How Progress Ate America.

Sprawl is as American as Henry Ford. The automobile gave us the means to spread out. Our moves in search of the good life, a tradition dating from the Pilgrims and Daniel Boone, gave us the desire.

It is important to remember that today's obnoxious sprawl was yesterday's idealistic solution. Eighty years ago, American cities were crowded and polluted, their grid-like streets choked with traffic. The progressive answer - super-highways and suburbs - promised to spread Americans out and combine the best of country and city.

Suburbanization became a victim of its own success, gulping property like a whale. The once-sleepy community of Phoenix has grown to the size of Delaware, consuming land at the rate of 1.2 acres per hour. Greater Los Angeles has sprawled to the size of Connecticut. Land in suburban Chicago is developing 11 times faster than the region's population is growing.

Our new freedom gave us freeways clogged with commuters and new neighborhoods that lacked commercial heart and cultural soul. The automobile proved as isolating as it was convenient. Many suburban office parks now use more space for parking than for offices.

By comparison, European cities, and even their suburbs, have three to four times the population density of their American counterparts, in part because of strict urban growth boundaries. In some German states, any developer consuming a hectare of forest must replant its equivalent elsewhere.

In the U.S., instead of moving Americans back into the forest, sprawl has made the forest recede. That trend is illustrated by two recent AMERICAN FORESTS examinations of satellite data. Urban forest center vice president Gary Moll found that since 1973, urban heavy tree cover in the Baltimore-Washington corridor has declined 32 percent, a loss of 265,000 acres. Similarly, suburban Virginia's Fairfax County has lost 40 percent of these forests in the same period.

In the urban growth area around Seattle in Puget Sound, the decline is more than 50 percent - a loss of 107,000 heavily forested acres. Sprawl combined with logging has made winter flooding a chronic regional problem.

Agriculture is receding too. America loses 45.7 acres of prime farmland to urban and suburban growth every hour, according to the American Farmland Trust. The nation's richest farming area, California's Central Valley, saw urbanized acreage more than triple from 1981 to 1992. If the trend continues, the valley will be paved over in 50 years.

Those who would stop growth have run up against a powerful coalition of economic interests and grim demographic reality: The U.S. population has more than doubled since World War II; suburbanites now outnumber urbanites. Developers attract buyers by moving outward to cheap land, saddling consumers with the hidden costs of new roads, utilities, schools, and cars.

As a result, motor vehicle miles driven doubled just between 1970 and 1990 as commutes lengthened, women joined the work force, and children were no longer in walking distance of activities.

"I've been driving from one meeting about sprawl to the other for the last 15 years and the only thing that's changed is that now it takes a lot longer to get there," Rob Melnick of Arizona State University wryly told the The New York Times.

Faced with this reality, no-growth pleas have given way in the 1990s to "smart growth," buzz-phrase being repeated from Washington, DC, to Washington state. The idea is not to stop growth but to direct it, corral it, and make it pay for itself. Some approaches:

* In 1976, Boulder, Colorado, a university city of about 100,000, limited new housing units to 2 percent a year of the existing stock. It contained itself in purchased greenbelts and decided not to extend utilities to the nearby Rocky Mountain foothills. In 1995, the building cap was lowered to 1 percent.

The result has been both hailed and condemned. No cap was put on job growth, meaning the number of jobs in Boulder has increased almost three times as fast as housing. This has resulted in satellite suburbs of commuters outside the city's own growth boundaries. An attempt to cap office space was dropped as unworkable, and Boulder's retail businesses have faced stiff competition from newer malls down the road. Yet the city has remained healthy and livable. The lesson: Growth can be managed, but a city acting in isolation can spin off unexpected consequences on the land around it.

* In 1973, Oregon adopted the nation's first and still most-sweeping statewide growth management legislation. To preserve 16 million acres of farmland and 9 million acres of private forest land, state government put growth boundaries around all 241 of its cities, a law that has survived several voter attempts to repeal it.

"Unlimited and unregulated growth leads inexorably to a lowered quality of life," Governor Tom McCall said in launching the program in 1973.

The need was plain: The agrarian Eden that is Willamette Valley was threatened by Portland's growth. Success is visible; by drawing a line in the dirt, Oregon's sprawl seems more contained than neighbors Washington or California. The state boasts that its tough rules allow permits to be processed faster, attract new business precisely because they preserve the environment, and still provide enough land for development.

Critics counter that land prices within the Portland area have tripled, hobby farms and golf courses continue to eat into real agriculture, and population has leapfrogged urban boundaries by spilling into smaller cities. The lesson here: The Big Brother approach can work, but loopholes remain and the plan remains hotly controversial even in environment-conscious Oregon.

At least 10 states have adopted modified versions of Oregon's plan, usually providing more local control to dampen political opposition. Another 20 have turned solely from zoning protection to purchasing development rights. Pennsylvania, for example, has preserved about 125,000 acres by spending $240 million - almost $2,000 an acre - raised from cigarette taxes and state bonds.

* After watching Oregon's experiment for two decades, neighboring Washington, which has more than twice the population, passed its own statewide Growth Management Act but left much of the decisionmaking to individual counties. King County, which includes Seattle, has adopted a mix of strategies to manage a population explosion that has created some of the worst traffic in the U.S.

Puget Sound to the west and the Cascade mountains to the east afford the county some natural restraints. Ice Age glaciers have left a series of north-south lakes, valleys, and ridges between sea and range, a geography the county has tried to use to its advantage.

Some valley farmland has been purchased to provide greenbelts, while development has been allowed to leapfrog out to adjacent forested ridges. Massive new planned developments have more density, more commercial space, and more parkland than earlier sprawl. Zoning in older neighborhoods from Seattle outward is being modified to encourage multifamily dwellings, concentrating growth in existing cities.

The program has divided environmentalists, who see the colonization of forested ridges as either the best of a bad situation or a surrender to sprawl.

Others complain the rescue is too late. Even as the plan is implemented, the state legislature has approved the biggest road-building program in its history to catch up with earlier ill-planned sprawl. The lesson: Waiting for public sentiment to demand "smart growth" means waiting until growth problems reach crisis levels.

* In the early 1990s, Washington, DC, lost 45,000 jobs while surrounding Virginia and Maryland suburbs gained 174,000. Over the past five years, as the city of Baltimore lost more than 50,000 residents, its suburbs grew by 67 percent; Maryland's Washington suburbs grew by 72 percent.

The result showcases some of the best and worst of modern development. Some of the country's most ambitious planning for parks and greenbelts occurs around the nation's capital. In its orbit are planned communities such as Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, both praised for layout and criticized for distance from jobs, commerce, and urban life. The capital has also given rise to unplanned "edge cities" on its beltway, soaring housing costs, and snarled traffic.

With Baltimore declining and farms and forests being gobbled, Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and the state legislature two years ago passed a Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Act.

Included is $140 million over five years to buy farm and forest land, for state cleanup of contaminated industrial sites so newer industries can use land already serviced by roads and utilities, grants for those who purchase a home near their work, redirection of money to rehabilitate older schools, and tax credits to reuse historic structures. The lesson: Its relative low cost combined with a lack of statewide planning controls can make "smart growth" palatable even in older states.

Can smart growth succeed, or is it an oxymoron? In the 20th century, explosive increases in land consumption have accompanied wrenching technological changes: the automobile, the airplane, electricity, the telephone, television, and the Internet. America is a nation of movers seeking the best combination of rural peace and urban excitement that their job, budget, and dreams allow. We vote with our feet, and many have said sprawl is an acceptable price to pay for affordable housing or good schools.

At the dawn of the 21st century, however, the price of sprawl has steepened. Traffic jams, rising taxes, and the loss of a sense of place make the 1950s dream of Pleasantville seem naive. At the same time, mass transit is making a comeback, telecommuting is on the rise, developers are consciously trying to recreate the feel of old neighborhoods, and ordinary citizens are recognizing the psychological and spiritual value of including trees, meadows, and healthy rivers in urban and suburban areas.

Growth brings not just problems, but the opportunity to "do-over" and learn from past mistakes. It used to be the promised land was that subdivision over the next hill. Now it is our own neighborhoods, with our own fragmented landscapes, that in some cases are being recognized as the true Eden: rehabilitated brick by brick, and tree by tree.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Bill Dietrich last wrote for American Forests about environmentally savvy mayors.