Self-sufficient towns needed for survival

By Michael Richards

I got off the freeway on a drive from Cedar Rapids to Mount Pleasant. I passed through Crawfordsville. Once one of Iowa's 1,000 self-sufficient communities, it is now nearly a ghost town.

Businesses that once served residents are mostly dead. No grocery store. No gas station. No Main Street cafe to get the morning news with morning coffee. Clusters of modest homes, a bank branch and a church remain. The post office maintains a link with humanity. Laughing kids in the schoolyard are the only counterforce to dead silence.

Crawfordsville and other dying Iowa communities were once self-sufficient centers of human life. You could buy everything you really needed without going anywhere else.

Who killed Crawfordsville? The same voracious forces that killed U.S. cable car companies decades ago. The same fast-car culture built a billion-dollar bypass around Crawfordsville.

Through the 1940s, no one really needed a car in any major city in America. Efficient electric cable cars carried us to work, a movie downtown and to local merchants who would meet our every need. Life worked, with much less stress.

Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, General Motors and Wall Street scions incorporated National City Lines. Their primary business activity was to buy up and shut down thousands of miles of interurban rail and electric streetcar lines. They had cars and oil to sell. Sustainable American cities and functional cable cars went on the scrap heap.

In the United States, we do not design public infrastructure for people, we design it for cars. Cash for Clunkers was one more futile patch on our auto-centric, oil-guzzling economy. The same billions could build sustainable towns and great cities.

After a devastating flood, Cedar Rapids has begged to get a few million when it needs

$5 billion to come back to point zero. But let Wall Street, The Oil Boys and now this Cash for Clunkers let out a whimper, and miraculously, billions are delivered within days.

What we are killing in Crawfordsville and Cedar Rapids is what America needs to survive long term: sustainable cities and self-sufficient towns where we walk, bus or bike to work, recreate and shop locally for all necessities of life. If we do not change our addictive, consumptive, climate-changing ways, it eventually will kill us.

Iowans, let's launch the most productive economic development initiative in our state's history. Let's rebuild Iowa towns based on intelligent energy conservation - towns where we work, recreate, worship and shop in our own neighborhoods.

Michael Richards, activist from Cedar Rapids, is author of “Sustainable Operating Systems/The Post Petrol Paradigm.”