A new report from NumbersUSA has revealed that 17,800 square miles of open space in the U.S. was claimed by development between 2002 and 2017. That area is about as large as Connecticut and Maryland put together. “The rate of sprawl in this century has slowed down fairly substantially from what it was in the ‘70s through the 1990s. That’s the good news, and it’s for a variety of reasons, some of which are not so good—the 2008 meltdown, for example,” said Leon Kolankiewicz, scientific director for NumbersUSA and the lead author of “From Sea to Sprawling Sea,” in an interview with The Epoch Times. “The bad news, if I could put it that way, is that population growth represents an ever-larger share of the forces driving that urban sprawl.” Population growth accounted for 60 percent of sprawl over the larger 30-year period between 1982 and 2017. Yet, during the …