If you're like most of us, you don't think much about development -- until ...

Until bulldozers rumble in to uproot the trees next door, and then mud from the clear-cut lot slides into your neighborhood creek. Until a mobile village sprouts at your kid's school. Until a trip to the store that once took 10 minutes now takes 30 because of traffic.

Then you gripe about City Council. Why do the politicians keep approving those subdivisions?

Here's the dirty little secret most people don't get: Those subdivisions don't need Charlotte City Council's approval. They could get built if the whole council took a two-year, round-the-world cruise. The growth is on auto-pilot.

Look around. Every undeveloped lot, every spot of woods, every cow pasture in Charlotte and unincorporated Mecklenburg County is already zoned for three-houses-per-acre subdivisions -- R-3 -- unless it's zoned for even more development. No vote needed unless someone wants a higher zoning.

The land's fate was sealed years ago, in an era when politicians here believed all growth was good and that all growth paid for itself through higher tax revenues. Protect farms? Whatever for? Trees? We have enough. Parks? Can't spend money on them or we'd have to raise taxes.

In planning decisions dating to the 1960s, the City Council and Mecklenburg County commissioners zoned all undeveloped land for suburban-style development. Unlike Davidson and Huntersville, in Charlotte and unincorporated Mecklenburg County no zoning categories exist for land conservation or farmland protection.

A 1992 rewrite of the city-county zoning ordinance jettisoned the last of the old rural -- RU -- zoning for unincorporated Mecklenburg. But even RU zoning allowed roughly two houses an acre, an anti-rural recipe virtually guaranteeing sprawl and farmland loss.

So if you have enough land, you can breeze down to the planning department and, if you meet all subdivision rules, build hundreds of houses, three per acre, clogging schools and streets and straining city services. No permission needed from elected officials.

To be fair, there are some reasons to set up zoning this way: Better for the tax base to have growth inside Mecklenburg, planners would say. When you set aside undeveloped land in a growing area, the building that might have gone there just goes farther out. Further, it would be unconstitutional to remove all development rights from someone's property, and most attempts at reducing zoning ignite firestorms of protest.

But in a city and county staggering from growth -- where school building lags by decades, parks are inadequate, street pavement is crumbling and we need more police -- how smart is it to put so much growth on auto-pilot?

After I wrote about bridges July 17, proposing that we in Charlotte come up with a project to design and build beautiful bridges in the greenways, I've noticed news about bridges elsewhere.

Chicago's new Millennium Park, just opened with a bandshell designed by architect Frank Gehry, includes a pedestrian bridge. The Wall Street Journal's Joel Henning writes:

"Adjacent to his music pavilion is Mr. Gehry's sinuous pedestrian bridge over Columbus Drive linking Millennium and Grant parks that doubles as a traffic noise barrier. This, even more than the flamboyant, delightful bouquet of steel panels that makes up the music pavilion, is the real show-stopper here. The stainless steel bridge is elegant and graceful when viewed from the skyscrapers to the west, while from its wooden walkway, strollers get the unexpected pleasure of seeing Mr. Gehry's billowing pavilion design from treetop height."

The park was able to hire major architects and artists because a CEO, Sara Lee's John Bryan, adopted the project and rounded up private donations worth millions.

Maybe Charlotte's corporations could take up a similar challenge here.