Sam Smith
We hear a lot these days about Maine’s economic problems: not
enough job growth, not enough young people, the decline in farming, fishery
problems and so forth.
There is merit in all of this but it is only part of the
story. After all, if the sought after economic improvement is to take place
there has to be positive reasons for it to occur.
To be sure we are bombarded with suggestions. Nestle wants to
privatize our water. We need an oil
pipeline. A bunch of ugly high rises in Bayside will revive Portland. We should
turn Washington County into a tax fee zone. And so forth.
I’ve seen this before. Among the stories I covered, back in 1957, was about one of the first major
urban renewal projects in America, in Southwest Washington where over 20,000
residents and businesses were forcibly removed. .
Some 80% of the businesses never went back into operation.
The design was hailed by planners and liberals; a 1955 report
for the District was titled No Slums in
Ten Years. Not everyone was so sanguine, however. In a 1959 report of the
National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Rt. Rev. Msg. John O'Grady said,
"It is sad. It is not urban renewal; it is a means of making a few people
rich. Instead of improving housing conditions, it is shifting people around
from one slum to another."
It is a story that has been repeated repeatedly. A place is
in economic trouble and the solution is to bring in new business and people
and, to varying degrees, let those already there fend for themselves or force
them out.To make this work, it is important to stress constantly the
locale’s faults and deficiencies and seldom mention why it might be worth
saving for those who are already there.
On the other hand, I have also covered, and been involved in,
numerous struggles by communities to preserve and improve themselves, often
with little help from more powerful government, media or business
organizations. And one of the things you find over and over is that a community
that knows and values its own assets and virtues, and which defends them
against predator planning and other intrusions, survives much better than one
that accepts the dismal prognostications of those on top of the system. In
other words, these communities plan for their own future before someone else does.
One example that illustrates this approach is the historic
preservation movement. Buildings and neighborhoods that would have been easy
marks for planners and their developer allies have often been preserved by supporters
standing metaphorically in front of these assets and declaring to all: “Leave
it alone.”
Maine faces this problem and this choice. Do his we let the
future of the state be determined by those who primarily market it as a problem
to be exploited or do we improve our condition while retaining, expanding and
adapting our cultural achievements, virtues and assets - making progress occur
for all rather than the few who specialize in feeding off less than ideal
conditions?
So, for a change, let’s look at Maine as a field yet to be
fully planted rather than as a collapsing barn, and see how differently things
start to appear.
Here are a few suggestions:
- Maine is a covert example of the sort of place California
and Colorado once were, places where people went to exercise their freedom,
imagination, artistic skill and alternative ways of living. Mainers tend
to be more modest than these earlier
examples, but you don’t have to go far in this state to find someone who is
doing something different and interesting. This is not only a cultural asset
but an economic one as well.
- Maine is full of internal immigrants, people who have moved
from another state to start a different life here. Little noted about
immigrants is that they are unusual members of their own culture simply because
they have made the courageous choice to leave it. Combine such folk with the
independent native Mainer and you have an underappreciated community of hardy
individualists.
- Maine has the right scale. We forget that humans are
animals, and that there is a natural sized community for us just as there is
for deer. One can argue about what size that is but a city of two or three
million is probably well beyond what nature intended. One reason this is
important is because much planning ignores the cultural changes that higher
density brings with it. Do we want to double the size of Portland or create
another Portland size town somewhere else?
- Mainers naturally understand environment and ecological
issues. If, for example, you’ve been a farmer or a clammer it’s not an abstract
or rhetorical matter; it’s real, it’s life. The extent of ecological
comprehension in the state is a huge asset at a time when nature has become
such a huge factor in human existence.
- We have an especially good water supply, As one report put
it, “Total annual ground water use in Maine is a small fraction of annual
recharge.” And the Press Herald notes, “Drill into the ground in Maine and
eventually you'll find water.. But it also reports that “The Department of
Environmental Protection has found that many high-yield aquifers are at risk
from pollution. In fact, the DEP has found that of the 29,000 acres of
high-yield sand and gravel aquifers in Maine, only about 1,200 acres are not at
risk.” In other words, we have a huge asset that could be easily damaged. How
do we deal with Nestle and other privatizers? How many people can Maine handle
with its water and where? How much damage will a pipeline do?
This is not ancillary problem. For example a
report on a town in Canada said that “Nestlé currently holds a permit through
to 2017 to take about 1.1 million liters of water per day from Hillsburgh… This occurs
while other nearby towns have by-laws to restrict their personal water access
during dry summer conditions.
We can make water plans now and avoid the sort
of crisis now facing California, or we can let others pursue their predatory
goals at our eventual expense.
- Maine still practices democracy pretty well.
Not in the governor’s office, to be sure, but power is decentralized enough
that hundreds of towns still make a lot of choices. As the problems with
regional school systems shows, attempts to move to more centralized government
can be at odds with Maine’s inherent principles. Democracy is disappearing in
many parts of America, starting with Washington DC, so the Maine’s democratic
and independent tradition is a draw. Mainers
also believe in reciprocal liberty – i.e. I can’t have my liberty if you don’t
have yours – which is why it leads other states on some issues like gay rights.
And, thanks in no small part to its agricultural and seafaring background,
Mainers intrinsically understand that competition and cooperation are not
opponents but allies.
- Maine has long been a highly favored place
for artists, musicians and writers. We tend to take it for granted, but it is,
in fact, a major attribute of the state.
- Maine is an excellent place to redefine the
relationship between the urban and the rural as well as the urban and the
natural. The emphasis on natural foods, outdoor activity and ecological
protection make this a good place for, say, college majors in eco-urbanism or
for town and city plans that deal specifically with this issue.
- Maine has a massive amount of land that is
not being used, as it once was, for farming. With drought and other crises
affecting America’s food supply, we should be consuming far more than ten percent
of our own agricultural output. And finding ways to help younger Mainers go
into farming to fill the gap being created by retiring seniors would help
greatly. But to do this, we have to stop thinking of planning primarily in urban
terms. We need tax incentives for processing and distribution centers, and
subsidies for new farm programs and new farmers.
- Maine is cool atmospherically as well as
culturally. In fact, it’s the third coolest state in the union, after Alaska
and North Dakota. Given the growing climate crisis this is a big asset, but how
does Maine remain Maine if it becomes too appealing to other Americans? This is
the sort of issue that needs to be thought and talked out.
- Finally there is the Maine
skill in survival. The fix it up, make it do, use it up, do without tradition
is something that much of the country is going to have to learn as times gets
tougher. I recently attended a
talk by Colin Woodard – journalist and author of The Lobster Coast, an
excellent history of coastal Maine. He described how Maine had thrived in the
early 19th century thanks to factors like sailing ships carrying
things like granite, ice, lumber and salt fish far away.
But with the Civil War, the economic progress collapsed for a variety of reasons,
including the extraordinary death rate of Maine soldiers in the Civil War and
the decline in the influence of Maine politics. In a 2011 article he described other effects:
Those at home watched the state’s
coastal trade and most of its once-thriving textile industry collapse, cut off from southern
markets and sources of cotton. The fishing fleet contracted as the cost of
everything from insurance to canvas exploded. Farmers, cut
off from seaborne markets, were forced to abandon their farms, and many would
flee to the south and west where, on the advice of soldiers’ letters, they
could expect to find better soils and transportation links. Lumbermen decamped
for the forests of the Great Lakes and, not long thereafter, the Pacific
Northwest, where entire lumbering towns were settled almost exclusively by
people from the Machias area.
The age of sail was over and “to
make matters worse, after the war the commerce of the nation began moving east
to west on the expanding railroads."
As I listened to Woodard’s description of this change, I
found myself suddenly thinking, that’s not just Maine he’s talking about. It’s
America today. Our economy has been outsourced, only not to the American
west but to places like Bangladesh. Our political power is slipping noticeably,
and technology and history seem to be constantly working against us. Who knows
more about how to deal with this than Mainers?
Bear in mind that the rest of the country is getting hotter, drier, and more
crowded. As the recent traffic disaster during Atlanta’s snow storm
illustrated, when a society becomes more urbanized, its citizens lose skills of
survival their parents and grandparents had. They become dependent on a system
that is in ore than a few ways, dysfunctional.
Maine has extraordinarily resisted life’s temptation to become
over-dependent on one’s society rather than being an active and skilled
participant. I suspect more and more
will start to notice this and it will have a big effect on our state. Now is
not a minute too soon to start, in the best Maine tradition, to figure out what
to do about it all before it’s too late.
#Maine
#menews
