Anti-Growth Activists Are Too Negative

Dismayed

As an urban planner, I am dismayed at the negativity found in these archives and a myriad of other doom-saying blogs. I must believe---we must believe----that the future of our civilization lies in growing cities. In fact cities are the cradle of civilization---of art, science, music and literature, and the more citizens we pack into them the more vibrant and creative they become. Malthusian logic suffers from inconsistency and its prognostications lack an empirical foundation. Most of all, their gloom and doom verbiage is, at closer scrutiny, an exercise in deliberate obfuscation.

People, our greatest resource

I believe in people. People are our greatest resource. The more the merrier. We need more people to make our transportation system more efficient, our production runs longer and our costs-per-unit smaller. We need the collective brainpower that more people can give us so that we may solve the problems generated by population growth. We need more cultural diversity and less biological diversity. With more diverse people we can have more choices in our cuisine, and we can always enjoy the film-footage of extinct and endangered species threatened by the encroaching subdivisions built to accommodate our growing population as we eat from a buffet of Thai, Indian, African, Afghani and Spanish food. It is best to enjoy wildlife vicariously---no one wants to suffer the discomfort of off-road trekking and camping. More dim-sum, less undomesticated animals---sounds like a good bargain to me.

Growing the bottom line

Above all, we need more people to pay for the health and pension benefits of our growing aged population. And when these new people are finished their working careers paying for our growing aged population, we can import an even large base of people to support the people we brought here to pay for those aged people. Ad infinitum.

No Gain without Pain

Yes, admittedly, there are growing pains involved in growing our population. But those can be infinitely mitigated by the greatest panacea known to man---“planning”. Now, it used to be that planning was understood as something both pro-active and pre-emptive. A government decided what its urban boundaries would be and how many people would live within it, and planned accordingly. But of course, that antiquated notion gave way to the enlightened concept of laissez-faire growth. Urban planners and demographers now look at what the population is projected to be and then counsel government s to “plan” for it---as if a given growth rate or trend is something that cannot be challenged. Which of course it can be, but to do so would be racist, xenophobic and selfish. Those who attempt to control population growth are playing God—when the truth is God wants us to go forth and multiply, especially if some rival tribe, religious community or nation threatens to out-breed ours. Well, no worries. Governments now have the good sense to believe that growth is inevitable, so the only option is to channel it out of harm’s way. Now we can have “green” buildings, “green” development and “smart” growth. Growth without ecological impacts. It is time that Malthusians got smart too. It is time they shut up and left it to the experts.

Public Education a must

The problem, I feel, is in lack of communication. Emotive language must surrender to dispassionate discussion. Malthusians must chill out. They must understand that there are positive alternatives to a sustainable steady state society that lives within the means and absorptive capacity of the environment. We can grow the limits.

Use of language

Let me elaborate with more precision. We can inculcate end-to-end morphologies, re-tool ruderal users and reintermediate next generation podcasts. If we monetize peer-to-peer networking we can repurpose next-generation synergies and enhance out-of-the-box action items by targeting open-source partnerships and maximizing ubiquitous deliverables. Only by capturing turn-key metrics and synthesizing seamless channels can we expedite vertical ecologies. If successful, we will have delivered 24/7 platforms and revolutionized viral e-commerce.

Getting Agreement

In short, if we communicate with clarity then the omniscient vision that is exclusive to the planning profession can be imparted to the voting public who are ill-equipped to grasp the opportunities that await us in the broad, sunlit uplands of our cornucopian future. Let’s dispense with the clichés and speak plainly. If there is no hope, do not despair---we can manufacture it with the same ease that we can build the hundreds of nuclear reactors necessary to power the hundreds of desalination plants that will substitute for our dry river beds and reservoirs, as well as energize the solyent-green biscuit factories that will replace the farmland that lies beneath our sprawling suburbs.

You see, the future is not as bad as you thought. Just leave it to us.

B. Rees-Nable,
President,
Urban Planning Institute
Tim Murray, Vice President.