q. i. f?

While it’s great to preserve pristine, historic and environmentally valuable land whenever possible, the effort is a drop in the bucket compared with the amount of land lost to inefficient, unsustainable and short-sighted development each day. Growth can be accommodated; sprawl cannot.
   Mr. O’Malley knows the statistics all too well (he repeated many of them at his GreenPrint unveiling). Since 1990, Maryland’s population has grown by 8 percent, but the amount of impermeable surface has increased by more than 40 percent.

The Sun, from a Dec. 7 editorial response to the news reported in the article I link to below.