The Small Town Project

Open space acquisition gets the job done. Image source: City of Boulder

Some weeks ago I promised an article on the “big picture.” I had in mind something highlighting the links between needless sprawl, broader problems such as environmental degradation, and the primary root causes of these problems: population growth and excessive per capita consumption of finite resources.

A trip to Boulder, Colorado last week did much to bring the big picture into perspective. I went there, in part, to observe directly the current results of city’s open space acquisition program. Initiated by local citizens in the early ’70s, and continuing today, it has ringed the city with open land, closed to development. I was curious to see how, some 35 years from its inception, it relates to the town and surrounding communities. Just as importantly, I was eager to meet two residents who have long been involved in addressing not only Boulder’s growth issues, but also all the broader issues discussed here as well.

Doing what it takes
Comparing today’s Boulder and its neighboring communities with the way they were 25 years ago highlights the benefits of a good open space acquisition program while simultaneously demonstrating the insatiable appetite of suburban sprawl. The suburbs and towns north of Denver have sprawled beyond belief in the last few decades. Twenty five years ago the drive from Denver to Boulder meant about 30 minutes through undeveloped, open land. Signs along the highway pointed to Boulder’s small town neighbors such as Broomfield and Louisville, but they were little seen from the road, existing as separate, distinct small towns unto themselves. Today they’ve sprawled to the highway, crossed it, and now appear as one nearly continuous suburban belt from Denver, almost to Boulder. Striking, however, is the expanse of open land you see when you come over the rise outside Boulder. The city’s open space acquisition program has preserved just enough land That Boulder retains an identity separate from the fast growing neighbors now surrounding it.

For Boulder itself, then, the open space acquisition program has been a huge success, preserving a portion of the surrounding natural environment and holding the town to a reasonable, desirable size. This, in turn, has gone a long way toward helping Boulder retain its distinctive character. As the Boulder city attorney’s office puts it:

This land acquisition program will have a far more significant long term effect than could be obtained through zoning, allocation of building permits, or any other form of growth management.

Indeed, as Gabor Zovanyi suggests, unambiguous, absolute measures such as land acquisition programs are necessary to truly stop needless growth. You can piddle around for years with zoning adjustments, smart growth boundaries, increased connection fees for developers, and the like, but all such measures ultimately just accommodate growth to varying degrees. City programs to acquire land, private land trusts using tools such as conservation easements, legally established population caps, and absolute growth boundaries are among the kinds of measures needed to get the job done. This is not to say the less decisive measures are of no value. They do have their place as parts of a comprehensive package aimed at stopping needless growth. Alone, though, they are simply not enough.

The larger implications of stopping growth
To stop needless sprawl a community’s citizens need not be expert in an array of global social and environmental issues. They need only see the harm “development” does to their quality of life, the environment, and community character and heritage. They must of course also have the political will to do something about it. That said, it can only deepen their convictions and appreciation of the gravity of the problems involved to consider the larger issues to which sprawl is connected.

That’s where we can learn from Al Bartlett and Bob Cohen, the two gentlemen I met on my trip. I introduced Al Bartlett in a recent post. The retired physics professor was a co-founder of Boulder’s open space acquisition program and speaks and writes expertly on issues of population growth and energy consumption. Bob Cohen, too, is a social activist who has tackled such issues as population growth and resource consumption, and is now focused especially on promoting fair trade and opposing global corporatization.

These fellows have a few years between them and a great deal of wisdom to show for it. Having witnessed for many decades the impacts of the problems they study, they’ve developed a perspective on the issues few can match. Listening to what they have to say brings into sharp focus the connections and interactions between sprawl, population growth, resource consumption, global corporatization, and environmental degradation. Ultimately, efforts to understand the sprawl overcoming communities all over the U.S. and much of the rest of the world necessitates considering how all these elements work together. In Part II, I’ll show how looking into the topics Bob and Al explore leads to just such considerations.