Love it when it snows

Rachel Carson was 100% correct and we owe her a debt of gratitude for Silent Spring...from the New Yorker: “Silent Spring,” a landlubber, is no slouch of a book: it launched the environmental movement; provoked the passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act (both 1972); and led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970." Also, if you don't think overpopulation is an issue you might need to get out more.

• "Also, if you don't think overpopulation is an issue you might need to get out more."

Wolfie ... That's exactly how I feel when I'm traveling from my house to LAX and fighting the bumper to bumper traffic down the 405 freeway. It is a 50-mile trip that takes at least three hours. As I sit in the traffic, I wonder ... from where in hell do all of these people come from? And where are they all going? When I drive from my house to Las Vegas, not so much.

The point is, everyone wants to live on that narrow strip known as the California Coast Line that extends from San Diego to San Francisco. Driving North through the Mojave Desert, there is wide open spaces between Bakersfield to Utah. And beyond that is Middle America's wide-open spaces. 

Still plenty of room for expansion. 

By the way, as a person who grew up in the Los Angeles area in the 1950s, I can tell you that in comparison to then, the air here is as pure as snow. 

Frank

The reason that air is now as " pure as snow" is someone began a sentence with ....The government should... so we got the clean air act and you can thank unfettered  capitalism for that 1950's miasma of breathable particulates. America's wide open spaces are filled with opioid addicts now with no jobs or hope yeah what we need is more people. People go where they can find work and it isn't in the Mojave desert or a wheat field in Nebraska. 

I agree with Oregonpappa that there's plenty of open space to still build out.  The question is whether we should?  There's 7.8 billion humans on the planet and do they all deserve multiple houses and highways to drive between them?  Do you need an Environmental Impact Study to figure that out?

Yes the space is there and the right question is should we? Not only is it an environmental question but an economic one, who will live there? Young people today want different amenities than my generation a big house and a nice green lawn and a $25k stereo system isn't what they are looking for so they are flocking to urban areas that meet their desires. In my city there is an urban renaissance and it's the younger generations you find congregating in these areas.