When cities grow and spread out into surrounding areas, they often replace forests, wetlands, and farmland with roads, houses, and parking lots. This is called urban sprawl, and it causes serious harm to the environment. Animals lose the places they live, travel, and raise their young. Plants and insects that depend on those natural spaces disappear too. According to a report from Nature World News, things like bees and butterflies are especially affected, and since those animals help grow the food we eat, it becomes a problem for people too, not just wildlife.

A big reason this keeps happening is the housing crisis. Houses in cities have gotten very expensive, so builders look for cheaper land further out, which usually means building on top of nature. Smart Growth America found that the Atlanta area lost almost 800 square miles of natural land since 1985, and even cities that are shrinking in population, like Pittsburgh, still lost over 200 square miles of green space to development. The solution here, according to researchers, is to build more homes inside cities where buildings and roads already exist, instead of constantly expanding outward and eating up more land.

To learn more about urban sprawl and environmental degradation, read more from my published posts!