Animals are coming out of their habitat and making homes in human neighborhoods. For example, in Georgia, alligators are swimming in neighbourhood pools. In Big Pine Key, deer are eating flowerbeds. In Savanna, an alligator crossed down the sidewalk! In parts of New Jersey, black bears are having too much comfort. Of course, the cases are not only these. So, as you can see, animals are invading human’s living areas.
The reason that animals come to human’s neighborhoods is urban sprawl. It means that humans are expanding their living places and their communities, but they invade wildlife areas. Each year, about two million acres of open space are turned into housing, roads, and buildings. Human’s life has become more convenient and comfortable, but wild animals are becoming homeless. So, animals could only go to the human’s communities to live.
Urban sprawl upsets the plants and animals that live in an area. They also lose some of the land and water they need to survive. They have to leave their habitat to the human’s neighborhoods in order to find food and water to survive. For example, the bears in New Jersey resort to roaming through neighborhoods for tasty treats. Urban sprawl causes plants and animals to become endangered, or even extinct.
How can we prevent urban sprawl? Well, we can solve it by changing the way we build new communities. Firstly, in the Florida Everglades, builders are making special bridges and tunnels so that animals can cross roads safely. Secondly, making nature-friendly building projects, like creating a natural reserve to protect wild animals. Thirdly, we need to set strict building permit limits to control the number of people moving to suburbs.
Urban sprawl is a big problem. It affects animal’s lives. We need to protect animals in order to have no special species that are extinct.We are killing down animal’s habitats, but we don’t know we are also killing some precious species. If their habitats are getting smaller and smaller, then the animal population will decrease. Then, the animals will come to our place to live, and they will have our habitat as theirs. If we don’t want that to happen, protect animal’s habitats and reduce urban sprawl.
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