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When Anti-Development Rhetoric Starts to Sound Good By Ron Rayevich
[ By Ron Rayevich ]
For the first half of the book, I was really captivated by the way this articulate author pokes fun at today's society, with its propensity toward consumption of just about everything. However, what I was really waiting for was the answer to the problems of over-development, when suddenly, about half-way through the book, the author came to her conclusions. I quote: "to stop our headlong slide into self-destruction only two things need to be done: stop people from procreating with such abandon, and change our form of governance and its supporting economy." There it was right before my eyes. This very clever and (at least up until this point) engaging author was suggesting a new form of government, economic system and radical population control, all in one fell swoop. Actually, for the rest of the book the author never goes beyond this rather brash statement to say anything that would be at all helpful to practically controlling over-development. Pardon my sarcasm, but what flashed into my mind from these few simple words was that a nice dictatorship, maybe a little communism and Chinese-style population control would get us all turned around. Stalin was able to weed out 20 million of his own uncooperative comrades and Hitler managed a nice little war which eliminated about 50 million more and Mao another 70 million or so. And of course Chinese-style birth control seems to have really helped that economy reign in its consumption of steel and concrete. To be clear, I want to emphasize that I would never advocate genocide in any form. Now that you know that I did not cross over to the dark side, I would like to share with you a few gems that I did learn from reading this book. First, did you know that for every five cars produced we pave over an area the size of a football field in order to allow for their movement and storage? I do think that we have gone a little overboard in the number of cars we think we really need for each family unit. Here's another one I just loved: "Since 1970 average American families have shrunk by 15 percent while their houses have grown 50 percent bigger." Actually, I have been personally keeping a little record of home sizes over the last half-century. Since 1950 they have grown by more than 130 percent. Finally, my favorite part was about retailing and the "big box" phenomenon. After listing a shopping trip to about two dozen stores in a typical power center, the author notes that at the end of it, "you fall, sated, heart bleeping faintly, unconscious of the sky above or the ground below or whatever could matter except crawling back to the Camry to transport the contents of two dozen plastic bags into the house which will, somehow, absorb it all." If you fondly remember the hometown of youth, want a few good laughs at our wasteful society, and are really interested in what makes the anti-development movement so appealing, read the first two surprisingly long chapters of Pierson'sThe Place You Love Is Gone. After that, toss the book in the trash can, because like many a well-meaning diatribe, it finally goes off the deep end and offers no viable solutions.
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