Danger: Smart Growth Ahead
With dramatic changes come major opportunities, and the chance to right past wrongs and strengthen what is good in the lives we lead.
Look at how America grew out of our Civil War, and Europe evolved after wrecking itself via two world conflagrations. Consider the care all parties brought to the negotiating table regarding watershed regulations following the disastrous January floods of early 1996. Or on a more personal level, how much better that second draft of a story is after the first crashes during some unforeseen computer mishap. Or the lasting sweetness of second marriages.
A number of recent setbacks in our Catskills are similarly starting to reveal new opportunities. Similarly, the biggest change any of us is looking at – involving the potential impacts of Climate Change that our nation’s top scientists outlined for all of us in the Northeast a few weeks back – is also filled with new hopes that we will not only survive global warming and all the shifts to life as we know it now coming down the pike, but likely grow stronger from those changes.
New York State now has an office designated to finding ways of anticipating and accommodating the big climate changes already visible via changing winters, more floods, and increasing infestations of pests brought on by warmer summers. New York City, at the federal EPA’s prodding, has agreed to utilize its massive reservoir system for flood protection means… and to consider ways to open it up, recreationally, to counter the losses in tourism potential likely to be suffered by other segments of the current economy.
A few weeks ago, the Governor’s Special Assistant on the Environment came to the Catskills to talk about Smart Growth, the new buzz-word for re-emphasizing the sustainability of individual communities, and the strengthening of inter-dependence between larger municipalities. The idea, put simply, is that we all do better in the long run when we concentrate around smaller, home-town businesses and industries instead of allowing large chain stores to change the look and feel of our communities, and pull what money we make out for profits used elsewhere. Our environment becomes less of an issue, and the viability of our towns keep our real estate markets healthy, our desirability to new residents intact.
It’s something that makes sense, environmentally… but also in terms of what more and more are seeing as a vastly changing future ahead of us, when gas prices keep rising, and supplies eventually dwindling. Pundit and author Jim Kunstler, from Saratoga, points out that although disastrous for some places where cities have been built where they shouldn’t – in deserts, without public transportation, or so vertically that they could no longer operate in a blackout, oil depletion will likely benefit small communities like ours. We have the ability to grow our own food. We can shop locally. There’s plenty of water and, via its power, a renewable energy source yet to be tapped. Hey, we even have a rail line that could be revived when the need really arises.
Remember… when World War II followed the Great Depression, a generation back, many (we are now too quick to forget) felt something vital had been lost in all our lives. Books railed about the rise of “Organized Man” and decried the loss of Main Street for Suburbia. In this area cars weren’t ubiquitous, and electrification was still unfolding into the 1960s. Kids went to high school in Kingston up until the early 1950s.
No one imaged telecommuting or televisions in every room. On-line shopping wasn’t even imagined. The world was as different, fifty years back, as it’s likely to be now fifty years hence.
But we planned as best we could, led by new flanks of sociologists and educators, economists and more traditional scientists, for where we’d now be by consolidating schools, building new highways, putting up new housing tracts, and making room for that once-new concept, shopping malls. Some were mistakes, others still work.
Now we have to look ahead in a similar fashion, as if we’re coming out of similar times to the Depression and War. We have to look seriously at what our current scientific community is telling us, and not just scoff at them as being anti-progress. And look at what needs to be saved and what can go in all around us.
Are our roads above possible flood lines? Will septic systems still hold in our towns, or would sewer systems be better for the future? Do we have schools in all the right places? Are we putting economic resources into the right avenues, or simply following established patterns, and industries, that simply won’t be with us any more 25 or 50 years down the line?
Hard choices, all… just as we must all now consider how to replace Phoenicia’s historic inn, lost to fire this past week, so it can not only look to the future, but remind us of our heralded past.
Then again, no one ever said smart growth, like any true progress, would ever be easy. PS