Growth

On my recent trip to Texas, when I was making the five-hour drive from San Antonio to the Dallas area, I was appalled by how much development there now is along the I-35 corridor, the main connector between these two metropolitan areas. There is very little unadul-terated land to be seen anymore. San Antonio now bleeds into New Braunfels which bleeds into San Marcos which bleeds into Austin which is indiscernible from its bedroom communities of Round Rock and Georgetown to the north. Urban sprawl in spades. There was a tiny stretch around the tiny town of Jarrell where you could see open loping land, with the occasional tree, a scattering of cows, that is the basic landscape of central Texas; but then you hit Belton/Temple/ Waco. There used to be countryside between those three small cities, but not anymore. Land can again be seen around the small town of West, which boasts a large Czech community. As an aside, I stopped there once at the much-touted Czech Stop and Bakery, right off of I-35, to try some of the much-touted koloches, which are firm, chewy pastries with some kind of filling – poppy seed or prune paste, apricot jelly, sausage, cream cheese – in the middle. I had the cream cheese and found it "all right," but not really as satisfying as a good cheese danish.

So small town West, and surrounding farmland, are still the same, but so much else...

I realize this kind of development is everywhere, that land that was once fields/hills/woods has disappeared beneath giant shopping malls/discount outlets/chain motels/fast-food restaurants/cookie-cutter housing "estates," and Auto World (auto sales/gas stations/ parts houses/tire distributors, etc.) I'm not talking something new, something that lots of other people haven't already commented on. But here's my point: this god-awful consumer sprawl represents the very "growth" that they keep telling us we need to return to, from the retrenching of the current economic crisis. We need more of this? I don't think so. It made me think of the 1972 book, "The Limits of Growth," which talked about the exponential growth of five variables: world population, industrial production, food production, pollution, and resource depletion. In 2008 somebody named Graham Turner from Australia published a paper comparing the reality of the past 30+ years with the predictions made in the original book, and found that "changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic collapse in the 21st century."*

So here we are, collapsing. We've been churning out too much stuff, too many unnecessary gadgets, too many absurdly large houses to be lived in by a couple with one or maybe two kids (and now they can't pay the mortgage), too many Office Depot/Home Depot/Wal-Mart/Best Buy clones. This growth, which is supposedly essential to our economy, to the world economy – and the rest of the world has recently been jumping on the consumer bandwagon with us – has been eating up the land, and other of the planet's resources, destroying the ozone layer, wiping out species, increasing commute time and aggravation, which increases stress, making everyplace look like everyplace else, and in short, not impressing me one bit. I'm thinking, there's gotta be a better way. We've already tried the drop-out, get-back-to-the-land hippie alternative – and some people are still living that way – but it really doesn't seem like the solution for a whole planet. So what is? Let's hear it from the Wise Men (and Women). I'm not a big fan of my native Texas, but one thing it always had going for it was land. I don't want it all to disappear beneath concrete and Target stores.

*Graham Turner (2008). "A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality". Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).