This title seems in contradiction with the fact that the world population has doubled in the last thirty years from 3 billion to 6 billion. It is not the number of people, but the space they are leaving on. Due to the accelerating speed of the growing number of people are going to live in cities leaving the rural areas. This has lead that the Earth has become an emptier place. Look for yourself in your countryside in the area where you live. Especially older people can compare the emptiness of the countryside in comparison with let say forty years ago. Even in the most crowded places on earth the west and middle part of the Netherlands. You will be astonished to encounter a number of places away from the cities and highways you can find spots where you will see nobody and thinking you are alone on this planet (except for the condensation stripes of the airplanes in the sky). When flying over this planet, it is remarkable how empty looks this earth. All of a sudden rises up huge skyscrapers only confined to a small area in comparison with the countryside. Everybody wants to go to places where other people are to find their luck and better life. This world trend will finally –instead of giving a better life - will kill us all.

In the beginning of this century only 10% of the world population were living in urban settlements. At the end of this century this will be than 50 %.

In 2025 two third of the world population will live in towns and cities.

Especially in the underdeveloped countries the percentage of people living in urban areas is at the present the greatest and will in the future be still more in comparison with the developed countries.

Africa : 35% -- 54%

Asia : 34% -- 55%

Latin Amer: 74% -- 85%

North.Amer : 76% -- 85%

Europe  : 73% -- 83%

Oceania  : 70% -- 75%

Cities would become a pool of tension with growing number of poor people living next to a very rich elite that are manipulating laws and systems to their benefit.

The impact of this urbanization trend on our environment will be immense.

• Loss of cropland, extraction and depletion of natural resource. Growing urban areas require more resources that the local area can supply.
• The production and disposal of wastes to the environment.
• It will alter the nature of the atmosphere. Rising of temperature creating urban heat islands strongly influencing the climate, more rain
• Air pollution. More than 1 billion reside in cities with extremely poor air quality. 40% of the total North American carbon dioxide emissions originated from only 50 urban areas.
• Changing of surface properties. Roads, parking lots and building do not absorb precipitation increasing runoff and severe flooding
• Increasing demand on water resources, far more than in rural areas.
• Pollution of both surface and groundwater
• Urban land conversion results in complete alteration in the physical and biotic character of the Earth land’ surface.
• Destruction of coastal area the home natural homeland for wetland. Swamps, tidal marches, tidal flats and mangroves forest. Development of these areas eliminated their contribution to environment and can lead to coastal erosion
• Urban development of hill slopes can lead to erosion and landslide especially when vegetation is removed
• It has impacts on soil layer. Cement asphalt or buildings now cover the soil. Emission from vehicles can contaminate soils with cadmium, lead nickel, oil and grease. Salt applied in the winter to reduce ice and snow on roads can reduce the fertility of urban soils.
• Loss of habitat can cause some native species to become endangered or extinct

It is also of interest to pay attention to the urbanization in the western world. We have taken as an example one of the most important places for the dominance of the western world: the area in and around Washington DC. The residence of the President of America, the White House, the Pentagon and a great number of institution controlling or monitoring world’s environment and natural resources (American Petroleum Institute, United States Geological Survey, World Resources Institute, National Institute for environment etc).

An article of the Biological Resources Division of the United States Geological Survey (1996) shows images the urbanization of the Baltimore-Washington area over the last 200 years (from 1792 to 1992).

Figure 1 Population numbers of this area:1792: 600.000; 1900: 2.000.000; 1953: 4.000.000; 1972: 6.000.000; 1992: 8.000.000

The urbanization of the Baltimore-Washington area in 200 years from 1792 to 1992.

The study covers a 2–degree latitude by 2-degree longitude area that includes the District of Columbia, much of Maryland, the northern provinces of Virginia and parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Figure 2: urbanization in 1792

After a century and a half of colonial settlement, a distinguishable road and urban pattern has evolved. The region population was 600.000

Figure 3: urbanization in 1850

Baltimore is firmly established as the center of expanding urban and industrial region. One million people are distributed throughout the region. Due to heavy siltation, resulting from deforestation and overuse of agricultural fields, many colonial-era ports have become inaccessible to ocean-going ships.(Imagine already at that time we were destroying nature).

Figure 4: urbanization in 1900.

At the turn of the century, there is an expansion of market tows and sings of suburbs beginning to develop. The Baltimore-Washington is beginning to form as streetcar lines reach out to the northeast from Washington into Maryland. There are two million people in this region.

Figure 5: urbanization in 1953

Since the turn of the century, the Baltimore-Washington region experiences significant infilling of suburban areas adjacent to the central cities and additional growth into rural areas made possible wit the advent of the automobile and improved road systems. Over four million people reside now in the region. In the thirties and forties there is a growth of the Federal government in the Washington.

Figure 6: urbanization in 1992

Sparked by rampant growth during the 1980s and continuing flight not only from the central cities but from the older inner suburbs as well, urban sprawl has transformed the Baltimore-Washington area. More than eight million people no reside in the area shown at an overall density of 466 persons per square mile; actual densities within the built-up areas are as well over 1000 persons per square mile. The term suburban now is becoming a misnomer as towns that were once bedroom commodities located at the fringe have developed into urban centers with their own commuter-sheds and economic hinterlands. (Recently an American psychologist told on TV that people living in these urban centers execute the recent killings in the US).

The density of the population of the city of Washington is about 1000 persons per square mile. Compare this figure with the density of the whole US with only 75 persons per square mile.

The Unites States also becomes an emptier place and people are crowding more and more the urban areas. The report ends with mentioning the main problems: increasing permeable surfaces, unprecedented deforestation, increasing air and water pollution, tropospheric ozone warnings, loss of more than 50% of wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay, traffic congestion, rising crime rates and an overall reduction of the quality of life. (All data LUHNA, Report Baltimore-Washington Urbanization of the Biological Resources Division, USGS, 1998, principal investigator T.W.Foresman).

But what to do about these problems is not mentioned in this report.

Unfortunately we will see no trend in the reversed direction: from urban rural areas.

As a Maryland farmer said once:

Very typically for cities in the United States is the urban sprawl. Huge areas outside the urban cities great surfaces are used to build houses on. Rees and Roseland pointing out "that this urban sprawl is the legacy of abundant fossil fuel and perceived right to unrestricted use of the private car, whatever the social costs and externalities. Sprawling suburbs are arguably the most economically, environmentally and socially costly pattern of residential development humans have ever devised". Households in these suburbs require 200.000 more miles of auto commuting and three million more gallon of water per day. Rees and Roseland suggesting to stop the urban sprawl to setting limits on physical expansion and favoring alternatives for the automobile. Limiting automobile access to inner cities, levying regional carbon dioxide taxes, restricting parking availability and using traffic calming street designs. Building bicycle parking garages and policies that slow down car traffic to improve conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.

These solutions seems to us quite unrealistic.

William Rees says in his article: Ecological footprints of the future in People & the planet.
"Cities may be the engines of economic growth and the brightest stars in the constellation of human achievement. However, they also resemble entropic black holes sweeping up the output of whole regions of the ecosphere vastly larger than themselves."

".. no city or urban region can be sustainable on its own. A city’s population uses the productive output of a land area nearly 180 times larger that it’s political area to maintain its consumer lifestyle".

Wackernagel and Rees have made a study of the ecological footprint of 52 % nations covering 80% of the total world population. Their definition of ecological footprint: the corresponding area of productive land and aquatic ecosystems required to produce the resources used and to assimilate the wastes produce by a defined population at a specified material standard of living, where ever on Earth that land may be located. The biologically productive land is however not all available to human use as this area should give room to the 30 million fellow species with whom humanity shares this earth. At least12 % of the ecological capacity, representing all ecosystem types, should be preserved for biodiversity protection

The world population would be sustainable when every person uses 2 hectare of biologically productive space (this assumes 12 percent for other species). The countries who are living below this critical figure: Bangladesh (0.6 ha/cap), China (1.5), Egypt (1.5), Ethiopia (0.7), India (1.0), Indonesia (1.4), Nigeria (1.0), Pakistan (1.0). Peru (1.7 ha/cap) and the Philippines (1.7). One country has the sustainable eco-footprint: Thailand (2.0ha/cap). All other countries use more than their available space can produce. What to think of the topper who is importing goods from the other countries: United States (10.9 ha/cap). (Data Wackernagel 22 June 1999)

They use also another parameter to show the overuse by 42 countries. That is the measure of the ecological deficit. The deficit represents a country’s ecological load compared to the resource capacity within its borders and the level of appropriation from other regions that is required to offset the deficit. The ecological deficit induced by local consumption above locally available ecological production represent country’s overshoot and the beginning of self-destructive growth. A positive number means that consumption exceeds local supply, while a negative number reveals that there is remaining capacity. This remaining capacity is uses for the production of export goods, rather then leaving it as a principle in reserve. It is an indication of potential vulnerability. The people on this earth needs a ecological productive space of 2.35 hectare, but only as we have seen before that only 2 hectare is available on earth, this is overshoot of 36%. Very striking is the bare fact that in 1992 this was figure was 25% and shows the fast expansion in the end of this century. (M.Wackernagel Ecological footprints of nations, http://www.edg.net.mx/~mathiswa)

In an article on our homepage we cite Rees (page 15) in saying that the Netherlands depends on the ecological productivity of an area almost 15 times larger then the entire country. The Netherlands has an ecological deficit of 4.7.ha/cap. This multiplied by the 16 million peoples comes to a staggering amount of 7.52 million hectares, nearly 22 times the size of the Netherlands. Thereby is not taken in account that most people live on a relative smaller part in the west of the Netherlands (called the Randstad). The data would be even more disturbing.

Quite a number of people are realizing all these problems: as overshooting, depletion, urbanization trends etc. We think that these solutions are highly unrealistic. They are not taken in account two fundamental laws: the second law of thermodynamics and the law of exponential growth.

Rick Reese wrote us the following mind opener:

"Imagine if there had been ten times more oil, gas, and coal -- the population explosion would continue, the destruction of ecosystems and species would continue, and the result at the end of the game would be a complete horror"..

Indeed it would be better if our natural resources were depleted, and that we have to leave our cars in the middle of the road and starting to cultivate carrots and other renewable resources. It maybe not too late for the present world population to cope with this situation. The more we develop newer technologies the later the big bang will arrive but the shock will be exponentially be more catastrophically.

The answer is YES, according a report of J.Morrison and B. Hoffman : The urbanization of insurgency: The Potential Challenge to U.S.Army Operations (Rand 1994) The report was prepared as a project titles "Military Operation Other than War (MOOTW). "The likelihood of urban insurgency – irregular (i.e., guerilla or terrorism) warfare in cities – is increasing as the dual demographic trends of rapid population growth and urbanization continue to change the face of the developing world. Whereas cities once provided a relatively better standard of living for people migrating from the countryside, they are now overcrowded and overburdened. Generations are growing up the slumps that surround the capital cities of many of world’s developing cities and infrastructure are providing incapable of serving the massive urban population. And the situation is worse. Moreover, insurgents are entering this ripe environments

This report was written already 5 years ago. At the present we can see clearly how right they were in their prediction. As we have seen the trend of urbanization is a force as unstoppable as floodwater.