Frontier abundance mentally licensed wasteful land use until suburbia exhausted it

Evidence

As Train’s testimony suggested, the bill’s supporters often argued that the development of a stewardship ethic required a reckoning with the nation’s frontier heritage. For much of American history, the overwhelming abundance of land had encouraged wasteful and destructive attitudes. We felt free to exploit the earth – to do whatever we pleased with our property – because we were blessed with so much. When we used up the resources of a place, we could always move on, to the West, to start anew on fresh land. But the population explosion and the sprawl of suburbia made “the pioneer ethic” a dangerous anachronism. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 963

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Entrenched property-ownership ideals defeated the effort to treat land as a social resource — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 1077; Suburban sprawl provoked deliberate environmental sabotage decades before Earth First! — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 563; The Use of Land was motivated by disappointment with postwar sprawl — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 959 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The Use of Land was motivated by disappointment with postwar sprawl #responds-to (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 959
• Quitrents failed in America because land was abundant #corroborates (0.85) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 278