The Small Town Project

Time to introduce a new site! After 18 months, Growth is Madness!, introduced below, began to take too much time away from writing for larger publications. To be able to focus on the latter, I’ve now settled into johnfeeney.net. It features a sampling of my writing, updates, information on speaking and interviews, and resources for those wishing to dig deeper into the core ecological issues confronting us. Stop by!

http://www.johnfeeney.net/

I’m happy to announce that I have now launched a new weblog, Growth is Madness! This was the result of a great deal of thought. Though I had previously reported that I was planning a site which would be “uniquely participatory,” I decided to take another route. The site I originally had in mind is still on the back burner, but I believe it would require too much administrative work, and additional thought led me to question whether it would have the impact I’d thought it might. With blogging platforms becoming so easy to use and so sophisticated, I concluded that, for now, the most “bang for the buck,” would come from a new blog. But Growth is Madness! has a broader focus, aimed at disseminating information and promoting discussion of some of the most fundamental problems faced by human society today.

Those problems are population growth and corporate economic growth as they interact with growing per capita resource consumption levels. They are driving the looming ecological collapse of which scientists have been warning us for some time. Yet those with vested interests in shielding the public from the truth of these issues have done their job well. These topics are virtually ignored by the mainstream press.

As far as I know, Growth is Madness! is unique among weblogs in focusing specifically on these root causes of our ecological crisis. I hope that by providing well sourced information and discussion, Growth is Madness! will inspire others to take actions of their own to address these, the most pressing issues of our time. For me, it may become a springboard, as well, for other work aimed at addressing these issues. So stop by and see why growth really is madness.

http://growthmadness.org/

The White House needs a subscription to Scientific American. The gap between science and society is profound and extraordinarily dangerous. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

In the recent essay, Will We Avert Ecological Collapse?, I led off with mention of Jeffrey Sachs’s keynote address at the State of the Planet conference at Columbia University. As as follow up, and because it’s really a great overview of the ecological challenges we face today, along with discussion of what we need to do to meet those challenges, I recommend listening to (or reading) Sachs’s actual address. This is the sort of material that can give you a general idea of the ecological issues we’re dealing with and the actions we need to take, without digging seriously into the scientific literature or reading whole books on the subject. (Though if a book is what you want, I can’t recommend highly enough Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update!)

It’s worth staying with the address till the end. Sachs does not deal with the the question of population growth, for instance, until late in the talk. When he does, however, he is forthright and, in my view, accurate.

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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“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…)

Image source: The Sustainable Scale Project

Part I of this article offered a snapshot of Boulder’s open space acquisition program. I suggested that an understanding of any such effort to fight sprawl ultimately connects with larger issues such as population growth and per capita resource consumption. The work of Boulder residents, Al Bartlett and Bob Cohen provides a look at these issues, their interconnections and how they deepen our understanding of sprawl and other needless and destructive “development” such as that which we see today in Mount Vernon and Lisbon.

Let’s learn from a sprawl fighting pioneer
I mentioned in a recent post Al Bartlett’s famous talk, Arithmetic, Population and Energy. (Go there to learn about the talk’s history.) It’s one of the best sources for a clear, concise introduction to the problem of continued growth. In this case, the growth in question is both population growth and growth in our per capita resource consumption. They are, after all, the two leading culprits in the growth problems we face. Working together, they magnify the problems with which we’re dealing. And lest we lose sight of the focus of this website, we have to recognize that population growth and growth in per capita land consumption (an example of increasing per capita resource consumption) are the primary root causes of sprawl.
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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.
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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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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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