Landscraper

Having returned from a week long visit to northern Colorado, I come to the sad conclusion that our wretched suburban experiment has metastasized into every corner of our America. Greeley, CO has become identical to Inglewood, CA, to Elk Grove, CA, or to XXXXX, XX. Every city in America has become every other city in America...and what used to be a someplace, Greeley has become a noplace.

Driving through Greeley is identical to driving through Elk Grove, CA in every respect. The exact same chain stores, sporting the exact same architectural "embellishments" such as false fronts and useless cupolas, the exact same parking arrangements, layouts, and lighting. Single use zoning, leapfrogged residential tracts, car dealerships, fill stations and fast-food shacks. Why we all believe that this is the best possible use of our talents, our wealth and our energies, only demonstrates to me how utterly fucked up Americans are. We are collectively smitten with the same belief that razing grazing lands for low-density development is what we should be, what we ought to be doing.

Greeley is so sprawled out that I had a hard time imagining how a worker in one of the last remaining grain mills in the city could use any public transit to get to his job from his house twelve miles away. Indeed, he can't. So into his single occupant car he goes, along with every other Greeleyian. A large portion of the population commutes to Denver each day, too, and they wonder why I-25 is in such bad shape, or why incessant construction to expand capacity is required. For ninety five years the two lane highway 34 was more than adequate to serve the town. Now, in less than a decade of unmitigated sprawl they've decided that four lanes were required, and one can only predict that this won't be sufficient come 2019, when six lanes to service its commuters will be required.

Greeley has become a landscraper, devouring all the regional farmland that was used for the last two centuries. Somehow, they've decided that duing the last 200 years they've squandered its potential and that TJ-Maxx, Target stores and oceans of parking lots are a superior use of this resource. Never mind the fact that it might be marginal land -- it is still land, and it was used as a local resource for generations, providing hardscrabble crops, pasture, or simply open space.

Nope, the water rights were sold off, the farmers sold off to buy condos in North Carolina, the landscrapers were erected, new residents flocked in from southern California and New Jersey and they all think "Wow! We live in rural America!" while the original town core is rotted out, manufacturing and factory jobs disappeared, replaced by insurance adjusters, theater attendants and retail sales positions, where mandatory driving is the law and where his-and-her SUVs are compulsory instruments of daily living, indispensable for all those twin commutes required to support fantastic mortgages on starter mansions in the rural countryside.

Having a hard time imagining how some wage-earning underclassman would use a non-existent transit system, I also had a hard time imagining how Greeley would manage in any fossil fuel crisis, in any possible scenario of sustained high gasoline and diesel prices, or how Greeley could possibly support itself with PHEVs when the average commuter probably drives forty seven miles a day. Green Greeley? More like Browinsh-Ochre Greeley, what with its expanding auto-emissions and laced storm water runoff from several square miles of pavement. Do any of us really, really, imagine windmills, solar cells, PHEVs and a smart grid all working seamlessly to keep Greeley sprawl going, to continue exurban commuting, to allow us each a 5,400 sq ft housal unit loaded up with electronic gadgets and other time-saving devices, to provide for perpetual leisure?

I can't imagine it.