One Million More Local Residents

Baltimore-Washington area population growth 1792-2100

Today's Washington Post notes that Washington, D.C. is now among eight metropolitan areas with immigrant populations of 1 million or more. The full litany of cities includes New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Washington and Dallas.

There are limits to all good things, and that is true for population growth, wherever it comes from.

Today, the single greatest threat to hunting in the United States is population growth and its attendant sprawl.

As large farms are cut up and atomized into suburbia and exurbia (the rural "farmettes" beyond the suburbs), more and more Americans are having to drive farther and farther to gain free hunting permissions.

The is not a new topic for me. I have written a little about the demographic growth in the greater Washington-Baltimore area in the past, noting that fox hunting in America started in this area, but that the land is quickly being gut-shot by too rapid population growth. Forest has fallen to farm, and farm has fallen to freeway until at last it has become hard to dig very far from the roar of a road.

The graph below shows where we have been -- and where we are growing due to a combination of unrestrained immigration and one of the highest fertility rates in the industrialized world.

Post-1970 immigration now accounts for about 98 percent of all U.S. population growth.

This a repost from the blog circa August 2006.
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