I’ve lived on my 1-acre wooded lot in Landenberg, Pa., for one year, in a house that was built in 1954. The surrounding area has already changed. I’m 31 years old and I hear myself saying, “Back in my day, that development was nothing but trees.” Just like my dad talks about how he used to ride horses along a road that’s now called Kirkwood Highway in Delaware, where you can get a taco, a lube job, a massage and a new pair of shoes all at one intersection. Every intersection.

Urban sprawl. It’s coming to a town near you (if it hasn’t already). Last Halloween I dressed as Urban Sprawl. Even among the goblins, ghouls, ghosts and gremlins, I was the nastiest, scariest creature of them all.

For the first layer of my costume, I put on “farm” clothes: boots, jeans, a flannel shirt. This was meant to depict the land as it was before strip malls and housing developments took over. Then I tucked the green and silver STREET ROAD street sign I stole back in high school in my belt. In my left pocket I placed a bag from the Gap. On my right thigh I hung a Coke can. Down on my right knee I pinned a Sunoco gas rebate banner. Above my left knee I fastened a Kentucky Fried Chicken sign. I hung a pair of binoculars around my neck (developers are always looking for new sites). And then I hid behind a U.S. road atlas, because sprawl is all over this country.

My outfit didn’t cost a cent, and it made a statement about a problem I find even more frightening than terrorism. Terrorism is beyond our control, which is why it doesn’t scare me. Well, it scares me the way getting hit by lightning does; if it happens to you, it happens to you. As an average citizen, you can’t go to the local township meeting and make decisions on how to deal with terrorism. We can control urban sprawl, but we choose not to; that is what is so frustrating.

In recent years I’ve seen the grand meadows near Fair Hill, Md., turned into the Grand Meadows housing development. Deer Run used to be where the deer ran; now it’s where they’re run over by passing SUVs. Country Stream was where the fish swam; now it’s the name of a strip of houses that has damaged that very stream.

Think about your lifetime and the changes that have occurred in the environment. When does it stop? Do we just develop until there is nothing else to develop? Cut down all the trees, pave all the fields, kill all the animals?

I think of a quote from “Indian Summer,” a book written by Bruce and Edie Smart, an older couple who have fought sprawl their whole lives: “The ‘American Century’ and the community we enjoy are transitory moments in the sweep of history, subject to all sorts of pressures that will change them, for good or ill, depending in part on the wisdom of citizens and their governments.”

I wonder about the wisdom of citizens who don’t mind that the new strip mall destroyed a field because now they can buy a pizza five minutes closer to home. I wonder about the wisdom of officials who won’t adopt zoning laws to protect open spaces.

I went to a township meeting and listened to a builder talk about all the good a 105-house development (which will take over a farm and a house on the historic register) will do for the community. He went on about how the new houses would improve land value and generate commerce. He even uttered the phrase, “Listen, I like you people.” Talk about a line straight out of a bad movie. I wanted to ask him, isn’t it the peace and quiet of areas like mine that draw home buyers in the first place?

I hope it’s better in other places, but I know all too well about the gas station that ran roughshod over a Maryland community, whose residents didn’t want gas pumps in their backyard. And I stood in a Kentucky horse field and saw what a proposed airport runway would do to a streambed.

There are traffic lights where there used to be stop signs, and stop signs where there used to be open roads, and open roads where there used to be grass and trees. It never ends. Urban sprawl is one problem we have the power to solve. It’s time we try.