How have environmental/sprawl issues affected your life/memories?

I was talking with my brother last night (he is 44 I am 39) and we were discussing the creek near our house where we used to fish and play when we were kids, and the fields all around this area.

We would swim in the creek, eat some of the fish, see skunks and opposums in the yard - childhood was full of such memories.

Today the most I see is a racoon or two in my back yard (I live in Ohio, I-270 runs behind my house on a large hill now covered in trees - was a field when we were kids until they built the interstate).

Now? Hardly any fields left, a drive from one area to the next is not through the country, the creek is terrible and no one eats the fish from there and I have caught more then one that had some disease (the name of which escapes me). Far fewer fish, though lots of turtles (and I have caught some giant ones there that scared the heck out me). Still some big fish there thankfully, but the creek has lowered and is polluted.

The fishermen and hunters I know (I don't hunt myself) are some of the strongest advocates for better environmental protections. They see over the years the changes caused (while the rich folks just fly to canada or somewhere and don't see such changes and their impacts - just my humble opinion and guess - cause if they were hunting/fishing here they would think twice about some of the things they do in the corporate world).

And to be honest, it is not just the big corporations doing such things, I see many lower on the ladder polluting by dumping and littering.

Just sad really. Reminds me of that Indian guy in the 70's on the commercial. Very powerful ad.

So how have things change in your neck of the woods?

because it was such a long walk to anything fun, because it was so incredibly boring, and because even as a kid I found suburban culture to be stifling.

I live in an inner city 'hood that used to be burbs 50 years ago that has the best parts of both, convenience with single family houses, sidewalks to walk on, a certain amount of street life so it's not like walking through a moonscape.

Here the town is sprawling out in all directions, running into national forests, Indian reservations, and national parks as the only things to limit it. New neighborhoods are horrors of big piles of masonry on small lots with nothing facing the street but huge expanses of 2 car garage doors, just waiting for grafitti vandals.

I've lived in every living situation out there, including a truck and a boat. Apartment living is a pain in the butt, but given a choice between another apartment and a house in a bedroom community in the burbs, I'll take the flat.

that was used just a few years before for crops. My childhood home was on what had been vineyards just a couple of years before (this is California), my first apartment was called Plum Orchard because it had been a plum orchard just six years before I moved in. I now live in a six year old surburban home on ex-farmland as well. I do get sad when I think of it. I live in Steinbeck country. There is still some of it left, believe it or not.

"Blossom Hill Rd" was named because it rises just enough over the valley so that tours were given to enjoy the MASSES of blossoms each spring. I lived near downtown San Jose in an OLD residential district. There weren't even any malls yet. It was like American Graffiti era where folks acutally shopped down town and on the weekend, we youngin's cruised the main on $.50 a gal of gas. :)

Our family used to take drives on weekends to stop at makeshift fruit stands near these orchards to pick up THEE best tasting fruit you'd ever want to put into your mouth--cherries, apricots, oranges, nuts, plums, peaches, apples etc.. My parents worked in Canneries; there were serveral. A trip down hwy 1 took us to Morgan Hill and Gilroy (Garlic Capitol) where we'd pick up a batch of freshly roasted Almonds etc.

You could drive for MILES in any direction and not find the end to the orchards until you arrived near, say San Francisco.

There were developments here and there but not anything like it is today. Today, it's wall to wall CITY. Gone are the orchards. They and canneries moved to the San Joaquin Valley (Big Valley) to make room for COMPUTER related industries.

Now I live near Steinbeck country (Santa Cruz). Not too much change here; still a few canneries left, a lot of farming still going on (salad bowl and all that). Some canneries have gone to Mexico and elsewhere. But the country side has been slow to over develope; due in part to city planners and the enviro movement. Salinas has boomed though, I don't like Salinas...Monterey is still beautiful and there's been a concerted effort to keep the bay clean/made into a marine sanctuary.

My adopted town has seen a boom in housing. One day theres a field, next day it's covered in squeeze box over priced homes. Still, there IS LOTS of area north, east, and south of us that is open and pristine. The coast north and south of here is still Very, very beautiful.

Thanks for the first person history lesson of the San Jose area, an area where I went to college and still work. Of course I'd heard of all the orchards on Blossom Hill Road, but I never saw them. It was the nineties before I saw the area, and it was completely developed by then. You make it sound wonderful, and I'm sure it was. I tend to get misty over things like this; I can't think think about it for too long or I tear up. And, as a fan of Steinbeck, I hate what is happening to Salinas as well. Thanks for the mental picture of the orchards. I'll think of it every time I drive down Blossom Hill Road.

The house I grew up in near the Guadelupe River is now overpassed by a thoroughfare by the same name. A trip to Los Gatos was like "going into the country"

My mom and sisters and I worked the "drying sheds", owned mostly by Portugese American ranchers, on the East side of San Jose (more orchards). We kids would help cut apricots to dry in the sun for $.50 a crate. I could ride my bicycle from down town all the way to Alum Rock Park (w/o mom's knowing it ..eek)

That park was a pleasant place then. It had a zoo and indoor swimming pool with a slide. Our family picnicked there often; we hiked through the mountain sides as well. I spent one summer at day camp there.

So much to remember that is all gone now.

Best, :hi:

the restaurant in East San Jose, got its name? Thanks again for the history lesson.

Walnut Creek, specifically. We moved there in '71. My childhood was filled with swimming pools and horseback riding. The walnut orchards started disappearing at a rapid pace. Fields of mustard sprouted townhouse/condo things. Horse ranches became McMansions. (Thank goodness Mt. Diablo is largely protected.)

Walnut Creek in the 70s and early 80s, when I was in high school, was still a sleepy town. Now when I go down there to see family I cannot believe the "Scene" there -- restaurants, chi chi shopping, etc.

I grew up in, and still live in, the Central Valley of California – the son of a farmer no less. Since I was a kid in the '70 I've seen massive agriculture turned into massive subdivisions, and there's no end in sight.

The Valley towns, even tiny towns now, are still expanding and paving over farmland, be it vineyards, orchards, rangeland, rice fields, row crops. I would call it one of the themes of by geographic life.

a local developer wants to build an upscale housing development on beautiful rural land next to one of our most lovely parks out on the edge of an old affluent village.

Monroe county made it to the top ten (maybe five? can't remember) worst areas in the Nation for sprawl.

The issue upsets me ALOT. I can barely talk about it.

I used to live in Prescott, AZ. A formerly beautiful place that used to have lots of hiking trails that I frequented. I was such a budding environmentalist that I counted tailpipes on cars, thinking the ones that had more than one tailpipe polluted more and therefore should be ticketed by the EPA. Aww, the innocence of a little kid.:)

Anyway, when I was in the second grade, my mother moved me down to the Phoenix area. I would then live in the concrete jungle until college, first in Mesa, then in various Chicago burbs, then in Chandler (AZ), then back to more Chicago burbs. I go to college in rural MO so I now have at least some of my former connection to nature. Though when I go back to Prescott, every time I find more and more old hiking trails built over. It has become little more than a Phoenix exurb, and it's more than 100 miles away.:(:grr:

"Asked Mr. Rogers...."

another california. More like another east LA. Fourth generation native and my heart just cries when I look at all the great beauty the developers have plundered. Greed is ruining so much in this country.

that was just bizarre...they loved the view so much they ruined it with their house.

just northwest of Atlanta. When I moved here in 1989, it was a quiet urban area. Not anymore. The city has moved up here. Shopping centers everywhere and more and more developments being built. And the traffic is just as bad as in Atlanta.

for example Pittsburgh. There is ample room and loads of places to refurbish and revitalize...but wait...let's move to the farming areas and build massive suburban developments and make our commute a big nightmare...

My wife and I joke that all the new housing developments in our area are named after the things they destroy and replace, "Willow Creek" "Golden Meadows" "Pond View". The laughter just hides the real sadness :(

It's like gallows humor.

The beautiful fields and wooded areas were stripped of coal and "reclaimed" into fields of bland nothing. The barn, house, outbuildings and garden have all disappeared. It is now just a stark empty nothing area.

The farm where I grew up was split into four divisions. I no longer recognize the Victorian house that I lived in. I still dream of the adventured my brothers and I had in the old post and beam barn with its beautiful hewn and pegged beams. The barn collapsed from neglect after we moved.

When we bought the home we lived in more than thirty years ago I could look out on an enormous corn field. The field is now a housing development with huge homes on postage sized lots. I feel like I'm walking through a canyon of tan siding and tan bricks when I go down those streets.

I miss the corn. I miss the barn. I miss the farms. The world is not better because they are gone.

As a kid I rode my little mustang mare all over wide open land in the west end of the SF Valley in CA. I could take off with my friends and be gone all day, and never run out of room to ride.

We moved in the mid 70s; the ranch I boarded my horse out was razed to build housing tracts, and access to places to ride was disappearing.

We lasted in the new place for a decade or so, and then moved again. And so on.

Every time I find a place, somewhere "out there," affordable with access to open space, the developers move in, and my horse and I are pushed out. It's happening again right now. The ranch I keep my horse on, and ride from, is part of an old cattle ranch sold to developers more than a decade ago. Legal challenges and developer bankruptcies have kept development at a standstill until this year. We have surveyors everywhere, ready to begin flattening, filling in the springs, mowing down the chaparral, and evicting the wildlife to make room for pricey, upscale housing tracts. And I'm on the move again.

Montgomery County, PA was a great place to live through the 1960s; there were farms within a mile of the Philadelphia city limits; you could jump on a train and be in Center City (downtown) Philadelphia in less than an hour...

By the mid-1970s the place had become unbearable...nothing but one office building after another strip mall after another yuppie McMansion development.

And it's gotten worse. I can barely stand to go there to visit family; it's so depressing to remember what a great place it used to be.

(Not to insult anyone who lives in that area, OK?)

I'll second the point that others have made, that one of the worst effects of this kind of sprwal is to utterly destroy the character of an area; if you go to this part of Pennsylvania, you look around and it could be ANYWHERE else that has developed like this...Northern Virginia, Colorado, Dallas...all the same.

Redstone

The main reason for this is that large tracts of land were set aside years ago as parks/open space by some very wise council members. Also there is a farm in our old neighborhood and the owners had the property classified as a natural area.

We spent every nice day in the woods. Some of the vines we used to swing on are still there (I am 52). When I am home, I always take walks in these same woods. It brings back a lot of great memories.

Up here in central MN, it used to be that there was maybe one neighbor every 1/4 mile, and they were farmers as well. Gravel roads, open fields of corn, alfalfa and soybeans, thick acreages of woodlands, pastures and windbreaks. Now where ever you go you see new houses set up on their 2-3 acres of land, nicely landscaped, mowed lawns bright green from being overfertilized. People don't care that they have to commute 30 miles each way to work, so long as they can get their little slice of land. A few sad ones try to hobby farm their land, with a horse here, a goat there, maybe a pot-bellied pig. It infuriates me to no end to see all this development, because 1) it uses up valuable farmland that should be used for crops, 2) it uses up valuable gasoline to commute 60 miles round-trip for work, and 3) it makes it all the more difficult for me to hunt and target-shoot without worrying about hitting a neighbor. A farmer down the road lost a calf to a pack of dogs last year, but he managed to drop two of them before they got away. One of them was a big German Shepard with a tag on it. The owners had just moved into their new house last fall and thought it was ok to let their dogs run and play in the woods out back. The owners were furious that their dog had been shot, and threatened to take the farmer to court. The farmer mentioned how he could call the police and have the couple arrested for letting their dog loose to kill his calf, and the subject was dropped.

In the summer there were cows in the field and in spring there were buckets on the trees collecting sap for maple syrup. That was just one side of the road. It's been replaced by 3 shopping plazas, a Home Depot and a bank. Not far from the spot, a half mile away, there's a big Victorian house. It's wedged between a cheesy motel chain and an Ace hardware store and is the last holdout in a nightmare of strip development. It's very sad the younger generation will only have Wendy's and McDonald's as memories.