OUT HERE on the edge of the continent, where the force fields of respectability and convention run thin, we like to think of ourselves as progressive, in an undogmatic way. But really we are conservative, when you get down to it. We are alert constantly to the capacity for evil in human nature, especially in the form of greed, and greed’s designs upon the land. We are skeptical of the version of progress that the corporate market pushes at us. We embrace the wisdom of the past, especially as embodied in the natives of this place.

Russell Kirk, the intellectual progenitor of modern conservative thought, marked these as central tendencies of what he called the “conservative mind.” (Kirk would not be pleased by what claims that banner today, but that’s another matter.) We revere the land and take a dim view of change, and if those are not conservative inclinations, then nothing is.

Unlike the conservatism that prevails in Washington, ours is not pliant to moneyed interest or calculated for political advantage. It represents the strange fate that befalls the progressive in a commercial culture that turns everything into a commodity for gain. Yet this does not exempt us from the karmic conundrums that attend efforts to resist change or turn back the clock. Nor does it make us immune to the blind spots that can occur when a sense of virtue is wrapped up too tightly in the preservation of a status quo, even an ecological one.

Create a national park, restore a wetland, and people want to drive out here to partake of them. Start to create a local food economy, and more people come who are less interested in the land- scape than in the food. The town fills with cars. Parking becomes a problem. A place in which ecology is practically a religion becomes, on summer weekends, a hot spot on air pollution maps.

We locals become a little cranky and walk around with a debate inside our heads. We like our neighbors who have started the ventures that help attract these crowds. We want them to succeed.

We support local economy, organic food, all of it. Yet each success takes us a little further from what we thought we wanted to be—or at least from what this place used to be. It also drives up real estate prices, so that people who made the community what it is can no longer afford to be part of it.

It is not a new dilemma—the failure of success. But it has a particular and ironic twist in a place where people thought they were going to be different. It eats at us, the way our certitudes keep colliding; and this is what makes local points of contention—a footbridge over a creek, or an oyster farm on Tomales Bay—so symbolically hyper-charged, almost like conflicts in the Middle East. The disagree- ments are over competing versions of good and therefore become projection screens for the tensions that beset us not just from the outside, but from inside as well.

Walking—good. Sustainable aquaculture—good. Local food economy—good. How do such goods become bads? It is hard enough to battle developers. Now the fight is over objects of our own desire too. We feel a need to draw a line. But where, and how—especially

when we are part of what we have to draw the line against? We build our homes at the edge of this stunning landscape—

well, let’s call the spade here, in this stunning landscape. Then we get our backs up at those who would intrude upon it with their footsteps, or a sustainable livelihood, or a second unit that enables the owner to afford the first. We create our own understated and ecologically responsible versions of better homes and gardens, and then wonder why the town cannot remain forever the rough-edged remnant of the Old West it still is in our minds.

As somebody once put it, the one who builds the house is the developer; the one who lives in it is the environmentalist. Yet we are not unself-conscious people. The paradoxes—I put this gently—of our oppositions rest uneasily in us, along with the awareness that we are a privileged group to begin with—we who oppose privilege on principle—just for being here. We find ourselves a little like those people who, in middle age, begin to suspect that they have become the parent they rebelled against, and that their rebellion somehow binds them to that parent all the more.

This quandary is not new to me. From the time I first came to West Marin 15 years ago, I have felt that I had walked back into a drama I’ve been through before. I spent my teen years at the tip of Cape Cod, which is as far east as Point Reyes Station is west. My mother’s husband was an artist-craftsman who owned a shop—and later apartments—in Provincetown, where the land ends, and from which the next stop is England. The Pilgrims landed there before they went on to Plymouth.

P’town, as it is called, is a compact little village along a narrow strip between the bay and the dunes. Physically and geographically, it is very different from West Marin. The Cape at that point is less than two miles wide; the open spaces are out to sea. History overhangs the place in the form of a tower that commemorates the Pilgrim landing.

And yet P’town in those days was similar too. The traditional economy was based on food. Where we have cows, P’town had fish. More precisely, it had a fishing fleet that worked the bay and the Georges Banks beyond. The old-timers were Portuguese fishermen, tough, swarthy guys who went out for a week or more and who still

walked barefoot down Commercial Street in winter. As out here, there were decaying remnants of a railroad. It had once carried the fish to Boston, which is 120 miles by land, though only about 50 by sea.

What P’town shared most with West Marin was a sense of being beyond the pull of social constraint. It was a separate world; you could go for years without a coat and tie. Artists and writers were drawn to the rustic authenticity where they were close enough to Boston and New York for a quick visit to a publisher or gallery. Eugene O’Neill started the Provincetown Playhouse. Norman Mailer, Stanley Kunitz, and a host of others followed.

What drew them drew another group as well—gays, who came in summer droves and let it all hang out in ways they couldn’t even in New York back then. The result was a mélange like no place else. There was traditional P’town, embodied in the fishing fleet and Portuguese Bakery, with its flipper bread and tangy soup. And then there was Mr. Kenneth with his hat shop; the female impersonator lounge singer at the Crown and Anchor Inn; the lesbian bar called the Ace of Spades, which jutted out into the bay and from the deck of which throaty laughter could be heard late into the night; and the Atlantic House down the alley where the homo-erotica in the men’s room could make even a gay sailor blush. A town council dominated by people with names like Santos and Cabral looked upon it all with a Mediterranean shrug. (The business brought to their bars and restaurants didn’t hurt.)

It was a rich mix, and a fragile one. As with so many places, P’town was done in by what made it so attractive; its uniqueness turned on itself. The tourist shops metastasized. Fudge became more preva- lent than fish. The gay self-presentation became more circus-y and contrived. Wooden cottages were spiffed up. Rough turned into quaint; the nooks and crannies of affordability disappeared. The year-round population diminished; merchants had fewer customers in the winter months. Meanwhile, artists without trust funds could no longer pay the rents—nor could very many others.

If the shoe doesn’t fit enough already, there’s more. Outside of town, a new national park—the Cape Cod National Seashore—made the lower Cape (the end furthest out, though also the furthest north) all the more attractive, and the existing real estate all the more valuable. The park saved a precious landscape—within its boundaries. Outside them, development came like mange. The marsh across the road from the Goose Hummock outdoor shop in Orleans, which I passed on my way to school each day, is now the Cranberry Cove Plaza. You could be anywhere. Much of the Cape is that way now. It pains me to go back.

In the parts that aren’t spoiled, moreover, an Aunt Sally land- scape has replaced the Huck Finn version—preserved, but with a precious quality, and woe to him or her who tracks dirt across the rug. Deer hunting season used to be a little like a Jewish holiday in New York, with empty desks at Nauset High School. Now the woods are houses. The guys go to New Hampshire to hunt. There was a dune colony just outside of P’town, near Pilgrim Lake, where adventuresome souls lived off the grid in summer in driftwood shacks. The Park Service took it down. The dune colony was a little like the summer encampment at White House Pool, halfway between Point Reyes and Inverness, where young people in the 1960s took refuge when they had to relinquish their winter rentals to the owners. The informal campsite couldn’t happen now; and what is relief to some is a sense of loss to others, leaving us with a nagging question as to whether there might have been another way—one that maintained our rougher edges and the social dimension of our landscape.

That Cape experience helped to shape my conservative side, in the Kirkean sense. Washington conservatives see evil mainly in govern- ment and in a teeming penumbra of Communists, gays, Muslims, and liberals that never give them rest. I see evil more in money—not money itself but the love of it, the cupidity, which threatens always to ruin that which is precious and beyond price.

That weighs on me when I see development creeping out from Petaluma, Fairfax, and Novato, and the story poles that go up periodically around town, and when I think about the potential ripples from an upgraded Grandi Building in Point Reyes Station.

When I watch the parade on Western Weekend, I flash back to the P’town equivalent, the annual Blessing of the Fleet. It is still a celebration, if anything louder and more garish than before. But there is no more fleet, just a sad assemblage of rusting hulks at the town pier. The fish market there once did a brisk business. Town kids dived for coins nearby. Now they are gone; and it is hard not to wonder whether our ranches will go the same way and the pick-ups in town become mainly exurban accoutrements for the hauling of landscaping equipment and organic garden supplies. Edmund Burke, that proto-conservative, worried about the unique local cultures that the Jacobins of the French Revolution would destroy with their rationalistic planning. The real estate market is a Jacobin by other means. Yes, the bulwarks here are stronger than they were on the Cape. We have county planning and the Coastal Commission, where the Cape back then had neither. Still, money doesn’t sleep, and plenty of damage can be done within the existing “envelope,” as the planners call it.

But then I remember the kid—myself—whose family lived on tourists, as did most of the people I knew. My mother and her husband were at the shop until 9:00 or 10:00 every night. I worked on a golf course and in a grocery store where the customers were tourists too. “The season,” as we called it, ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day—three months in which to make the nut for the year. There was gloom at the dinner table on rainy weekends, and even more when the bad weather stretched on for days.

That memory tempers my annoyance now at the traffic. Cars mean customers, and something besides spaghetti on the dinner table. I find myself asking merchants in town how the season’s going. I hope they don’t think I’m nosey; part of me thinks I’m still one of them. There is grumbling in town about the tourists. We grumbled too—about the ones who pawed the merchandise, and let their kids run wild, and never bought anything. My mother’s husband had a thing about the tourists from Canada, of all places, and the women who should have left the Bermuda shorts at home.

But I cannot get too down on tourists. I’ve been tempted, as when a contentious fellow shouted curses at me and my young son when we didn’t vacate a parking space as he expected. Still, our merchants need the business if there is to be a local economy and a Main Street with shops and life. Those lines of upscale motorcycle fantasists on Sundays help keep the Bovine Bakery open for the rest of us. And for all the traffic, it is a kind that is dependent upon the landscape and thus provides an economic base for it.

Do we really expect taxpayers to pay for a park and then let it become a private viewscape for those fortunate enough to be situated nearby? No matter what we do or don’t do, there is a price. Even if we try to build a wall around West Marin, our community still will change because of who gets to live within the wall and who doesn’t. From a strictly ecological standpoint that might not seem so bad to some. The Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, north of Manhattan, has preserved almost 3,500 acres of mainly woodland.

You look at the surrounding sprawl and feel grateful for the enclave, much of which is open to the public.

But most of us humans cannot live on ecology alone. There is a social ecology here as well as a natural one; inhabitants as well as habitat. Our town is symbiotic with ranchers, ranch-hands, tradesmen, along with the artists and musicians, who together comprise a human web within the natural one to make the place unique. Yet for all the effort to preserve the landscape out here, not much has been devoted to the integrity of the town itself and the social ecology it embodies.

This is a great opportunity. Our biggest contribution to the larger ecological cause could be in finding new ways for the social and the natural to co-exist.

Sustainability without settlement is a non sequitur, and one to which Western environmental movements are prone. I sometimes sense in the complaints about tourists—and in the opposition to such things as an oyster farm—an indifference to livelihood generally and to the practicalities of daily life. This is the classic astigmatism of the conservative gentry; and it is no less myopic because it is connected now to ecology and landscape.

Not long ago I too might have shared it. Then I married a woman from the Philippines and began to visit her family on their rice farm there. It is a rural landscape in a way that ours no longer is. The roads are dirt. There is no plumbing. Chickens and goats run about in the yard. When it is time to prepare dinner, my wife’s mother goes out back with a knife.

Yet for all this it is a domesticated landscape. Practically every inch is accounted for, and must be in a land that is so populous and poor. There are efforts in that country to restore clearcut mountain- sides and protect remaining forests. But the concept of “wilderness” in the American sense does not exist. My wife had never encountered it until she moved here. For most of the world wilderness is a luxury for those whose income and sustenance comes from someplace else.

Untouched places are important, where they actually exist. But for most of humanity the challenge is to live on and with the land in a way that doesn’t ruin it; to embrace that challenge in West Marin might help us unravel the conundrum of change. Main Street and landscape are connected. If we want a town that is not just a quaint tourist destination, then we had better support the ranches and dairy farms—and perhaps even an oyster farm—that sustain the agrarian version. No ranches, no feed barn.

A range of housing is important too, to prevent the town from becoming too upscale and precious. Socially and environmentally, it is hardly ideal that so many of our service workers must drive in from Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa each day. This means, among other things, encouraging second units, especially close in. It means filling in the town so we can leave the landscape alone.

Organizations such as the Community Land Trust Association of West Marin (CLAM) and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) have been doing yeoman work along these lines. Why not extend the techniques by which MALT has helped preserve the landscape to the town itself? If we can buy development rights to ranchland, for example, why not to town land?

Why not establish a town trust and buy key parcels ourselves? It could help keep out invasive uses, and the rents on existing or created housing or shops could provide a funding base for local purposes.

Such a trust might also purchase parcels in town to create com- mon places where the social ecology can flourish. One of the constants in Provincetown through the years has been the benches outside the town hall on Commercial Street. No matter how expensive and tacky the place becomes—and it is both—the benches do not discriminate.

Anyone can sit there to take in the passing scene. This is social open space. Stinson Beach has a town green. Every

town should, especially ones that want to maintain a noncommercial dimension and continuity with the past, as we conservatives want to do.

I know a person who bemoans change in town and the visitors who flock here. This person’s house wasn’t even built when another friend up the road first moved in. There are old-timers who were here before both of them; from their standpoint, the first to move in was a hippie, the other gentry, and both took some getting used to. I have seen pictures from the early 1900s of locomotives coming down the middle of Main Street and the entire northeast side devoted to a railroad yard. That’s not a past that anyone I know wants to go back to.

There is a geology of memory out here, an accretion of reference points for the better yesterday. We tend to think the story starts when we enter; yet our own entrance might have been someone else’s jarring change. The point is not that one house justifies another ad infinitum until the landscape is full. It is that we need to approach the question with humility and an awareness that the process that enabled us to be here is going to continue in some form.

We need to leave some play in the line and some room for humans in the ecological scheme. Nature as a concept would not exist without us. The one thing we can say for certain is that the town will be different in 30 years, just as it is different now than 30 years ago. Once upon a time, the Dance Palace was in the Cabaline. Point Reyes Books was a natural food store. Building Supply was in the Grandi Building, and there was a dance studio above it.

That process will continue, and this is not necessarily to be regretted. If the change is indigenous and inventive—as it can be— we could look at the results and think, “Hmmm, not so bad.” A generation ago, a burst of local energy gave rise to the Dance Palace, the Point Reyes Clinic, and other civic institutions that are warp and woof of the community today. That change is our normal. If we can bequeath a new normal such as that, then we conservatives will be able to rest in peace.

Download this article (PDF): WMR_Volume3_JRowe

Our good friend and co-director, Jonathan Rowe, died suddenly the morning of Sunday, March 20. Jonathan was a brilliant thinker, a gentle man, a gifted writer. His writings on commons inspired this project, which he co-founded. His guidance, his thinking, his words, his friendship will be cherished. He will be deeply missed.

This article (http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/reclaiming-the-commons/the-hidden-commons) which Jonathan wrote for YES! magazine, we used as a common reading for a seminar I organized in 2005 when I first discovered Jonathan and his writings on the commons.

He also helped write curriculum on the commons for high school students in New York. I used this writing with a group of home schoolers here in town around the same time. We surveyed our commons and began to tease out the meaning and the practical way we might work with it here.

The adult seminars met in Inverness and Point Reyes. These discussions, and then visits here by Mark Lakeman of City Repair (whom Jonathan invited) garnered tremendous enthusiasm. In February 2006 we organized a community walkabout, or what Jonathan called a perambulation. More than sixty people on a rainy day surveyed our physical space.

Step by step, out of a movement for the commons, this organization grew. And projects like the Mesa Road Pathway, the Native Garden at the Livery Green, the Town Commons which is just now coming into being, and much more.

I will help create a memorial for Jonathan. I will learn what is most helpful to his wife and son so we can all take part in holding them however they need.

I’m grieving a lot myself like many of you. He was a mentor, a friend, an editor of my writing, an inspiring writer. We co-founded West Marin Commons.

Jonathan was someone who valued words and their meanings, ideas and how they manifest, in ways I will always seek out.

Elizabeth Barnet

On Sunday, October 10 from noon until 4 we are planning a work day afternoon to weed, prune, mulch, and plant. Please bring gloves and your favorite tools for weeding crab grass – we’ve found forks work well.  But if you know how to use a gancho well, that too works great.

We are preparing a location within the garden for the solar-powered pump and water fountain installation. Bring tools and work gloves.

Part of the afternoon we will have an apple press in operation and will need someone who knows how to work an apple press (with care for the machine and caution for the participants).  We will also need apples collected and we will need clean containers.

Latino Photo Project and Shoreline School Readiness groups will work in collaboration with us.

Does anyone play the guitar or accordion and know some good songs to work by?

This is one of many community work projects scheduled for that day.  This will be similar to the low-carbon faire we did last year in alignment with 350.org (http://www.350.org/actions).  At 4pm the various work parties in the area are gathering at the Dance Palace for soup (prepared by Mainstreet Moms), donated beer and ice cream, and a report back – with photos – on the activities of the day.

Please contact us if you’d like to help.  A handful of committed participants will make this a productive and fun event.

The first time I drove through Novato I thought that I had let my attention wander and taken a wrong turn. As you enter town from West Marin, Novato Boulevard seems almost as wide as a freeway. It is supposed to be Northern California but it feels more like L.A.

Then you pass the diner on the left and somehow the scene changes.  The road narrows to two lanes.  There is the welcome shade of trees, and a sense that the occupants of the houses might not be subscribers to Better Homes and Gardens.

You are back in small town America, circa 1949 — a stretch of a half-mile or so that progress somehow missed.  Then you cross Diablo Boulevard at the stoplight and it is L.A. again.  Two malls in the next half mile, and oceans of parking that remind you what rules the roost around here.

With auto-centricity on both sides I’ve wondered how long the quirky center could hold. Not very, it now appears.  According to the Marin Independent Journal, the Novato city council has decided to eliminate the two lane stretch.  It will demolish the houses, cut the trees, and widen the road to four lanes; and it will do all this for the “efficiency” of traffic flow.

Don’t people ever learn?  About half a mile to the east is Highway 101, which was built to ensure an efficient flow of traffic north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  Have you driven 101 at rush hour lately?  Widen it and they will come, and make it clogged again.

Perhaps a mile back from the stretch in question is San Marin Drive.  It is four lanes plus parking, with strip mall of course, and a model of efficiency by the standards of the typical traffic engineer.  So much so that speeding has become a chronic problem. Not long ago a motorcyclist crashed into a father and daughter, killed the latter and left the father maimed.  Residents are desperate for ways to slow the traffic down.

That’s what the two-lane stretch on Novato Boulevard does.  It “calms” the traffic in the term of the trade.   The planned widening would “take down the quality of our community and take down beautiful trees,” one resident told the IJ. “I like the idea of slower traffic.  It’s fine by me.”

Novato has been down this road before, so to speak.  For years it permitted strip malls to proliferate around town until its main street – Grant Avenue – dried up.  Then it had to spend millions to spiff up Grant Ave and try to bring people back.  Now it wants to speed up the traffic on Novato Boulevard with the probable result that it will have to slow it down again.

What’s the old saying about making the same mistake over and over and expecting somehow to get a different result?

Jonathan Rowe

A culture reveals itself in what it believes can go wrong.  Economists for example have no concept of bad growth. Growth can be too fast, in which case the economy is “overheating.”  It can be too slow, in which case it is “sluggish.”  Economists of a leftward bent might say that the fruits of growth are distributed unfairly.  The rich get too much and everyone else too little.

But fruits they are assumed to be –  a succulent pie that just needs to be carved in a more equitable way.  That the pie itself might be unhealthful or spoiled is not within the ken of the conventional economic mind.  The possibility cannot exist.  Growth might consist of junk food and violent video games, pills to which people are addicted, and a host of other such things.  Still it is growth and therefore devoutly to be sought, as far as the economist (and the corporation) are concerned.

Something similar happens with invasions of the cultural and social realm.  Unless there is a link to bodily harm, in the form of cancer in particular, then harms are deemed spectral and of marginal importance.  What prompts this thought is news of a $24 million U.N. study on the possible connection between cell phones and cancer.

The study covered 13 countries and was – not surprisingly – inconclusive.  Researchers found a small correlation but not an overwhelming one.  Critics pointed out that the study was based on cell phone usage patterns from a decade or more ago when 30 minutes a day was considered “heavy.”   Also the study ignored the difference between people who used headsets and those who held the phone itself next to their ear.

That’s twenty four million to learn not much.  But my question is this.  Do we really have to determine that something causes cancer before we can say it isn’t good?  Can’t we talk about the noise and annoyance in public places, the way people tune out the life around them – the way parents ignore their own kids while yakking on the cell phone for pete’s sake?

The cancer centric bent of advocacy in this country has a number of sources.  For one thing it goes to our national body obsession.  For another, it arises from the requirements of the legal and legislative arenas.  Regulation here must be justified in terms of what is called the “police power;” and harm to person or property is the most direct and unambiguous way of invoking that.  In the courts, such harms provide a basis for lawsuits that seek money damages.

The more general degradation of the cognitive environment is harder to quantify and thus harder to regulate and seek compensation for.   Our processes for determining what a problem is, thus are slanted in the direction of personal bodily harm.  That is important, certainly.  And certainly there are big gaps there, where powerful interests are concerned (workplace hazards for example.)

But the health of our social body is important too, and of the common spaces we inhabit.  When the law takes equal cognizance of that, it will be a sign of progress.

By Toby Barlow

A friend who owns an independent bookstore was recently telling me about a disturbing trend where people go into her store, browse titles, read a few pages, and then go order it from Amazon, all to save whatever you save by shopping on line.

I told her that I actually do the opposite. If I see a book that interests me, I read the customer reviews online, then I call my local store, Leopold’s, and order it. Yes, it’s slower, but I’m usually already in the middle of another book, so I have time. It costs more too but I actually like doing my part to help keep the lights on, maybe helping them enough so they can hire some nerdy kid who likes books.

You might think your town is different than mine. After all, I live in downtown Detroit and your community is doing so much better than that. Listen to those birds chirping! Look at that line at the coffee shop! It’s nothing like downtown Detroit where, as we all know, great economic changes have wrought a massive Godzilla-scale beat down. But if you think that can’t happen to you, lemme tell you, it can.

It has been, what, fifteen years since the internet started changing everything? And thanks to it we now have a lot of convenience (click!) and a lot of social networking (poke!) and a lot of information (forward!) yet instead of making us happier we are living in a woefully insecure society where very few models are actually sustainable.

Just to take one small example, I usually watch 30 Rock on Hulu, which isn’t generally considered to be anything near a viable business model. If I happen to be home, I watch 30 Rock on NBC, which is losing money faster than a spastic drunk at a casino. NBC was just bought by Comcast, the cable giant whose entire mega-profitable empire, I just learned from The Atlantic, is seriously threatened by things like, oh, Hulu.

The only ones who are winning right now are the robots. The almost completely computerized and automated iTunes, Netflix and Amazon are all making serious bank. And I can get 30 Rock episodes from each of them. But I can’t get it at my video store anymore because my video store is closed. Which is kind of my point. I liked those guys. Sure, one of them was a little creepy, but at least he had a job. I mean, where do the creepy guys go when they lose their jobs? What do they do? Do I want to know? (No, I don’t want to know. Let’s just give him a job.)

Every holiday season more and more people do all their shopping online, forcing more local stores out of business and local unemployment goes up and then, lo and behold, next Christmas nobody has as much money. The whole thing is either a reverse engineered ponzi scheme or a losing game of three-card monte or it’s just the end of Reservoir Dogs where they all shoot one another dead.

So can we maybe just slow it down a little? As spring arrives and we embrace the slow food movement and plant our gardens and tend to our bees, I would also like to propose we think about slow shopping too. Walk into a store and browse. It will take more time, but by making it a bit more difficult you’ll actually wind up spending less money, thusly saving more than you would have if you had shopped on-line.

I’m not saying the Internet is evil, far from it, it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing (Hi Arianna!) and if you need a book fast then, sure, by all means, go buy it on-line at bn.com. But if there’s a place near you where you can go support your community, then stop on by there instead. Make the effort. Yes, you might pay more, but a lot of the extra money you’re paying in local taxes goes to filling in your potholes and paying for someone to watch your kids cross the street. Businesses survive on wafer thin margins, one more customer going and shopping at a store can actually make a big difference.

Seriously, you might feel savvy buying those shoes from Zapatos but in the long run you’re really not. The phrase “free shipping” is really just like crack cocaine, it’s cheap, it’s addictive and, in the end, it will cause the same horrible destruction in your community.

If you really want to know what is going to happen if you keep sending your money to support those distant acres of automated warehouses, come visit Detroit and take a look around. You’ll see parts of town that look exactly like that burned out futuristic landscape from The Terminator. You know, that’s the movie where the robots won.

Toby Barlow is a writer who lives in downtown Detroit. His critically acclaimed novel Sharp Teeth is currently available from Random House in the U.K., HarperCollins in the U.S., and in a few other countries whose languages he doesn’t understand. His book is available at your local bookstore.

Originally published on Huffington Post

POSTED March 22, 2010

Published on OntheCommons May 2010

http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2700

www.onthecommons.org

Jonathan Rowe

Does it matter who owns our local businesses?  According to the economics texts the answer is “No.”  The only question is “consumer value” – which is to say, how much we get for our money.  We are one-dimensional creatures; our psyches are essentially those of wall eyed bass with better math skills.

So, ownership is not relevant.  It’s essentially none of our business.  So long as Wal-Mart offers the cheapest prices, we should welcome it to town.  Ditto Barnes and Noble, Safeway, Starbucks, and Dominos Pizza.  They provide the most stuff for the least price, so what’s our beef?

Part of the answer comes from my old neighborhood in New York.  Not long ago, when you crossed West 23^rd Street walking south on 8^th Avenue, you entered a real neighborhood called Chelsea.  (Actually Chelsea spilled north over 23^rd to the Fashion Institute and the Penn South Towers, but the core was in the other direction.)

It was a realm of mom and pop shops and restaurants, the kind of place where you knew the owners after a few visits. New York used to consist largely of urban villages such as this, that existed paradoxically within the mega-city. I do not remember a single chain, except perhaps the McBurnie YMCA on 23^rd, and a couple of supermarkets that were local chains.

That was in the early Nineties.  A couple of weeks ago I was in New York, and took a walk from Penn Station down through the old neighborhood.  As I approached 23^rd Street I encountered a CVS drug store/melangerie, and then a Gap clothing store.

The Gap?  In Chelsea?  I thought of the actors, stage hands, and assorted others who lived in my old co-op building, thanks to New York laws that enable tenants to buy into buildings undergoing co-op conversion at low “insider” prices. They included Richard, my professor neighbor and a devoted dumpster diver.   Their interest in a Gap store would not have been great.

Across 23^rd it was more of the same.  On the west side of 8^th Avenue there is now a Vitamin Shoppe, Starbucks, T-Mobile shop, Jamba Juice, ATT shop, and Mailboxes Inc., in that order.  It could have been Vintage Oaks mall in Novato, or Serramonte Plaza in Daly City, or any of the other commercial venues that define the placeless corporate landscape here in the Bay Area and in much of the rest of the country.

The neighborhood was gone in any but a geographical sense.  A couple of blocks over, on Sixth Avenue, there’s now a Barnes and Noble.  There’s even a Toys ‘R Us in Times Square, and a K-Mart in the vicinity of Penn Station.  (These big box stores cause the sense of place to blur.)  New York City itself is starting to disappear.

To which our economist friends say, “So what?  Big boxes wouldn’t be there if people didn’t shop at them.  Are you some kind of an elitist who doesn’t care about bargains?”

What such people don’t grasp is that commerce isn’t just about stuff.  It serves a social function as well.  Those mom and pop stores were places where people could know and be known.  This was especially important for older people, and others for whom shopping might constitute the only social contact in long empty days.

There was a Greek coffee shop on 8^th Avenue called The Regal – one of those places with red naugahyde booths and encyclopedic menus that used to be everywhere in the city.  It was unremarkable except for the owner, a kindly Greek lady who would sit on a stool at the end of the counter by the cash register, and greet people as they came in.

This included a number of forlorn souls who lived at a community care facility in the neighborhood.  They would wander in and out during the slow morning hours, and the waitress would chat them up and make sure their coffee cups were filled.  As the lunch crowd came they drifted away to who knows where.

One afternoon I got a clue. I was walking past the MacDonald’s a few blocks up 8^th Avenue and saw one of the people who had been in the Regal that morning. He was gaunt, with a disoriented and haunted quality.  Kids were tormenting him; the manager was shooing him away.  That is the difference between a neighborhood and a corporate marketing arena – between a real person and a lawyers’ version of one.  (That a majority of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court can’t tell the difference does not speak well of them.)

Safety is another issue.  As Jane Jacobs pointed out in her seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities, a street with many small shops has many watchful eyes looking out the doors and windows.  This is especially so if the shops are run by individual owners who take a personal interest in the surroundings.  The pedestrian traffic alone – the constant in and out – provides potential witnesses and thus protection against crime.

Compare that to a block with a K-Mart or Barnes and Noble.  There will be a long stretch with no entry ways, and no watchful eyes from inside.  Such blocks are especially creepy at night.

In a nation with a surfeit of stuff but mounting social deficits, there is an element of insanity in designing and assessing the economy solely in terms of material output.  Dr. Thomas Lyson of Cornell University has compared counties with small, locally owned businesses and social institutions against those in which outside corporations dominate.

As recounted by Stacey Mitchell in her book Big Box Swindle, Lyson found that “[T]he big-business counties had greater income inequality, lower housing standards, more low-birth-weight babies (an indicator of overall health); more worker disability, lower educational outcomes,  and higher crime rates.  The small-business counties not only scored better on all of these social welfare measures, but their residents belonged to more civic organizations and voted more often.”

Those bargains come at a pretty high price.  And this isn’t even counting the informal social dimension that the Regal Coffee Shop in Chelsea used to embody.  (I didn’t mention that the Regal too has disappeared, replaced by a trendy-chic wannabee of the kind that has become a Manhattan cliché.)

Even the bargains aren’t really what they seem.  Wal-Mart for example is infamous for loss leaders, and for pressuring suppliers to produce lower-quality items that it then can sell at lower-seeming prices.  But that’s an issue for another day.  For now, let’s just be aware that there are reasons to keep an economy local, to the extent possible; and one of the main ones is to keep the social dimension of commerce intact.

If Agway owned Toby’s Feedbarn, and if the Bovine Bakery was a Starbucks, and if Point Reyes Books was a Barnes and Noble, does anyone think they would be as committed to the community as those businesses – with their local owners – are now?

As the resident of one community in Michigan that said “No” to Wal-Mart put it to Mitchell, “They don’t sell small town quality of life on any Wal-Mart shelf, and once they take it from you, you can’t buy it back from them at any price.”

Manhattan Dispatch:  Too Spiffy?

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village is one of the great common spaces in the U.S., and probably in the world.  On any given day, when the weather is half decent, you will find chess players in the southwest corner, the air thick with concentration; while parents and nannies watch their children in a shaded, ample play area in the opposite one.

In between are musicians, magicians, readers, nappers, New York University students intent over their books; and young people who paint their bodies silver or gold and stay stock still for long periods of time.  Actors study their parts.  Might-be lovers study one another.  Dog owners socialize and watch their pooches in the dog run.

In the early morning earnest runners and power walkers somehow finesse the narrow sidewalk on the periphery.  During the day skateboarders perform amazing feats in a large empty fountain.  It is not unknown that young men slung out on benches with a casual alertness sell items in which a federal agent would have an interest.

Within a space that is neither large nor small – less than ten acres — a distillation of this raucous city somehow settles in with grace  It is less a matter of tolerance than of learned obliviousness.  Do your thing – just don’t bother me.  The New Yorker’s creed. And it works.  A few minutes here can restore one’s faith — not in the future, perhaps, which seems a mess, but rather in a present that can be surprising in its congeniality.

Put enough such presents together, and we might be onto something.

The word “improvement” makes one a little edgy in connection with this happy space.  “Leave it alone” sounds a lot better; and the Project for Public Places, to its great credit, reached this conclusion a few years ago.  Nevertheless, a general spiffing up is under way.  Portions of the park are being closed in sequence, while the improvers go about their work.

Walkways are being resurfaced, benches replaced, the landscaping made more genteel.  Some of this seems harmless.  The old benches sometimes did make you wonder about when they were last cleaned.  Greenery is always welcome in this city of concrete.  Maintenance and order do send signals to users that encourage civility and respect.

I don’t want to prejudge.  Still, the place is starting to feel just a bit prim, like Gramercy, the gated private park on the East Side.  The greenery in the new planter boxes I saw is of the type that a downtown improvement district might install.

The old Washington Square Park was like a comfortable living room – worn in a way that put you at ease.  Too much improvement and people will feel the way they do in a home of their financial betters – worried always that they will scratch the furniture or spill something on the rug.

It is hard to sip coffee and work on a manuscript in a place like that.  I hope this is just an excess of protective instinct.  One should never underestimate the ability of New Yorkers to foil the spiffer-uppers and reclaim turf with wear and grime.  Still, it helps to remember that a commons is about life and not décor.  Part of the alchemy of creating common space is to get the balance right.

The Practicality of the Local

The offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund are across from the leafy grounds of the Riverside Church, and the Hudson River beyond.  It doesn’t feel like Manhattan in this part of the Upper West Side.  The offices have the discrete, purposeful hum of old wealth responsibly employed.  The furnishings are modest.  But still, there is a sense that things financial are taken care of; and for this day at least,  there will be no worries about rent and the rest.

I was there for a conclave on new indicators of national well-being.   (The current default measure, the Gross Domestic Product or GDP, is perversely out of date; and never was intended for this purpose to begin with.)  It was a crowd of heavy hitters, led by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel winner in economics, who served recently on the commission that advised French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, on new indicators for his country.

I sat listening to these smart people debate what should be measured, and how.  Can you really put a dollar value on the air and sky, for example?  (I wish there had been more discussion of whether that’s a good idea; and what it says about this culture that we feel a need to.)

Is it possible to measure happiness?  How do you make comparisons across cultures when the concept itself is so culturally bound?  My father-in-law is a Third World rice farmer who says happiness is “when you have rice under the house.”  I have a feeling that wouldn’t cut it in L.A.

I was getting a little dizzy.  The discussion was earnest, enlightened and very learned.  But it was not grounded in any particular reality other than the conventions of the disciplines represented at the table, and a generalized political penumbra. It was a little like large schools: when you deal with a mass, the particularity gets lost.

My mind went back to the workshop the previous Saturday at the Freitas Center of the Sacred Heart Church in Olema.  It was led by Milenko Matanovic, the founder of the Pomegranate Center in Issaquah, Washington, who has worked with communities all over the world to design and build common spaces. The topic was how to develop the design of a village green/zocalo in Point Reyes Station.  (Milenko had made a presentation at the Dance Palace the night before.)

There were about twenty people, including a few from Stinson Beach, Bolinas and the Valley, who came to share their experience in creating village greens in their communities.  After some general discussion, we focused on the activities that we hoped could occur in the new (and still hoped-for) space.  Form follows function.  Decide what the space is for, and you are on your way towards a design.

People didn’t need much prodding.  The ideas poured out, from chess and meditation to music and dance – and of course conversation and unplanned encounters. We ended with a list of about 25, and this was just a warm-up exercise to get a feel for how to get the process going.  Convenient access for people who are not entirely mobile, figured large throughout.

There is something about the concrete that arouses the imagination, while abstraction tends to deaden it.  In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator, who is teaching writing at a college in Montana, unlocks a stymied student by asking her to describe one brick of the county courthouse in town.  The specificity set loose a torrent that more general topics had blocked.

This is related, I think, to Jefferson’s doubts about democracy in a large nation.  Distance and abstraction are no more hospitable to self-government than they are to the imagination. Locality, by contrast, engages us at the level of experience.  It tends towards the practical rather than the ideological.  What to do in a village green is not a question that parses out along left or right wing lines, except possibly at the fringes, such as whether to permit political posters or crèche displays.

We need better indicators of well-being, for sure.  Feedback guides policy and action.  At present, the national feedback loop is dominated by a metric – the GDP – that counts bad things as good just because they occasion the expenditure of money. Cancer, divorce, car crashes, violent video games and a host of other ills make the GDP go up.  Stable marriages, good health, walking instead of driving, sharing instead of buying, all make it go down.

For the complete run-down, see the links on this page.  By the weird standard of the GDP, the practice of community, such as the Over-The-Hill-Gang and West Marin Share, don’t count at all, because no money changes hands.  Worse, they come out as regress because they take the place of the expenditure of money.

With feedback like that, it is little wonder that policy in this country is a mess.  If you had a car in which the windshield was painted black and the gas gauge went up as you drained the tank, you’d end up in a mess too.  So yes, we need better indicators that portray the world as we experience it and not as professional economists choose to see it for the convenience of their simplistic models.

But such measures won’t do much without local practice that gives reality to the better path towards which they point. After the heady discussion at the Rockefeller Family Fund, I’m looking forward to getting my feet back on the earth, so to speak.