I found a fascinating book at the library recently — Superbia!, by Dan Chiras and Dave Wann, a creation of Mother Earth News. It’s a discussion of how to change the way we live, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and after reading about the communities where people have made positive changes I come away amazed at how creative committed people can be when they’re aware of a problem.
Most Americans take our way of life for granted. We’ve grown up amidst surroundings that are a fact of life. There are aspects of our way of living we may curse — traffice jams, rising costs, for example — but generally we don’t connect the dots and see the overall picture.
The picture that some see is that we’ve created a way of living that is essentially not sustainable. We may curse the traffic, but we don’t necessarily think about the energy consumed while our cars sit and go nowhere. We tend not to think about the greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere that results from combustion accomplishing no work. It may be a small thing, but puzzles are usually comprised of many small pieces.
Traffic is but one symptom of that unsustainable lifestyle we’ve created for ourselves — a lifestyle that came about as a result of the population movement enabled by the development that took place after WWII, when vast tracts of farmland were turned into suburban neighborhoods, laced with roads and connected by more roads. From that point on, development became roadway centered. Up until then, development generally occurred first along rivers and then along railroads. Populations were more concentrated and most of what we needed was within easy reach.
Early communities were generally self-contained, typically with everything a family needed to live. What wasn’t made locally was, by the 20th century, shipped in by railroad. In those times, most agriculture was local too. For the most part, people ate what was grown locally. In those days, our world might have been considered cozy.
That all changed in the 1950s, with the advent of the federal highway system we call the Interstates. As railroads were allowed to perish, expansion occurred along these ribbons of roadway, ever outward from urban hubs. No one thought about replicating the style of community that we’d been accustomed to, and in general people relished the new space they were afforded. People moved from concrete neighborhoods of apartments to communities of single-family homes with new lawns and baby trees, quiet streets and shiny new schools. That we might no longer be able to walk to the grocery store was a small price to pay for what many considered country living.
Geographers and social scientists now look back on the evolution of modern America and see the mistakes we made, mistakes that cannot be reversed. The outward sprawl that in the beginning gave people what they perceived of as freedom was in reality a prison. We put distance between ourselves and everything that was crucial for sustaining lives — our work, our food, our culture. And in the process we fouled our nest.
Superbia! takes a look at what some communities in America are doing to step back in time a little. Nothing wholesale, but in many ways examples of how to make neighborhoods more liveable. It’s a refreshing and inspirational book, full of ideas that just about anyone anywhere can adapt to where they live, given the required awareness and spirit of cooperation.
Liberal Buzz 