1980 census shows just over 40M in the west:

https://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1981-02.pdf

page 6

2019 figures show nearly 80M in the west:

https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr...

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

The new construction methods, building types, and communal land management strategies that are preferred by implants have an outsized effect on the environment. Compare the new construction in Vail to the older buildings, which can still be seen in smaller towns.

I would prefer building preferences to become more harmonious with the natural environment instead of less.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there is a politically tenable solution since everyone likes their own personal vehicles, and for that you need a driveway or garage, and for that you need space and roads, and that does not scale well with population increase.

What you call development in step 1...

> narcissist and selfish

What you call development in step 2. They're both development and urbanization.

> only there as a hindrance to you.

This seems like a projection. You don't seem to consider "them" as having any right to even exist. Indeed, in the next sentence you compare migrating within the US to migrating outside of it, making the xenophobia even more clear.

No, turning a wilderness into viable farmland is not urbanization. There's putting in the time and work to make what you want from scratch, and then there's seeing something nice that someone else made and screaming "mine!"

compare migrating within the US to migrating outside of it, making the xenophobia even more clear.

Putting a false label on something doesn't make the thing become what you label it. The US is not meant to be an open season playground for the rich and the careless.

You don't seem to consider "them" as having any right to even exist.

This sentence seems to perfectly describe the perspective of those who see a small town and want to appropriate it and make it theirs. As someone who has lived in everything from a hometown of a few thousand up to San Francisco, and a variety of suburbs and mid-tier cities in between, it's pretty tiring to see people treating the world like their own giant Disneyland, and all the people who live in it like Castmembers on display for their amusement.

Striving to minimize disruption and maximize cohesion when moving into a new town or building a new development would make for a much better world than the conquistador-style takeover that actually happens in a lot of places.

I'm 90% with you, but we need to be clear that this is not true for the way in which much of the West was settled. It was often not wilderness, but instead land watched over by Native American communities who practiced varying forms of regenerative agriculture, who had only recently been wiped out by disease or war, if they weren't still there. It was settled not by experts looking to "tame the wilderness", but largely by immigrants who were hurried, by job scarcity and discrimination, out of the East Coast and into the interior. They were extremely lucky that the land had essentially been prepared for their monocultures by generations of NA stewardship - people the government was more than happy to enable the displacement and genocide of. (And the Dust Bowl STILL happened.)

That said, after several generations of like stewardship and occupation, I favor those residents and their right to remain over new residents looking to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. What we absolutely need is more respect for the positive aspects of long-lived communities so that we don't trample and dismantle them so casually. It may not be wholly just that the world isn't one's oyster, but as a black person who has to deal with unfortunate and continued existence of sundown towns, the reality that some places are off-limits until the locals have fixed their own issues is one that should be respected. If the lock isn't level you're just going to open the floodgates of trouble.