Sprawl affects the environment in other ways as well.
We've already seen that sprawl uses up much more land per person than traditional development. Almost as big as all the urbanized land in Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties combined. This does not include the land indirectly lost when scattered rural housing development slices up larger tracts leaving pieces too small to be viable for farming. Farming on this land is halted and the probability increases that surrounding land also will fall to residential development. This has proved to be a common sequence of events in Waukesha County and elsewhere in Southeastern Wisconsin.