The answer, of course, is nobody knows.  But I have to write about something, so… let’s say… meaningful and fulfilling lives.  But first, where are they moving?  States like Texas have had a positive population gain over the last couple of years mostly due to strong energy sector jobs.  But let’s face it.  As an former resident of Texas, I realize not everyone wants to move to the armpit of hell, Houston.

Many are decrying the fact that young people are fleeing the country like scripted drama from prime time television.  But just like prime time TV, there are pockets of CSI, er, young people still finding home in the country.  Others, like a recent Wall Street Journal article, talk about the opposite trend.

The Journal’s story is entitled, “Green Acres is the place to be,” and it represents the perspective that people are migrating back to the country.  ”Motivations can vary, but typically there are three groups: young people buying land as an asset or investment, with vague hopes to live on it someday; exurban commuters who have jobs in big towns or cities but want to escape the sprawl; and back-to-the-land types who want to dabble in hobby farming.”

Honestly, if i were a God-fearing country boy, I would have to admit that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t make these folk sound very appealing.  Land speculators, commuters and hobby-farmers sound like the sort of people I would harass with bottle rockets or small arms fire, or perhaps some mailbox baseball. All said, it seems obvious that young people are leaving Rural America.  This is not exactly a new trend.  The recent book, Hollowing Out the Middle, addressed this issue in candid detail.  A splendid blog, Reimagine Rural, also dedicates much time and energy to the topic.

While most movement is out of the country and toward the city, there is a significant movement in the opposite direction.  While many of those individuals moving back to the country may not be representing country folks’ interests, I believe that some are.  Because of the longevity of the trend to flee the country many God-fearing country boys and girls are waking up every morning to the sounds of honking, train whistles and sirens.  With the help of a dream-crushing economy, many of these country-gone-city folk are also waking back up to their childhood memories of a simpler life.  By simpler I mean more straight forward: no gym fees, no commuter traffic, no HOA fees.

I see these folk as not so much pretenders or redneck wanna’bes, but rather prodigals returning home.  After spending so much of their formative years desiring nothing more than escape from a provincial life, now they wonder if the city was a harpy, a siren luring them to destruction.  After all, if you are going to be unemployed, why not be unemployed back home surrounded by family and homegrown food and cheap property prices.  But seriously, some of these people are returning to the country with actual skills and a passion to make Rural America great again.

The question still remains on where they will end up.  Certainly things like broadband and coffee shops will play a part.  More importantly, where will they find open arms and a welcome embrace?  Which small towns will decide that the Prodigal deserves a fatted calf after all?

This summer, Reburbia, a suburban design competition, was held by Inhabitat and Dwell Magazine. The competition set out to gather creative and imaginative ideas on how to go about re-visioning the American suburban sprawl that will almost certainly become our suburban wasteland without intervention. Several of the ideas were great, but one in particular caught my eye.

Forrest Fulton designed Big Box Agriculture: A Productive Suburb. In his design he advocates for transforming abandoned big box stores into suburban farms and markets, and I think it is a tremendous idea. Within three miles of my house right now (and I live close to downtown Salt Lake City) there stands an empty big box store that used to be a CompUSA. Yeah. Remember buying that flash drive there last Black Friday as they were going out of business? Well the building is still there. Currently there is a Halloween business pumping plastic jack-o-lanterns and pregnant Brittany Spears costumes into the soon to be saturated October holiday madness. But they will be gone again in another month. The location is perfect. Less than a mile to the East is a long stretch of solid neighborhood. A little further to the West and you will find the same. Right next to the Costco and Sam’s Club there could be a blacktop farm and market.

Fulton’s idea would use the old CompUSA building as a greenhouse and restaurant by replacing most of the roof with glass and the rest with more crops. One could easily imagine a small market to find fresh produce or where one could wash and wrap the harvest one’s self. By keeping the blacktop parking lot and using containers for the farming the urban/suburban farm could maintain flexibility and easy customer access. In a place like salt lake the greenhouse space would prove invaluable as well. Winter roles around and all the plants that need to come inside have a place to stay.

The two problems that I just can’t shake are crime and parking. Ironic that you can’t just plow up all the parking lots in the world to plant crops even though most of these parking lots were farmland not so long ago. I don’t know about the location of most big box stores, but the old CompUSA isn’t in what you would call a walkable neighborhood. And I don’t think Costco is going to like people using their parking lot/derby arena for parking their John Deere. Could an operation like this maintain a shuttle with off-site parking? Is it ridiculous to consider an underground parking garage? Yeah, probably.

The second problem would appear to be crime. I guess you could always put up a ten foot cyclone fence around the whole farm, but that tends to take some of the community feeling out of the friendly local market. I don’t know, maybe there aren’t that many thugs who need to make a tomato-plant-peace-offering to their old lady for shooting out the television. Then again, my church had its freshly planted perennials yanked out just a few months ago.

One last thought to ponder would be the profitability of an operation like this. Urban and suburban property is still pretty pricy in most cities. Can dense, container farming pay the bills? I know I would like to see someone in SLC give it a try in the old building where CompUSA gave up the ghost.

I by chance stumbled upon the last half of ABC’s show Earth 2100 a couple nights ago.  Now understand, I just returned from a trip to Texas, the land of my birth.  And Texas, with the exception of Austin, is not the land of environmental sensitivity.  And so my frame of mind was stemming from what some other bloggers on the topic of Earth 2100 have been referring to as “the lowest common denominator.”  Imagine my reverse culture shock when I found myself watching an acid trip induced, enviro-documentary/graphic novel about the end of humanity on prime time television.

Break out the shisha and tea.  I need to relax.  Now for the last couple of days most of the reviews on the show have been critical, but personally I think everyone needs to take a few puffs from the hookah.  After you feel a little light headed you should keep reading.Yes, temperatures and sea levels are rising here on planet earth (taking into account that temperatures have leveled off some over the last couple decades, but you know, follow the overall trend).  Yes, most of us have come to agreement that humans and our affinity for burning petroleum has contributed to these trends.  Over the last few years most people seem to be admitting that we should even do something about it.

But here is where level heads must prevail.  Most of us are not in agreement as to what the human impact is and will be.  Most of us are not in agreement as to how much and how quickly our planet will heat and what effects that temperature increase will have.  And get this, most of us are continuing to move forward under the assumption that everyone else either sees it our way or is a nonconsequential moron.  This sort of flippant name calling is the backbone of our national conversation these days and the biggest reason I randomly crap myself while wondering around the park considering life.

I thought Earth 2100 was interesting and imaginative.  It should cause many regular Joes to stop and think a little.  On the other hand I did think that their method was a bit heavy handed and overdramatic.  The last thing we need is for several of those regular Joes to take the whole thing seriously just to decide that when the dramatic predictions fall short that global warming was just a hoax after all.  Maybe Earth2100’s predictions are on the nose.  Maybe not.  Some people still need to be scared while others need to be encouraged, challenged or comforted.  A few people on either extreme will need to be ignored, it is true.

The main truth in all of this is that our petro-industrial revolution has run its course and we need to come up with another.  Intelligent people that disagree as to what this revolution should be and how we should come about it will need to work together (with one voice or another taking the lead).  This fact, above all, is what keeps me awake at night.

Despite the devastation that I know this process has been and will continue to wreak on the people of Flint and other cities like it, I can’t help but to hope for the future.

Maybe these desperate times will engage us Americans with the dynamic process of creating cities that are sustainable through thin times as well as thick.  I take a short look around at the carnage that was our economic system and it is evident to all the effects of planning only for success.  ”My home will only continue to rise in value.”  ”The markets will certainly trend ever upward.”  ”Food and oil will always be cheep.”  ”We must certainly continue to get stupider!”  Out of all of these, only the last one has been true.

City planning has seemed to be based on similar thinking — continual growth and gain.  Most of our waistlines tell us this is not sustainable.  Yet we believe it from the lips of mayors and builders and venture capitalists alike.  Now I am not against growth.  It is as inevitable as its counterpart, shrinkage.  The rub seams to be figuring out how to plan on both.

Can Flint remake itself as a leaner and more meaningful community through the brutal process of bulldozing abandoned homes and asking the owners of not yet abandoned ones to step aside?  Can the land bank that is claiming ownership of an ever increasing number of lots find the quickest and best path toward a sustainable city footprint that can expand and shrink with need?  Or will they just knock crap down now and build new crap up later?

I couldn’t help checking out Alan Weisman’s book, “The World Without Us” from the Salt Lake Library.  It’s just such an eery thought.  In the book Alan posits many questions about how long it would take the earth to recover from us.  It seems in some ways, that Flint is now asking the same question.  Shrink a city and how long does it take for nature to expand?  And can we bargain a new, more sustainable balance for both?

But is all of this just modernist, Jean-Luc Picard type thinking that is already being supplanted by the post modern sense of relativist spirituality?

One of the cornerstones of The Venus Project, or its activist arm, Zeitgeist, is to kill the modern monetary system replacing it with a resource based economy.  On the surface I would agree that this sounds like a great thing.  Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where stuff is worth what it is actually worth?  Oh, I forgot, alot of people wouldn’t.  This is where I start to get a bit discombobulated with the whole plan.

Call me a pessimist if you must, but I harken from protestant roots and still very much believe in total depravity (otherwise known as the theology of how all people suck).  I would love to get behind the Venus Project and help build a society that is completely sustainable — one without war, poverty, and injustice.  But I just don’t see how getting rid of money is going to achieve this.  I can’t quite accept that people won’t still fight over fame, pride, lust, etc. even once the lure of greed and monetary need are gone.  (Just because all my physical needs are met doesn’t mean I won’t want to boink your wife, does it?)  In a resource based economy won’t someone still decide to jockey for power by controlling a crucial resource?

Even if you just see it as an old story, Cain killed Able before money existed and before resource scarcity could even be conceived.  He did it for power, control and to manipulate.  Now, it might still be nice to eradicate our outdated monetary system, but I still think the best route toward sustainability and stability is gonna’ have to include humility and selfless sacrifice in the face of human hubris, and that includes well intentioned hubris like that of the Venus Project.

Reuse and core remodel projects are exciting, but there is a problem here that runs much deeper than the upgrading of an old home.  Communities and codes and current thinking all need to be upgraded.  Heaven forfend I sound old-fashioned here (never you mind the folksy sayings), but mobility and convenience have combined in the U.S. to mortally wound our sense of place.  What happened to our obligation to neighbors?  To the live local mindset?

Eric Morris of Freakonomics wrote last week about the top ten and bottom 10 walkable cities.  Most notable was his observation that “Six of the 10 most walkable cities were among the 20 largest urban places in 1900.”  At the same time, “None of the least walkable cities were among the 20 largest urban places in 1900, and five were not even in the top 100.”  The U.S.’s walkable cities are well over 100 years old.

Our scale for life was different then.  We knew the value and protected the value of our neighborhood because it wasn’teasy to often move in circles far abroad from it.  Now I am not saying I think we should all hitch some oxen to carts and put on galoshes(or rubbers, depending on where you’re from)  in order to slosh around our neighborhoods on rutted-out, mud roads.  But I am saying that we should be challenging our local planning departments to pull there heads out of their proverbial 1950 asses.  Modern is getting really old these days, and even back then newer wasn’t necessarily better.

I am glad to see Obama’s emphesis in volunteerism.  I too agree, that if we want to help our nation crawl out of recession we should start with committing to the life of our neighborhood.  If you have to load up the Lincoln Navigator to head the 30 minutes downtown for your stint of volunteerism then you are: 1.) not volunteering in your neighborhood 2.) volunteering in a means totally irrelevant to your lifestyle 3.) begging to be broken into and robbed.  Really though, if we want to help the economy maybe we should consider volunteering dinner for the family living just next door.  That means you may have to meet them first.

All of this to say that I don’t think there is an easy answer to our empty house problem.  Some urban and rural neighborhoods probably don’t have enough champions left to survive.  The ones that do won’t recover quickly.  Relationships don’t form overnight.  But I think if we hope to reuse many of the worthy but empty homes around the U.S. we have to do it a neighbor at a time.

Well, a group of dark skinned youth began to stride toward my vehicle while I idled waiting for the light to change.  I decided to play it cool.  I was a friendly person, so I assumed they just wanted directions or something.  About that time the car behind me started to blow it’s horn rather urgently.  ”The light is red you frick, damn,” I thought.  After another short moment the car pulls around me and guns it through the intersection while flying me the bird to boot.  ”Whatever Jackass,” I continued my inner dialogue, and then noticed that the approaching youth didn’t look as friendly as I had initially estimated.  And then suddenly…

The light turned green, and I calmly accelerated and continued my drive around scenic Detroit (only a little more nervous than I had been before).  All this to say that I have since been a huge non-fan of Detroit.  Honestly, it is a bit of a hell hole, and has been for a long time.

Some history:  In 1943 Detroit had its first race riot as blacks protested jobs for the war build up going only to whites.  Throughout the 50’s and 60’s the inner city continued to slide into black poverty while car companies built new facilities in the suburbs that were open to white workers only.  Then in 1967 Detroit suffered its second race riot after several cases of police brutality and an entire black neighborhood was bulldozed for Interstate 75.  Almost 200,000 people, mostly white, had fled Detroit between 1950 and 1967.  Almost 100,000 more fled after the riot of 1967.  Only poor, mostly black, residents remained.  At the hight of the unemployment leading up to the riots blacks hovered around 15% while whites stayed around 6%.

Here we are today, still paying the price of our racism over forty years ago.  Unemployment for January was at 20%.  Maybe with all the high paying, low skill jobs that went to whites throughout the car industry boom disappearing, the racial divide is closing.  Maybe not.

It was after the 1967 riot that Detroit became the leading city in the U.S. for gang violence and drug activity.  For forty years Detroit has remained close to the top of this list.  Now it is taking another heavy blow (with the Detroit Lions logging the worst NFL season ever!), and what is to be done?

An artist couple in Detroit has decided to do the insane and care about their neighborhood and their community.  They have started a project they call the Power House.  Who says that artists can’t be crazy and inspirational?  Oh, right.  Nobody does.  This is exactly the kind of thing we depend on artist for, and so far they have convinced a handful of friends to move into the neighborhood as well.  Through their collective efforts in the bombed out shell we call detroit they are gaining national attention on NPR and in the New York Times.  Since I heard about these guys on the radio I have been tracking their efforts and applaud them tremendously.

This is exactly the sort of creative and bold community growing effort we need in Detroit and throughout the U.S.A.  Detroit residents may have no choice but to take rehabilitation into its own hands on a local level, but this sort of thing is never a bad decision.  And with the growing socialist insanity at a national level this is the perfect time to take your community into your own hands.  Viva el Pioneer Spirit! and gumption that made America great.  Viva Power House!  Viva repairing racial tragedies of the past.

Churches are a community asset that tend to move-in and stay around for long periods of time.  Even if members come and go, the church remains.  They could be perfect entities to provide local care for those in need.
A local church has a better chance of knowing which families are good bets and which are not.  They know which have contributed to the community and which are traveling through or unstable.

Churches may not represent millions of liquid assets, but if they can raise $500,000 for a building program to invest in their own building, why not do so for neighbors instead?  Why should we homeowners only pay interest to the banks for the privilege of using their money?  This idea made perfect sense back when a home loan was $20,000 and the bank was a truly local entity.  Then the banker was just as likely as anyone to know who was a good bet and who was not.  Now maybe local churches and other community organizations could step in and fill the gap.

Over twenty years ago Frank and Deborah Popper began to call for their visionary “Buffalo Commons” in which the Great Plains would be returned to the prairie of the past and in part given back to Native Americans.  Their dream seems to be gaining traction during this most recent economic crisis.  Some are saying that we have been fighting against the plains long enough and instead we should be working with them.

Other voices, like Karl Stauber (past president of Northwest Area Foundation) and Joel Kotkin (New America Foundation), continue to speak out for saving the Great Plains and it’s rural ghetto’s through restoring its pioneer economy and spirit.  But what exactly is Rural America?  And how should we go about saving or restoring the dying Great Plains region as well as other rural ghettos in states as diverse as California, New Mexico, and Montana?

I disagree with the idea of turning rural towns and villages into ghost towns.  I think many of these communities have been ignored too long, and we as a country should actively seek to strengthen them.  Rural America contributes a strength and work ethic to our nation that we need, not to mention products that our cities can’t do without.  But, I also have a passion for justice, and the ruthless betrayal and destruction of Native cultures across this continent is something that we should also seek to repair.

Is there a way to accomplish both?  Can we see a sort of “Buffalo Commons” work in conjunction with a recovering Rural economy?  The USDA’s latest farm bill includes a new Grasslands Reserve Program, which offers incentives for ranchers and farmers to protect sensitive grasslands.  This could be a humble beginning, but The Land Institute is a group that is working on a much more sustainable solution toward solving, as they like to put it, the problem of agriculture.  I think their Natural Systems Agriculture could be the answer we desperately need.  While trying to restore the polyculture health and stability of the plains before we tilled them they also seek to produce equivalent crop yields to modern monoculture farming.  This discovery could be instrumental in allowing us as a nation to move forward in both bringing justice to Natives and an abused land while also bringing dignity back to our agricultural heartland.

There is a divide occurring in America between the Urban and the Rural.  Maybe it has always been there, but recent blue state and red state maps are being used to widen this divide and drive it home in the hearts and minds of Americans.  It would be unfortunate if we allowed these differences and growing hostilities to lead us toward unsustainable actions against our own “country” in one extreme or the other.

First they are built from earthen materials, the outer walls being essentially rammed earth with wooden structures sometimes internally.  I am fascinated with earthen building materials because you just can’t get more sustainable.  Literally the whole world’s population could build their homes with dirt and the earth would be no worse for wear.

Secondly, they have stood the test of time.  Not only in the sense that the buildings have lasted for hundreds of years, but also people in China have continued to actively live in them and construct them up until the last 100 years.  Practically, they must have worked.  Not only did they succeed in providing defense from other warring clans, but there must have been more.

Lastly, the tulou were built to house entire clans.  Some of the ones still in use today house up to 600 people.  Yet in Western culture it is rare to even find a handful of extended family members under the same roof.  I myself live in an urban bungalow with my wife and child, but we have often sought ways to shake this formula up.  International students have lived under our roof, friends who needed a place to go, and students who I have worked with and shared life with.  But these arrangements have been temporary.  Should we be so ardent about our values for individualism and personal space?  Are these things the earned privilege of a wealthy and affluent culture?  Or are they blights on what would otherwise be a more meaningful and sustainable life?

What other residential models like the tulou are out there but withering in the brutal heat of modernity?  Can we take some lessons from the dying clan lifestyle of China?  Or at least build homes that we expect our children’s children to be able to come home to some day, if only for a visit.