Fifty percent of the nation's annual flood damage comes from small upstream watersheds where both public and private property are destroyed. Unsightly scars have been created on 2 million acres of land through strip mining and the mine acid that leaches out of the spoil banks and pollutes streams for miles around. Solid waste is another byproduct of our affluent society. We discard 250 million tons of waste each year. Two-thirds of into 40,000 open dumps, in rural areas where it pollutes air, water, and land.
Animal waste has a serious negative impact on the environment.
This not only pollutes the air, but -the runoff can accelerate eutrophication and destroy streams, ponds, and lakes. By volume, sediment is our most costly water pollutant. About half of it comes from cropland erosion while the other half comes from highways, stream-banks, public lands, and suburban developments. Sediment yields on a single acre of land can skyrocket from 50 to 25,000 tons a year when land is converted from rural to urban uses-and more than I million acres a year are being converted to homes and businesses and roads and airports and reservoirs. In the next 10,000 days, we will build in and around our metropolitan areas the equivalent of everything we've built since Plymouth Rock.