(PVRP is ahead of the curve on climate and oil depletion… will Amherst catch up? – promoted by eli_beckerman)

Between 1790 and the Civil War (the early republic) the people of New England (and much of the US) lived mostly scattered about on small farms. The miles between town centers would increase with Western expansion. But what has been called the “friction of distance” was, from the start, a much greater challenge to travel, location and commerce than it is now-in the era of carbon-fueled vehicles.   In fact, hundreds of thousands of people traveled primarily by foot (“shank’s pony”), not horse and wagon, increasing this friction even more. In the 1840s, tax records and household inventories make it clear that horse ownership was then less equally distributed than automobiles are among Americans today.  

We might appreciate the friction of distance even more graphically by contemplating traffic counts on the Norfolk and Bristol turnpike in Massachusetts in 1824. “Market wagons,” designed for hauling a farmer’s freight rather than the family, were four times more numerous than “chaises” and “gigs,” designed for pleasure. Enormous droves of cattle and pigs clogged the roads supplying the urban centers. Thirteen miles travel a day might be all a pig drover could achieve, all the while running thirty miles to keep the beasts in line. A hundred miles travel from farm to city might take more than a week. Turkey drovers worked in groups of two or three while walking alongside a wagon equipped with a bed and a stove.  Travel was dangerous and uncomfortable-but people did not need to use vehicles in order to travel to fitness clubs to prevent obesity-related health problems like high cholesterol and diabetes.

In the past, people reduced the stress and cost of travel-to the extent that they could-by economizing on human and animal energy. Overcoming distance was reflected in architecture, in the layout of towns, and in the prime political, economic and social relationships of villages, towns and cities to each other.  There could not be shopping malls, strip development, suburbia, and commuter jobs.  Time was also costly in a way that it is not costly today.  There could not be shopping after work, followed by music lessons or little league for the kids. Fragments of the landscape we used to live in still remain as charming older houses closely clustered around the post office, churches, and town hall.

There is a house on Kellogg Street in Amherst built in 1900, at the dawn of auto, well before the two-plus ownership of cars in many households now.  It is one of those three-story walk-ups so common in the older neighborhoods of Springfield. Next to it are older houses, all closely packed by modern middle class standards. The 1900 house was not built to accommodate the cars of three families, but to reduce walking distance for more than one domestic group to a town center replete with grocery, shoe, department and hardware stores.

By contrast, contemporary middle class housing sprawls over the landscape, household by household, on large lots-supplied by two-plus autos that make daily trips to enormous big boxes spewing asphalt over valuable Hadley soil.  Under the circumstances, there has emerged a new and alarming reason to conserve distance. The CO2 emissions and open space required threaten life on earth, a very inconvenient truth.  Our bodies have bulged along with our transport to McDonald’s.  Our economy is supplied from far away in distant China, while no one works in the neighborhood.

It is the purpose of “village centers,” according to the Amherst Master Plan, to combat the end of civilization and the waste of open space by clustering retail business, perhaps with apartments overhead.  We are reminded by the example of the early republic that life without autos is possible, and distance can be subdued-more conveniently in the new age of solar and wind power. However, if these centers are more than, say, two miles out of town center or situated at the outer borders, then there is nothing to stop the sprawl between them and across borders in nearby towns.  Stay centered, build up and not out because distance is not frictionless.

Steve Randall, Larry Ely, and Rob Crowner lead the Pioneer Valley Relocalization Project, which is advocating and developing projects in the relocalization outlined by E. F. Schumacher, Richard Heinberg, and Bill McKibben.