Small and Smaller

My writer/activist friend Janisse Ray has recently written an essay called "Bleeding Fields," all about rural exodus in the South. Janisse grew up in Baxley, a small farming town in south Georgia. Though she wasn't raised on a farm (her father ran a junk yard), her grandparents were still on the land just outside of town all through her girlhood. She grew up eating home-grown okra and tomatoes. She knew the smell of tilled fields, could recognize a chicken shack and a mule. She grew up believing in small communities like Baxley and the surrounding rural culture that supported them.

But so much has changed so fast her head is spinning. In the leveling world of statistics communities of less than 2,500 are considered rural, and only 26 percent of Southerners can now be classified that way. To be urban is now the norm, even in the South, a place whose myths and values are rooted deeply in fields and on farms.

"My current sadness is my chronic sadness," Janisse writes. ‘A way of life is passing, I have watched its passage, it is one I loved, and I am not sure that in my lifetime we will get it back."

I would argue that not only the rural is passing. Small is passing. To be small is disappearing. Small schools. Small communities. All gone to consolidation or growth brought on by believing in "economies of scale." We're losing it all to growth. If small, as E.F. Schumacher said in his famous 1973 book, is beautiful, then there is less and less beauty in the South we love every day.

Janisse's essay got me thinking about our own situation right here in the Upcountry. We're growing fast and change is all around us. Will Spartanburg retain any small town character with Greenville growing into a real city so fast right next door? Will Anderson, Landrum, and Walhalla retain any of the culture associated with smallness? In the next fifty years will even smaller places like Jonesville, Fountain Inn, Lockhart, and Dacusville empty out or simply be steamrolled by suburbs from Greenville and Spartanburg?

This isn't the first time that a way of life has passed. We're now living on the cusp of a fourth great cultural collapse here in the upper South. First the stable world of native cultures disappeared with the coming of the Spanish in the 1540s, then 400 hundred years later, Europeans had farmed out the land and the great rural exodus began that Janisse mourns.

Then an industrial culture came and went like a flash. Mills and mill towns were built, worked, abandoned and in many cases salvaged in a little over a hundred years. It's hard to believe something can come and go so fast.  All that's left in many cases are family memories of working in a mill and the fortunes these mills made their owners.

So the history of the South has always been one of cultural collapse. "After the lapse of 500 sometimes catastrophic years [since the arrival of Europeans]," environmental historian Albert Cowdrey argues, "it is hard to say which is more remarkable, that so much has changed in the southern landscape, or that so much remains the same."

I know none of this reflection helps with the current pain of small places being eaten up by larger ones. There are small towns all over the region struggling with consolidation. There are small-scale schools being eaten by larger ones because districts might save some money.  Nothing soothes the pain when your old school closes or your grandparents' small farm is sold and bulldozed for the next strip mall or mega high school or distribution plant or subdivision.

The larger question is what we can do about it. What is the new culture are we now building on the ruins of the earlier ones? Will the service culture of hospitals and schools and fast food last? Will suburban culture endure once gas is no longer cheap or plentiful? How will we make a living here amidst the great I-85/I-26 sprawl in 50 years? "The South is at a crossroads," Janisse writes. "An old farmer on a tractor is driving along a Southern highway, down a long hill, and he is passed by a log truck, a queue of city bicyclists in skintight spandex." Where do we fall in line?