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Mel: I did not say "sprawl is the greatest threat to biodiversity. . .

You're right. What you said was, to paraphrase, human expansion=wiped out
competative species=ultimate loss of world livability.

." I did say, relative to the perceived deer population "explosion",
it is indicative of the consequences of human/urban development. No
great leap to conclusions here.

That is provided you are comfortable with making conclusions based on
limited perception. The keyword here is perceived. It's not like deer are
running rampant through the streets of the major metropolitan areas of our
nation. What is actually happening is more and more people are moving to
and expanding the suburbanized areas thus increasing the likelyhood of
crossing the paths with wildlife. However, like I previously stated...
"urbanized" areas only accounts for a little over 6 percent of the total
area of land. Before we can continue we must come to an agreement on the
definition of "urbanize".

Main Entry: ur·ban·ize
Pronunciation: '&r-b&-"nIz
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -ized; -iz·ing
1 : to cause to take on urban characteristics urbanized areas

Main Entry: ur·ban
Pronunciation: '&r-b&n
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin urbanus, from urbs city
: of, relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city

For that matter, to take up your well-enumerated points, our industrial
farming is hardly a boon to biodiversity. Given that so many more
acres of land are devoted to this kind of urbanized development (and
modern industial agriculture is not a "rural" enterprise in anything
other than location) I would say your logic only reinforces my
argument.

Once again, refer to above definition. Farmer Bob living in an 1800 sq ft
house sitting on 2000 acres hardly constitutes a city. As far as your
arguement goes, you maintain that human/urban developement has created an
imbalance resulting in an "explosion" in the deer population. I disagree.
I'm free to do so chiefly due to the fact this is all suppostion in the
first place. I maintain that increased occupancy in once rural areas has
simply increased the likelyhood of deer/human encounters. I'll even conceed
that a very very small temporary imbalance may be occurring but will
eventually correct itself.... as it always has.

The point of my previous post was to illustrate these facts- 3% urban
(city) + 3.1% rural residential = 6.1% That leaves 93.9% of total land area
that isn't considered developed (i.e. built upon~happy Fred?) or 1.76
billion acres of land of which deer and other wildlife COMMONLY reside. You
either maintain that a 6.1% developement over the course of 200-300 years
has caused an explosion that the other 93.9% cannot contain or you must
admit that it's a limited perspective thus admitting to an inability to "see
the big picture".