Land Use and Climate Change

The last time we in the United States tried to do anything at the national level about land-use policy was in 1973. That limited effort was a bill (S.268) introduced in the U.S. Senate by Henry Jackson that aimed only to provide funds for those states bold enough to engage in land planning. Toothless though it was the bill was defeated with much patriotic chest thumping. And the Republic still stands—or more properly, sprawls—having reportedly lost an average of one million acres to badly planned “development” each year since and another million or so to soil loss. In truth, we barely keep track of such numbers, preferring to take comfort in the total land reservoir of 2.2 billion acres that has so far buffered us from the consequences of bad judgment and the absence of intelligent planning. But the true costs of land lost to development and agricultural mismanagement are considerably larger even than the little we do count. First, sprawling development requires more roads, wires, pipes, concrete, and materials than more condensed development or “planned unit development. ” A 1974 report by the President’s Council on Environmental Quality concluded that “planned development of all densities is less costly to create and operate than sprawl” (CEQ 1974:7). Second, sprawl requires a lot more energy because more people and goods have to move longer distances, which thereby commits this and other landuse intensive nations to use more oil than they otherwise would need, leading to foreign policies predicated on dependence and in turn to belligerence or begging. Third, sprawl was financed primarily on a foundation of sand that is now washing away in a tsunami of bad debt and insolvency. Fourth, sprawl is bad for our health. Children cannot walk to piano practice or school, which begins a vicious cycle that leads to obesity and future health costs in the form of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and less familiar ailments (Frumkin et al. 2004). Fifth, sprawl tends to disconnect children from nature, causing what Richard Louv (2005) calls “nature deficit disorder” and mental problems that arise from the lack of healthy contact with living things. Sixth, sprawl destroys natural habitats and is a main driver of the loss of species. Sometimes smarter development can lessen impacts on wild habitats, but the aggregate effect of any new development is probably never positive. And finally, sprawl contributes to the use of fossil fuels and to the loss of carbon sinks (including forests and soils) that are driving climate change. According to the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have already raised the temperature of the Earth by 0.8 ◦C and are locked in to another 0.5 to 1.0 ◦C in coming decades no matter what we do in the meantime. Twenty percent of the excess CO2 now in the atmosphere will still be there 1000 years from now. Assuming we summon the wit to cap the warming below a 2.0 ◦C increase, land-use changes, nonetheless, will be dramatic, if still somewhat conjectural. Sea levels will continue to rise, perhaps for another 1000 years, inundating coastal regions. Larger storms will batter coasts, and bigger storm surges will reach farther inland. Midcontinental areas will likely become hotter and drier, possibly leading to the abandonment of millions of acres that were once “breadbaskets. ” Rainfall events will become larger with more floods such as those in Iowa in June 2008. More-frequent tornadoes will stress our emergency response and rebuilding capabilities. Some inland lakes will lose much of their present volume, radically altering shorelines. Lake Erie, for one, is projected to lose 40% of its present volume by 2050. Forested regions will be degraded by larger and hotter fires until there is little left to burn. Climate change, in other words, is not so much a problem to be solved once and for all as it is a worsening condition that we will have to endure for a long time to come. John Locke and others from whom we derive our foundational ideas about land law reckoned with none of this. For Locke, land became private property once someone in the distant past mixed their labor with the land. More than 3 centuries after Locke, defenders of private property, such as legal scholar Richard