Unbridled Growth

The Sprawl Continues. Near Golden, Colorado, 2014

When will it stop?

The Earth’s surface is finite, so, at some point, we will eventually populate, pave over, farm, build on, fish in, live on, or otherwise severely affect just about every square centimeter of surface capable of maintaining some sort of human activity.

As Edward Abbey said: “Growth for the sake of growth. The ethic of the noble cancer cell.” Or something like that, as best as I can remember.

This kind of growth I have personally witnessed in two places especially…two places where I spent a significant number of years: Phoenix, Arizona and San Antonio, Texas. There are many other places that have experienced unbridled growth just as much as these two, so I’d say these cities are just two small sketches within a much larger picture that spans the globe.

When we moved to Phoenix in 1968, the population was somewhere around 500,000. The interstate up to the sleepy mountain burg of Flagstaff was yet to be completed. Sedona was just a gas station. There were more than 100,000 times more rattlesnakes in the desert than there were golf courses. (Just ask Rick Fritz–the fangs of one serpent found his shin not 1/2 mile from our house.)

Currently, the population of Phoenix is approaching 2 million. God knows where they will get the water in a few more decades. (Echoes of the Anasazi and their mysterious “disappearance”?) I still have many friends in the Valley of the Sun and I enjoy seeing them. But I don’t much enjoy the city any more.

When asked, I always say, “Yeah, I grew up in Phoenix–before it was Los Angeles.”

San Antonio has much the same story: clear the land…put in the streets…build the “planned” subdivisions…build the strip malls…then lather, rinse, repeat progressively farther out from the center (the original I-410 ring). Curiously, for all the planning, there was no way to walk to the house 100 feet behind ours in the Stone Oak area as it was in a different “planned” community–so, you had to drive, following the nicely “planned” boulevards with no bike lanes. And, oh yeah, it was a 25-mile drive to our dentist (but I guess that last was our choice).

Imagine, though, what San Antonio would be like if they had confined growth to inside the 410 loop (build up instead of out) and if they had set up a huge green belt of parks and trails in the zone between 410 and the 1604 loop! THAT would have been a great city! But, no, when there is money to be made in real estate, and when everyone wants their little 60’x100′ rectangle of lawn in the backyard, there is no stopping the growth motor. The “free market” at work?

Again, I have many friends in San Antonio, but I would never live there again and it hurts to visit and see the change.

What’s the solution? Heck, I’m not smart enough to know. I think Mother Nature knows, though. She, along with the Rule of the Cycles of Civilization will ensure that there will eventually be a correction.

Too bad we couldn’t be smart enough as a species to gently guide those corrections ourselves.