....is John Hickenlooper. We can't keep growing and, worse yet, using growth as the metric by which we measure success.

One can try to manage the impacts of growth through planning and zoning. The problem though can quickly become economic in nature. Since no one can actually stop people from showing up, if infrastructure isn't built to accommodate them, it can become overwhelmed, and/or very expensive. As someone else said, one important thing to work with growth intelligently is to not allow growth to become a metric of success in and of itself. Enough housing needs to be built, but not so much as to drive down the price of existing housing, and worse, creating "blighted" areas or slums. It needs to be built with issues like schools and public transportation in mind as well. And of course, one must pay close attention to the environmental impacts and impacts on things like the water supply.

Even on a progressive website like DU, talking about human population & the need to control our own numbers is not a popular topic. At the turn of the century I bought a bumper sticker that read, "SIX BILLION MIRACLES IS ENOUGH." We are at 7.7 in less than 20 years. Climate change is going to force more people to share less space.

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi was an interesting fictional account of the future of the southwestern states that depend on the Colorado River.