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What this reviewer, and most commenters on rural depopulation, seem to miss is that there is no inherent virtue in "small town" America. Small towns have existe

What this reviewer, and most commenters on rural depopulation, seem to miss is that there is no inherent virtue in "small town" America. Small towns have existed, historically, either as jumping-off points for pioneer exploration or as local hubs for farmers and their goods. I think it's safe to say that the pioneer exploration of America is a done deal, and factory farms (and even family farms) have shown that advances in technology can make even farming efficient to the point that local hubs are no longer needed. The average New Yorker has such a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident, that I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer. The sooner we all move toward urban settlement and leave the rural areas to efficient farming, weekend trips, and mother nature, the better!

krying_krab 17y ago
Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. The Midwest and its way of life depended on a technology and an industry that is not anymore experiencing growth. This could happen in coastal cities tomorrow too. Trying to adapt your town to meet the needs of a modern economy is, I think, a much nobler cause than letting it wither and die because it lacks some sort of abstract "inherent virtue" thing. I'm pretty sure there's no "inherent virtue" in having kids anymore either. I mean think about it, kids increase net environmental impact by humans. :|
- lionhearted 17y ago
  > Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. D'oh, I upvoted your comment before I read the whole thing. After spending time in provincial China, yes, I agree that the people living with miserable quality of life on subsistence farming should move to Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, or one of the developed places in the rest of Asia or the West. Haven't been to Africa but I imagine it's similar. Most of the valuable and useful things happening in the world right now depend more on working with other people than natural resources or lots of space. If you like it as a preference, go right ahead for it. But speaking in terms of individual success and progress, or as advancement as humanity/society-at-large, yes, generally speaking we ought to migrate to where there's other smart people we can work with. So I agree with the first part of your semi-sarcastic comment because I missed the sarcasm, though I disagree a bit with the rest of it.
HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
There is no inherent virtue in just about any living arrangement: it all depends on your perspective. Yours appears to be focused on environmental impact, I prefer to live in the near silence out in the country. When I visit family in NYC, I can't believe that I used to live there: the noise and crowds drive me nuts! I don't live in an incorporated town: I live in a rural "township" with a population of roughly 2,000 over 36 square miles. IIRC, that's about the size of Manhattan. Yet I know my neighbors better than I did when I lived in Brooklyn, NY some 20 years ago. The mother Nature you relegate to weekend trips is the same mother Nature I enjoy dealing with every day. Like I said: it's all about perspective.
garply 17y ago
'I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer' I found this post really insensitive. But it's good, because it made me realize that I've been insensitive in a similar way without knowing it. My brother and I grew up in a rural town of 6,000 in the Midwest. He went off to Harvard and is now a doctor on the West Coast and I went off to Stanford and now run a business in China. We visit home on the holidays. So you can say the article struck a personal note - I'd never read about the pattern before (though I was intuitively aware of it) and knowing that I'm contributing to it leaves me with a sense of melancholy. The point that you miss, jballanc, is that these are communities of living people - each with its own tiny culture. There are problems with these places that I don't know how to solve, but their gradual decay is sad in the same way that the destruction of cultures all over the world is sad. I have to thank you, though. As a foreigner in China whose invested a lot of time in mastering Mandarin, I've come to strongly believe that the elimination of the other Chinese dialects and the traditional character set is a very favorable thing. I've probably said, at some point or another, that I 'really couldn't think of a good reason for the traditional character set to exist anymore'. Until now, I've never been able to fully understand why, for example, some Taiwanese Americans get so upset about the gradual decline of their character set. When speaking to them about the issue, I must have come off as insensitive as you do to me. In the future, I will change my behavior.
- jballanc 17y ago
  I, too, grew up in a small Midwest town and have since lived in Miami, New York, and Silicon Valley. I guess you could say that I'm being insensitive, but I tend to see things a bit differently. Change is inevitable, and thinking that you can hold on to things forever is foolhardy at best. Yes, small town America has an ever so slightly different culture, and loosing it might be painful (much like loosing traditional print media, I should think). But I always think back to when I was 8. I had a stuffed toy animal that I loved and vowed never to give up. Then I realized that, while that stuffed animal represented a certain part of my life that I valued, it was time to move on. There will always be new things to value in the future. Now, as for the issue you raise of language, at the risk of sounding hypocritical I must say I've always been a strong proponent of preserving dialects and less common languages. I think it ultimately comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. I don't think that small town America represents a culture unique enough, or hard enough to recreate, that it's worth extraordinary attempts to preserve it. Languages, on the other hand, often represent hundreds or thousands of years of collective cultural knowledge, and once that's gone, it's gone. A last point I feel I should make: if there is some "intrinsic value" to small town America, I think attempting to preserve small towns by creating artificial incentives to keep headstrong youth from leaving would probably do as much or more to destroy that intrinsic value than just letting nature take its course, so to speak, and gradually reduce the number of small towns.
wglb 17y ago
Please explain how the average New Yorker has a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident. Are you referring to CAFO?
- eru 17y ago
  Just a guess. The average New Yorker may not have a car.
  - wglb 17y ago
    I would say that you are correct. However, the total impact of cities is significantly higher.
    - eru 17y ago
      Do we have any sources pointing either way? I expect it should be more efficient to provide stuff (food, energy, whatever) to a dense population due to economics of scale. On the other hand bringing that stuff over might take more energy.
- pchristensen 17y ago
  NYC has a higher share of transit riders and walkers than any city, also a decent number of bikes, so much fewer VMT per capita. Also, larger multi-unit buildings are more efficient to heat than single family houses. So although NYC's environmental impact is huge, its residents have about half as much impact per capita as average Americans. Incidentally, CA has lower than average environmental impact because the temperate weather means less energy used for heating and cooling. (Plus the higher efficiency standards and higher population density)
  - wglb 17y ago
    I would think that is the case if you exclude the environmental disaster that is LA, and the ecological harm done by flooding the imperial valley with water from Mono Lake.
wglb 17y ago
The no inherent virtue in "small town" America is really off the mark and inappropriate. And as noted elsewhere, it isn't the per-capita environmental load that is important, it is the total load. Aside from CAFO and other agricultural environmental costs, the total rural load might be small. And you can't attribute the agricultural load to the people living there, because the food goes to the cities to be consumed.

krying_krab 17y ago

Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. The Midwest and its way of life depended on a technology and an industry that is not anymore experiencing growth. This could happen in coastal cities tomorrow too. Trying to adapt your town to meet the needs of a modern economy is, I think, a much nobler cause than letting it wither and die because it lacks some sort of abstract "inherent virtue" thing. I'm pretty sure there's no "inherent virtue" in having kids anymore either. I mean think about it, kids increase net environmental impact by humans. :|

lionhearted 17y ago
> Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. D'oh, I upvoted your comment before I read the whole thing. After spending time in provincial China, yes, I agree that the people living with miserable quality of life on subsistence farming should move to Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, or one of the developed places in the rest of Asia or the West. Haven't been to Africa but I imagine it's similar. Most of the valuable and useful things happening in the world right now depend more on working with other people than natural resources or lots of space. If you like it as a preference, go right ahead for it. But speaking in terms of individual success and progress, or as advancement as humanity/society-at-large, yes, generally speaking we ought to migrate to where there's other smart people we can work with. So I agree with the first part of your semi-sarcastic comment because I missed the sarcasm, though I disagree a bit with the rest of it.

HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago

There is no inherent virtue in just about any living arrangement: it all depends on your perspective. Yours appears to be focused on environmental impact, I prefer to live in the near silence out in the country. When I visit family in NYC, I can't believe that I used to live there: the noise and crowds drive me nuts! I don't live in an incorporated town: I live in a rural "township" with a population of roughly 2,000 over 36 square miles. IIRC, that's about the size of Manhattan. Yet I know my neighbors better than I did when I lived in Brooklyn, NY some 20 years ago. The mother Nature you relegate to weekend trips is the same mother Nature I enjoy dealing with every day. Like I said: it's all about perspective.

garply 17y ago

'I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer' I found this post really insensitive. But it's good, because it made me realize that I've been insensitive in a similar way without knowing it. My brother and I grew up in a rural town of 6,000 in the Midwest. He went off to Harvard and is now a doctor on the West Coast and I went off to Stanford and now run a business in China. We visit home on the holidays. So you can say the article struck a personal note - I'd never read about the pattern before (though I was intuitively aware of it) and knowing that I'm contributing to it leaves me with a sense of melancholy. The point that you miss, jballanc, is that these are communities of living people - each with its own tiny culture. There are problems with these places that I don't know how to solve, but their gradual decay is sad in the same way that the destruction of cultures all over the world is sad. I have to thank you, though. As a foreigner in China whose invested a lot of time in mastering Mandarin, I've come to strongly believe that the elimination of the other Chinese dialects and the traditional character set is a very favorable thing. I've probably said, at some point or another, that I 'really couldn't think of a good reason for the traditional character set to exist anymore'. Until now, I've never been able to fully understand why, for example, some Taiwanese Americans get so upset about the gradual decline of their character set. When speaking to them about the issue, I must have come off as insensitive as you do to me. In the future, I will change my behavior.

jballanc 17y ago
I, too, grew up in a small Midwest town and have since lived in Miami, New York, and Silicon Valley. I guess you could say that I'm being insensitive, but I tend to see things a bit differently. Change is inevitable, and thinking that you can hold on to things forever is foolhardy at best. Yes, small town America has an ever so slightly different culture, and loosing it might be painful (much like loosing traditional print media, I should think). But I always think back to when I was 8. I had a stuffed toy animal that I loved and vowed never to give up. Then I realized that, while that stuffed animal represented a certain part of my life that I valued, it was time to move on. There will always be new things to value in the future. Now, as for the issue you raise of language, at the risk of sounding hypocritical I must say I've always been a strong proponent of preserving dialects and less common languages. I think it ultimately comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. I don't think that small town America represents a culture unique enough, or hard enough to recreate, that it's worth extraordinary attempts to preserve it. Languages, on the other hand, often represent hundreds or thousands of years of collective cultural knowledge, and once that's gone, it's gone. A last point I feel I should make: if there is some "intrinsic value" to small town America, I think attempting to preserve small towns by creating artificial incentives to keep headstrong youth from leaving would probably do as much or more to destroy that intrinsic value than just letting nature take its course, so to speak, and gradually reduce the number of small towns.

wglb 17y ago

Please explain how the average New Yorker has a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident. Are you referring to CAFO?

eru 17y ago
Just a guess. The average New Yorker may not have a car.
- wglb 17y ago
  I would say that you are correct. However, the total impact of cities is significantly higher.
  - eru 17y ago
    Do we have any sources pointing either way? I expect it should be more efficient to provide stuff (food, energy, whatever) to a dense population due to economics of scale. On the other hand bringing that stuff over might take more energy.
pchristensen 17y ago
NYC has a higher share of transit riders and walkers than any city, also a decent number of bikes, so much fewer VMT per capita. Also, larger multi-unit buildings are more efficient to heat than single family houses. So although NYC's environmental impact is huge, its residents have about half as much impact per capita as average Americans. Incidentally, CA has lower than average environmental impact because the temperate weather means less energy used for heating and cooling. (Plus the higher efficiency standards and higher population density)
- wglb 17y ago
  I would think that is the case if you exclude the environmental disaster that is LA, and the ecological harm done by flooding the imperial valley with water from Mono Lake.

wglb 17y ago

The no inherent virtue in "small town" America is really off the mark and inappropriate. And as noted elsewhere, it isn't the per-capita environmental load that is important, it is the total load. Aside from CAFO and other agricultural environmental costs, the total rural load might be small. And you can't attribute the agricultural load to the people living there, because the food goes to the cities to be consumed.