The National Resources Inventory samples the nation’s lands to estimate how much is dedicated to farms, forests, cities, and other uses. Formerly called the natural resources inventory, it is conducted about every fives years by the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which itself was formerly called the Soils Conservation Service.
The Antiplanner previously reported on the results of the 2012 inventory, including a special spreadsheet showing urbanized lands that wasn’t included in the published documents. Now, for those people who prefer looking at maps over looking at spreadsheets, Bloomberg has published a series of maps attempting to show the relative amounts of forests, pasturelands, croplands, urban areas, and other land uses in the contiguous 48 states.
For the most part, the maps and explanations are fair and balanced. But there are some elements that can be misleading. First, the second map paints the nation with six vertical stripes, each representing a major land use: pasture/range, forest, cropland, special use, miscellaneous, and urban. Because urban is the eastern-most stripe, it ends up covering eight states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont — as well as parts of New York and Pennsylvania.
This greatly exaggerates the apparent extent of urban lands. In fact, they represent just 3.6 percent of the total, or somewhat less than the state of Nevada. This exaggeration is compounded by the statement that urban areas are growing at “an average rate of about 1 million additional acres a year. That’s the equivalent of adding new urban area the size of Los Angeles, Houston and Phoenix combined.”
Together, this map and statement feed the notion that urban sprawl is somehow a problem. In fact, at a growth rate of a million acres a year, it would take more than 1,800 years to urbanize the entire 48 states — plus 425 more to urbanize Alaska. Moreover, the rate of urbanization has slowed — between 2007 and 2012, urbanized lands grew at only half a million acres a year — so urbanization is even less of a threat to other land uses than stated.
The Bloomberg article never mentions urban sprawl or openly suggests that other land uses are threatened. But urban areas are the only one that it notes are growing. In fact, between 2007 and 2012, acres of croplands grew more than urban areas. Forests and pastures also grew; among major land uses, only rangelands declined.
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The Bloomberg maps also conflate pasture and range, when in fact they are quite different. Pasture grows introduced plant species that may be irrigated, fertilized, or otherwise managed to provide food for livestock. Range grows native species that are relatively unmanaged but sometimes grazed by livestock.
“There’s a single, major occupant on all this land,” Bloomberg says of pasture and range: “cows.” That’s very deceptive. Of the 645 million acres identified on the maps as “pasture/range,” about 121 million are pasture. There are fewer than 100 million cattle in the United States, and most of them spend all their lives on pasture or in feedlots, not range. The 500 or so million acres of rangelands may see, on average, one cow per hundred acres for three or four months of the year, and none the rest of the year. The major occupants on that 500-plus million acres — more than a quarter of the 48 states — are wildlife.
Beyond this, the maps make some interesting points. Although the 48 states have nearly 400 million acres of croplands, only a little more than half are used to grow food we eat (77 million acres) or food for livestock that we will eventually eat (123 million acres). Some 84 million acres grow food for export, while 38 million acres grow corn for ethanol or biodiesel. That leaves about 52 million acres in conservation reserves or left fallow for a year.
One of the authors of the Bloomberg article seems to think it is important that, “Side by side, all U.S. golf courses would be larger than Delaware.” Since golf seems to be a declining sport, not to mention that Delaware is a tiny state, the Antiplanner doesn’t feel threatened by that fact either.
I hope the Bloomberg maps help convey one important fact: the United States is a big place, and has room for lots of different activities. While governments may create artificial shortages of some lands, the reality is there is room for everybody.
