The Small Town Project

Attorney Gail Small fights for Northern Cheyenne environmental rights. Image source: Kathdin Foundation

You can’t investigate topics such as growth and sprawl without soon recognizing how they connect with a variety of interrelated issues of environmental degradation. Today there are countless stories of environmental destruction, all indicative of our overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity. Many are hugely important to the futures of our children and grandchildren. Yet even the biggest of these stories, such as the burning and leveling of the Amazon rain forest, are barely covered by the media. That is undoubtedly one reason why few people seem to appreciate the gravity of these problems and the urgency with which we must address them. (Another reason — and one deserving far more attention than it gets — is our failure to appreciate the nature of exponential growth.)

With that in mind I plan to do what I can with this site to bring more attention to specific aspects of the environmental plight in which we find ourselves. This is consistent with recent efforts here to clarify the “big picture” encompassing issues such as the impacts of land development. It is also a small step toward broadening this site’s focus, part of a plan for the future of the site of which I’ll say more in the next couple of months.

It seems fitting to start by pointing to an information source on some of the most underreported environmental issues in the U.S. today. I’m talking about the environmental challenges forced upon American Indians on reservation land. Just as the social struggles of the American Indian are all but ignored by the media and government, their struggles to protect many millions of acres of land from destructive effects of mining, oil drilling, nuclear waste dumping, and other assaults coming from the U.S. government and large corporations are grossly underreported.

An easy introduction to these issues should be found in the film, Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action. I’ve not yet seen it myself, having only learned about it recently. It’s garnered some excellent reviews though, and judging from the clips available on the site, it should be well worth seeing if you can catch a screening or see it on DVD.

Exactly why topics such as those in this film don’t get more media play is a large question. But considering the proportion of news time now given to things like celebrity gawking and car chases, it’s clear mainstream news now consistently ignores important stories. The stories in Homeland are among those needing much wider coverage.

The city council of Colorado Springs chose this week to head farther down the unsustainable path of growth. They needed to fill the council seat vacated by Richard Skorman, a council member considered to be an “open-space advocate” and, as best I can tell, perhaps the only council member regularly to question conventional endless growth policies. They heard three minute presentations from applicants and voted on their choice. Rather than choosing someone with views similar to Skorman’s they selected someone whose views are expected to be completely in line with the current pro-growth council.
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Next week Mount Vernon will hold a special election to fill a vacant seat on the city council. The two candidates are Neil Rud and Karla Steffens-Moran. This week’s Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun features the candidates’ answers to several questions about local issues. Let’s look only at the gist of their answers to the question: “What is your stance on community growth? Explain.”

Neil Rud:

Overall, I do support the type and scale of growth as outlined in the [Comprehensive] Plan, but I do not necessarily agree with the timeline/pace of growing to a city of 5,000 by 2015.

I would like to see city council champion a periodic review against the Comprehensive Plan to assess such things as: city projects completed, new priorities and investments required, impacts of legislative changes, etc…

What can we make of this answer? (more…)

Washington state example shows property tax rates correlate strongly with population growth. [1] Image source: San Juan County Futures Information Resource

Previously here I’ve debunked a number of myths concerning growth and so-called “development.” The very first was the myth that residential development brings in needed tax dollars. Despite the information provided here, however, what I hear around Mount Vernon suggests this is the myth in which residents and policymakers remain the most interested. No doubt the local growth machine would love to show that Mount Vernon is an anomaly, a community where residential growth does pay for itself. It is not impossible, after all, for development to pay for itself. Very specific forms of development sometimes do.

However, apart from biased or otherwise flawed studies (in my opinion, a very real risk in the local instance), their chances of showing that development pays for itself here are slight. (more…)

I recently received an email from Mark Retzlaff of the Portland Peace and Justice Center concerning their Sustainable Energy in Motion Bicycle Tours.

As I understand it, the Peace and Justice Center is currently an evolving idea. They hope to have a phsyical space in the future. But their first program is well underway . (more…)

“Growth is madness!” Image source: Rama

In the first two parts of this article we began to connect sprawl with its primary root causes: population growth and growth in per capita land consumption. Population growth, of course, drives much more than sprawl. It has combined in recent decades with increased per capita resource consumption (of which per capita land consumption is a part) to bring about the worst human-caused environmental losses ever seen. Why then have the U.S. and other countries not taken decisive steps to address population growth and resource consumption levels? [1]

A corporate culprit
The answer is complex, but we can zero in with confidence on portions of it. The common phrase, “follow the money” is apt when looking for some of the key social forces enabling growth of population and growth of resource consumption to continue unabated in many countries. (more…)