I read Stranded Wind's diary today and it got me thinking about my days of thirty years ago, when I read The Mother Earth News from cover to cover and books like My Side of the Mountain and thought that I would live a life like that someday.
Here's why I didn't -- and why that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Here's what stopped me:
There are over 304,000,000 people living in the US right now, per the latest Census projections. Most of these people live in urban areas. Think about what would happen if even a tenth of these people decided that they wanted their own cabin, their own septic tank, their own fifty-odd acres, their own wood/corn-fired furnaces, and moved out to what relatively unspoiled land was left.
We've already seen a version of this. It's called suburbia. Everybody has their 80-by-40-foot hunk of land and their septic tank (or their sewer hookup if the suburb's big enough) and their single-family dwelling, because living in even a huge 1500-square-foot condo with common walls is unthinkable and only losers (and, though this is generally just whispered, those people) rent apartments.
I see some people (cough*Kunstler*cough) advocating killing off the cities and making everyone live in small towns. But really, unless all of those small towns have wind and/or solar or geothermal or hydro or methane power, they're going to have a bigger overall footprint -- carbon, physical, you name it -- than the same amount of people congregated into the smaller overall area of the cities.
A more workable option is one being pioneered by the city of Youngstown, Ohio.
Youngstown was a big steel town, with over 170,000 residents at its peak. Then the mills shut down, and the population crashed to its current level of 80,000.
For decades, the city frantically tried everything it could think of to gain back its lost population. Then, a few years ago, some of the city fathers and mothers realized that, since they weren't going to get bigger, why not try to live within their means as a city?
The concept is called "Plan 2010", and it's already making news as other cities in similar situations flock to study it.
The old, never-lived-in planned neighborhoods of the 1950s, and places that once had people but are now empty, are being plowed up and returned to nature, or turned into parks, or are becoming community gardens, many of which are also affiliated with CSAs. They are striving for a life at once urban and agrarian and green.
Interestingly, several cities in East Germany have embarked independently on the very same process. They have similarly-shrunken industrial bases, went through a similar frantic process of trying to regain what was never coming back, and have come to similar conclusions about what they must do to survive and thrive.
This is not to diss existing small towns. Just as cities have their place, so do small towns -- and greening up small towns is a very good thing, as places like Rock Port, Missouri and Greensburg, Kansas and Graettinger, Iowa (h/t to Stranded Wind!) show. (Greensburg's got most of the press lately, but Graettinger is in many ways a bigger success story: Vertical integration is used to provide clean fuel, clean water, fertilizer, and an organic greenhouse -- as well as dozens of jobs. I just love this town!)
UPDATE: I also want to add that the housing bubble's bursting is actually a teachable moment and an opportunity. America as a whole -- especially places that mushroomed too fast and now are crashing hard -- is going through what Youngstown went through: Empty Sun Belt 'ghost suburbs' with no homes or foreclosed homes, cities that once boomed now staring drastic population losses in the face. Youngstown can be a model for these cities as it is for Rust Belt places like Flint.
UPDATE 2: I did a follow-up diary on the efforts of Pittsburgh and environs to follow the urban agrarian path. The Rust Belt may well become the Green Belt in a few decades.