On Sprawl

from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland

Where the “developers” see “a whole lot of nothing” I see ecosystems – swaths of green space, native grasses, stands of Osage orange, cover for coyotes and foxes, pheasant and wild turkey, the hunting grounds for hawks.

I’ve been an enemy of urban sprawl since, as a child, I saw the metastasizing city begin to encroach on my family’s own patch of God’s Own Earth, since I saw firsthand that “development” really meant “destruction.”

Not only is so-called development destructive, it isn’t even creative: the legions of strip malls and fast-food joints, of Wal-Marts and Home Depots, of uniform tract housing, no matter how supersized or upscale, vary little from exurban scenes in any other American city. We’re sacrificing perfectly good prairie for this? We’re dozing up and asphalting over perfectly good farmland for yet another overpriced yuppie steakhouse?

It’s senseless.

Owing to our lack of courage and gumption, we city dwellers, instead of fixing up our old neighborhoods, instead of hanging around and getting involved, instead of shopping local, just carve out our chunks of faux-frontier on the edge of town. We cannot see, of course, since the land doesn’t light up or have a fake-ass Mediterranean facade, that the ecosystem our new model home stands on was once home to actual life, life as valuable than our own – or more for being more rare.

We also don’t seem to grasp that our new subdivision is quiet because everything in it is dead. Neither do we grasp that, retailers being what they are, the city we just upscaled to escape will catch up in a matter of scant months if not weeks. This phenomenon is a failure of imagination nearly as large as that which brings us war. In the long run it does as much damage as war to the environment, to the psyche, to the fabric of human relations.

Sadly, history tells us that civilizations that live as we do, with wanton disregard for their surroundings, tend to collapse rather than reform. I see no indication that we are even aware of that history, much less likely to heed it.