Monday Matters: West woes

By Jeff Gibson - 05/14/2007

Jeff Gibson

New paradigm?

Colorado College’s “State of the Rockies Report Card” contains little that’s new to Montanans who have been here a decade or two. The private college’s annual report on the Rocky Mountain states concluded that the area’s population is growing far faster than the national rate, that limited water is cause for concern, and that diseased forests constitute a particularly serious problem. The problem is that bug-ridden forests turn into standing deadwood, and this makes a forest fire more likely when somebody in a scenic subdivision drops a cigarette or over-primes a barbecue kettle. Ka-whoom!

A spokes-man for a conser-vation group in Bozeman tried to refute the Colorado report. Dennis Glick of the Sonoran Institute said that Montana may yet learn from the mistakes of others. He sees the beginning of a trend in a Bozeman subdivision that avoided run-of-the-mill sprawl by preserving open space. The half-square-mile subdivision has four miles of trails. That’s nice, but a half-square mile of just about any city has four miles of trails, too, except they’re called sidewalks.

The new subdivision also boasts “affordable housing.” But as the Bozeman newspaper has noted, all the houses in Bozeman seem to be affordable, because none of them go unsold for more than a few minutes. Affordable housing in a town like Bozeman usually means cheap or subsidized housing, and if that’s a trend, Montana builders got religion when nobody was looking. Let us give thanks.

Booming along Baby boomers, the media tell us, have different ideas about urban sprawl (item above). Boomers supposedly favor the excitement of the city over the boredom of the ’burbs. Accordingly, they are “returning to the city,” and that includes inner cities, where they apply their vast energy, keen intelligence and great wealth to restoring slums to their former glory. Except that this is not the case.

Boomers comprise the generation born between 1946 and 1964. As one columnist wrote, boomers see themselves as “agents of epochal change.” Their parents, of course, were members of The Greatest Generation, an age group too preoccupied with the Great Depression and World War II to have time for anything epochal.

But to return to the point: Joel Kotkin, author of “The City: A Global History,” says that boomers in general avoid the cities. Kotkin also found that when suburbanites over age 50 move, 80 percent move to another suburb. A few of the rest do give the inner city a try, but many eventually move back because they want to be near the kids. Washington, D.C., developer Jeff Lee told Kotkin that while boomers do like a place that’s a bit funky, it’s got to be “funky, but safe.” That’s disappointingly unadventurous, but it had to happen. After all, the oldest of the boomers, the ones born in 1946 and 1947, are now in their new- forties. That’s not old, of course — not anything like it! — but it is an age when most people start looking over their shoulders from time to time.

Pies in the sky Somebody’s been rolling doobies in Dubai. Architects in that oil-rich country are planning a 68-story rotating office building. It isn’t just the building itself that will rotate, either. Each of the 68 floors will rotate independently of the others. An artist’s concept published in The Wall Street Journal shows a tall structure resembling a precariously balanced stack of checkers sliding in and out of alignment. A reporter termed it “rotating pies in the sky.” The building won’t exactly spin like a top. Each story will turn at 6 meters a minute, about one rotation per hour. That’s too much centrifugal force for us. We get sick on the Seattle Space Needle.

The big question is, why? Critics see the rotating building as a sign of “architectural apocalypse.” Supporters see it as something “iconic” and “unique.” Well, yeah, but so was the Edsel.

We took a spin on the Missoula carousel once, and by the time our granddaughter helped us off that wooden horse all we could say was, “never again.” God’s little helpers Some reports say that Iraq is mired in civil war.

If so, it’s a strange war. There are few battles between identifiable armies. Judging from news reports, it’s mostly a case of belligerents conning gullible individuals into strapping on dynamite vests and then blowing themselves up, along with as many innocent men, women and children as possible. Apparently, religion plays a part in this. The bombers believe they will be blown straight to kingdom come. Some reassembly required.

It’s a bad idea to bring religion into a war, but it happens. As Abe Lincoln noted near the end of America’s Civil War, “Both (sides) read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” But as Lincoln also said, more or less: Forget about it: “The Almighty has His own purposes.” The problem isn’t just that adversaries ask God to bash the other side, it’s that they’re so eager to help him do it. Like he’s not omniscient enough to know what HE wants? Not omnipotent enough to do it himself? Even editorial writers don’t go that far. God will get around to getting your enemies sooner or later. He’ll also get around to you, so be nice.

Make them pay The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to set limits on lawnmower exhaust in an effort to reduce air pollution. If the EPA wants cleaner air, it should do something about man’s best friend. Every spring, lawns all over Butte emerge from the snow absolutely covered with dog droppings. This is because too many pet owners still poop their dogs simply by letting them run free for an hour or two in the morning or after dinner. When May arrives, nearby homeowners have to shovel their lawns. If they don’t, the first lawn-mowing of springtime can churn up enough manure to darken the sun. It’s probably the main reason people fence their yards. We still think that when pet owners license their dogs they should have to contribute to a public fencing fund for dogless homeowners.

— Jeff Gibson is a retired Montana Standard writer.