. There’s a Web site, Walkscore.com, that’ll help you do just that.

My own neighborhood (I’m off route 2A just south of the highway’s bridge over the Winooski River) has a pretty weak rating of 31 out of 100. And next to my home’s score are the words, “Most errands require a car.” That’s true for a bunch of things: Shopping for groceries, getting a haircut, visiting the dentist and family doctor, picking up prescription meds. Walking to the closest grocery can be done. It takes an hour or so, as I discovered a few days ago, and some of the hike involves walking on the highway shoulder (not good).

Homes in the neighborhood along Kiln Road (a new street at the top of Woods End) score even weaker than mine. The tag line for the address number I typed into the Walkscore.com search engine is 18 (almost all errands require a car).

Not all sprawl development scores so low. The Finney Crossing project across Williston Road from the Maple Tree Plaza shopping district has a walk score of 69 (Some errands can be accomplished on foot). But the housing project is chewing up former farm land.

CityLab again: “Sprawl may not be a four-letter word, but to many people it might as well be. You can include in that group the researchers at Smart Growth America, the national nonprofit coalition that advocates for ‘smart’ development in U.S. metro areas—i.e., cities and towns with neighborhoods where people can walk or bike or use mass transit to get things done, rather than driving everywhere.”

Surprise: We all live downstream

I’ve lived and worked in many watersheds in my 60-plus years.

There’s the Rio Grande in New Mexico; the Platte River in Nebraska; Lake Champlain (once at Plattsburgh Air Force Base on its west side, in New York State, and now on the east side, in Vermont); Lake Thunderbird and the Canadian River in Oklahoma; the Snake River in Idaho; and the Lower Ocmulgee in central Georgia.

They all have lots in common, much of it on the negative side of the graph, unfortunately: The loss of natural land to sprawl and the gougers, diggers, bulldozers, chainsawers, polluters, dam builders, graders and asphalters of urban America.

My home in Vermont is – like yours in Pennsylvania – actually in several watersheds. First is the Winooski River (I live a half-mile from it). Second, and much larger, is the Lake Champlain watershed, which is international and multi-state in scope.

“We all live in a watershed,” reads the election campaign-style lapel button I got from the Puget Sound Partnership in Washington State some years ago.

That conservation outfit is correct. We do.

The EPA gives us this definition: “A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that is under it or drains off of it goes into the same place. John Wesley Powell, scientist geographer, put it best when he said that a watershed is: ‘that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community’."

Many residents of metro Hazleton (oftentimes called “Greater Hazleton”) live in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, but neighbors in Carbon County reside in the Lehigh River watershed, part of the Delaware River’s watershed.

Roads, homes and other human activities have altered the composition of forests across the Chesapeake Bay watershed (and all the others, too), reducing tree cover and fragmenting those forests that still exist.

Fragmented forests are less resilient to disturbances and more prone to negative influences like wildfires and invasive species. The ongoing loss of trees and entire forests, with financial profit the true motive, toughens and heightens cost and the cleanup and restoration.

But just because some thousands of acres are (thankfully) owned by a public agency, the Hazleton City Authority, as watershed land, does not mean Pennsylvanians need not worry about the ecological health of that land or, even more so, the diminishing naturalness of other land, private or public, elsewhere in the same watershed.

The logging of hardwood trees relates poorly to the goal of healthy watershed land and the replenishment of groundwater.

The Chesapeake Bay Program: “Forests are critical to the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Large stands of trees can protect clean water and air, provide habitat to wildlife and support the region’s economy.

“But human activities have altered the watershed’s forests, reducing tree cover and fragmenting forests that still exist. Conserving and expanding forest cover is a critical, cost-effective way to reduce pollution and restore the Bay.”

Streams across the United States are suffering a decline in health, as human development alters stream flow and pushes pollutants into the water. It’s a sad commentary on our times when one can stand on the shore of a major Chesapeake tributary (like the York River at Yorktown) and watch as rainwater polluted with the blue sheen of automobile engine oil dribbles into the current and out into the Bay. I’ve watched that process, a bunch of times.

The Bay Program (www.chesapeakebay.net/issues): “There are two broad categories of chemical contaminants that can be found in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries: metals and organics.

Mercury is the most common metal found in the Bay watershed.

Common organic chemical contaminants include:

-        - Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which act as a flame retardant in electrical equipment. Though their production has been banned since 1977, PCBs still pose a risk to humans and wildlife because they persist in the environment.

-        Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which form when gas, coal and oil are burned. PAHs are common in areas with high rates of development and motor vehicle traffic.

-        Organophosphate pesticides (OPs), which are mostly herbicides and insecticides used in agriculture. OPs can affect functioning of the nervous system.

-        Storm runoff from cities, towns and suburbs picks up oil, pesticides and other chemicals as it flows across lawns, roads, and parking lots and into nearby streams and storm drains. This type of pollution is significant and difficult to control.

Protecting the sources of our clean drinking water does not fit well with the selling of saw timber or the building of a road to get the truck in and the cut out. Every municipal water agency in Pennsylvania could preclude all sorts of problems, some of which I’ve discussed, by buying and protecting natural lands.
I call it Wild Nature and it’s where good water and a lot more come from.

Is sprawl development coming back?

Hell, it never left, as far as I can tell. And I have watched it chew up the natural landscape for decades. That's a byproduct of life as a long-distance fitness walker. You get to see American ugly and listen to its noise pollution (leaf blowers!) along the way. The photo with this posting is sprawl happening about two miles from m home in Williston, Vermont. The NY Times offers this reporting on the subject of sprawl.