The Land Use Of America #1

As climate change is becoming a serious problem everyday, we have to start looking at how we are using our land to see if that is a factor of our problem. I read an article from Bloomberg about how America uses their land  in which I will provide the link at the bottom. The first thing that they bring up is how our economy is the largest and grew at a rate of 4.1% and how the employment rate is at the lowest it been since the last half century. 

The more I read, I realized that our land use is probably the biggest factor in climate change because we are beginning to average a growth of 1 million urban area acres a year which is  equivalent to adding a big city such as Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix combined. I'm from a city in Texas down the street from the Houston Area and I haven't seen all of Houston so I could barely imagine adding Los Angeles and Phoenix in the picture because that's a crap ton of land that increases carbon dioxide which all the cars  driving in and out and not enough plants to consume it all.

So with all the building of the Urban area, I bet your wondering how much land is for agriculture? Well I was heartbroken to see that only fifth of the country is for agricultural which basically means we have more parking lot space than fields to actually grow our plants and raise our animals. The Agriculture land is about equivalent to the size of Indiana, Illinois, and half of Iowa but more than a third of the entire corn crop is devoted to ethanol production. Ethanol is an additive we put in our gasoline, so imagine how many vehicles gas up on the daily across the U.S. With us not having a lot of land to produce food, we are forced to import them from neighboring countries such as Mexico and Canada.

Fun Fact: Americans imported 15% of their food and beverage products in 2016!

LINK:   https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
 Ky’on Bass