Suburban sprawl made American overpopulation fears concrete decades after global warnings

Evidence

The open-space issue also intensified concern about population growth. The threat of global overpopulation had become a part of conservationist discourse in 1948, with the publication of Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival, but the public did not pay much attention until the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1948, Americans had no near-at-hand image of uncontrolled population growth. The problem was most obvious abroad – in Asia, Africa, and South America. But by 1968, when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb became a sensational bestseller, the danger no longer seemed so distant. Though Ehrlich followed Osborn and Vogt in dramatizing the explosion of people in distant lands – he began with a nightmarish description of the crowds on a “stinking hot night” in Delhi, India – Americans had begun to feel the pressure of population growth directly: The sprawling metropolis seemed to threaten much that the nation held dear. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral-panic mechanics in the Islamophobia sources: a distant threat becomes vivid when localized — here via sprawl substituting for third-world imagery. — connects to: Postwar open-space loss converted conservation into a suburban problem and generated new causes — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 546; Suburban sprawl provoked deliberate environmental sabotage decades before Earth First! — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 563; Suburban sprawl pulled established conservation groups toward urban environmental concerns — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 553 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Postwar open-space loss converted conservation into a suburban problem and generated new causes #expands (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 546
• Suburban sprawl provoked deliberate environmental sabotage decades before Earth First! #expands (0.80) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 563
• Suburban sprawl pulled established conservation groups toward urban environmental concerns #expands (0.80) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 553
• Sprawl-generated fear of resource loss drove wetlands regulation in 15 states within a decade #exemplifies (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 662
• Quitrents failed in America because land was abundant #complicates (0.75) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 278