The Small Town Project

Image source: hubbertpeak.com

I recently offered suggestions for what to read if you read only one book or one article on the topics covered here. But some may prefer listening to reading. Well, for you I suggest Albert Bartlett. I quoted Dr. Bartlett a few days ago, and have done so previously. But I’ve not introduced his work here in any detail. Time to fix that.

Al Bartlett, physics professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, and a former national president of the American Association of Physics Teachers, is one of the clearest thinkers on issues of population growth, sustainability, and resource consumption. He makes his points with solid logic, often bolstered by simple arithmetic, such that they’re nearly irrefutable.
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The Zovanyi article I featured in the last post has a brief passage on the language those in “growth management,” and increasingly those in the growth industry itself, use to justify continued needless and harmful growth:

Spokespersons for the growth management movement affix a number of adjectives to growth in order to justify its continuance. They speak of “inevitable, normal, reasonable, proper, realistic, sensible, responsible, and legitimate growth.” They also refer to “balanced growth,” arguing that a balance can be achieved between ongoing growth and environmental protection without compromising either.

Don’t question it; it’s “inevitable.”
These kinds of terms aim to legitimize growth, assuaging our concerns about the harm it does. Most of them are misleading or, when paired with “growth,” become oxymoronic. “Inevitable growth,” for instance, is usually a complete fabrication. It suggests growth simply can’t be stopped. That’s obviously ridiculous. And given the current state of our natural environment, “responsible growth” is an oxymoron.
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If the richness of life on Earth is to be preserved, the growth imperative driving current human behavior must be replaced with the imperative of ecological sustainability.

So says Gabor Zovanyi in a stellar article titled Growth Management Strategies for Stopping Growth in Local Communities.

Just as the Fodor book is a good one to read if you only read one book on the topics I cover here, Zovanyi’s article is a great place to go if you only read one article. Perhaps I’ll find something even better as I continue my own reading, but on recently uncovering this article I was amazed at how well it brings together in one place most of the key issues concerning the problem of growth.

A few more teasers:
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Image source: Fodor & Associates

A post here about Eben Fodor’s book, Better NOT Bigger, is long overdue. If you were to read just one book about the problem of the American growth obsession, and alternatives to it, Better NOT Bigger would be an excellent choice. It’s clear and readable, and provides a nice overview of the issues, including plenty of viable solutions.

Fodor details the problem – the degradation of the natural environment and the the economic woes and loss of quality of life in communities around the country. He examines the way the “growth machine” works and debunks many of its common myths about growth. He looks in some depth at how growth relates to jobs and housing, and at the problems with conventional economic development. He outlines key points about the costs of growth and the often hidden ways by which taxpayers subsidize it. He provides scores of methods for slowing or stopping growth. These range from development impact fees designed to ensure that growth pays for itself, to growth boundaries and greenbelts. Finally, Fodor provides an introduction to ideas which, unlike the usual growth imperative, can promote sustainable communities.

The late Donella Meadows, lead author of the landmark text, Limits to Growth, offers a fuller review. Her last sentence cuts to the chase: “Since we can’t grow forever, where should we stop?”

Our fixation on growth has created problems, the impacts of which are accelerating. I would guess that without major changes soon, growth issues which today occupy a few books and outposts on the Web will, 20 years from now, be major and constant media stories. One easy way anyone can help prevent that is to get informed now, if only by reading Better NOT Bigger.

For ambitious readers I’ll devote a future post to a more complete, though still compact reading list. No need to create a list which “sprawls.”

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage. — Jacques Cousteau

Image source: The Sustainable Scale Project

Population growth is a big problem. Billions big. The U.N. projects about a 40% increase in world population, from 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion, in the next 45 years. (Figures as of February, ‘05) This, when by most authoritative accounts we’ve already exceeded the population size our planet can sustain for the long term (The U.S. shot past its own carrying capacity some time ago), and are struggling with the most serious environmental problems in human history. (Think loss of the Amazon rain forest, climate change, the Three Gorges Dam of the Yangtze River in China, the rupturing of the ozone layer, huge “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico, and a thousand times the normal level of species loss to name just a few.)

A local community connects to and interacts reciprocally with the larger region, country, and the world in which it exists. While our local population growth is in some measure a result of simple shifts of population from one area or town to another, it is also in part a reflection of national growth. And like the environmental degradation caused by national population growth, our own growth carries with it inevitable environmental consequences. To understand the effects of population growth on one level, we must examine them on other levels as well.

Our actions locally can accommodate population growth, both here and more broadly — or not. In light of the current state of our natural environment and its link with population growth, we should choose not to.

With that in mind I recommend an article on BBC News by Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey. The topic of overpopulation, Rapley tells us, is “So controversial… that it has become the ‘Cinderella’ of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private.”

Indeed, though the topic of overpopulation received a great deal of press in the ’70s, many groups, concerned about the thorny moral and political questions it raises, shied away from it in subsequent decades. Now, my impression is that its undeniable environmental impact is forcing it back into the open, and groups such as the Sierra Club are again taking the plunge and talking about it.

And discuss it we must. Rapley makes clear that any efforts to solve our environmental problems will have at best limited success if we do not also take decisive action to deal with the problem of population growth.

Below is a recent letter to the editor of the Denver newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. It’s from Dave Gardner of Save the Springs in Colorado Springs. It’s an excellent response to the typical growth industry rhetoric, this time concerning “listless” population growth. It reminds me of our recent mayor’s comments to the Sun that Mount Vernon had been “stagnant” until he began pushing for residential development, leading to today’s “vibrant housing market” giving us “the kind of growth we need.”

I recommend Save the Springs as a great informational resource for those interested in pursuing further a rational approach to growth.

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DEPENDING ON POPULATION GROWTH FOR PROSPERITY IS A DEAD-END

This is a letter I sent to the Rocky Mountain News in response to a story about Colorado population statistics. The first paragraph was published in the News on January 2. I thought you might like to read it in its entirety. Feel free to pass it on to anyone who could benefit from some critical thought about population growth and economic development.

In his story about population growth (Colorado ranks 11th in growth, 12/22/05), reporter John Aguilar did our citizens a disservice by labeling our state’s most recent 1.4% annual growth rate as “another year of listless population growth.” [EMPHASIS ADDED] Give Mr. Aguilar a calculator, please! If our population growth were to remain at this listless level (its expected to rise), our state’s population would double to over 9 million by 2055, and would hit 18 million around the turn of the century. A more likely scenario? This doubling will happen in just 38 years if we keep up the average growth rate of the past five years. That would mean 37 million people in the state of Colorado by 2119, and 74.5 million just 38 years later. That will require us to do much more than suck Lake Powell dry. We cannot build enough dams or seed enough clouds to supply water to that population. This listless rate of population growth is taking us nowhere we want to go!

An interesting quote in the story came from state demographer Elizabeth Garner: “There just haven’t been the jobs to bring people here. This underscores the simple truth that we cannot create or recruit jobs in a vacuum. If we steal jobs from other states, we are stealing residents from those states, too. People will move to where the jobs are. So job recruiting and creation is actually causing our state’s population to swell. We should be careful what we wish for. If we are to act responsibly toward the future of our children and grandchildren, we should base our prosperity on more innovative means of economic development. Traditional, archaic economic development will ultimately cost our state billions and billions of dollars due to its impact as a population-growth machine on our natural resources, environment and infrastructure.

Dave Gardner
Founder & Chair, SaveTheSprings

A sustainable approach to our environment & quality of life - for current & future generations
Visit us at www.savethesprings.org

For lots of topics, there’s often more information on the Web than you can ever hope to round up through conventional methods. Blog “carnivals” provide an easy, one-click way to approximate such a roundup. A blog carnival is like a travelling magazine or digest offering an array of articles, grouped under some theme, each “issue” hosted by a different blogger. There are carnivals of topics ranging from healing to literature.

And there’s the Carnival of the Green. It features a weekly collection of “green” topics from around the blogosphere. I’m happy to report that a post from the Small Town Project is included in the current carnival, hosted by Suhit Anantula.

Each carnival lists the host for the next installment. Or get the whole list from City Hippy, one of the carnival’s founders. For a clearing house of blog carnivals try Blog Carnival.

Happy new year!