Double Vision

Census information released last week reports the latest 12-month growth rate for the Spartanburg metro area at 2.1 percent. Greenville's rate is essentially the same at 2.2 percent, and Charlotte, an hour up the I-85 corridor, is double ours, at 4.2 percent.

The idea of growth is a funny thing. Most people see it as essential and good, important for the local economy. It keeps communities like ours on the pathway to modern prosperity. Others see it as a mixed blessing at best, something human societies have convinced themselves they can't live without, but something that in reality will rob us of all we hold dear if we're not careful-clean air, open space, and healthy lives.

After reading about the growth rate I imagine what it will mean to me if I live to see our population double, something that at the current rate will happen for Spartanburg and Greenville in about 33 years.

Double. That means if these current rates hold, rather than 275,000 people we share Spartanburg with today, there will be half a million in the not-so-distant future. And Greenville will have to wedge over a million in between the hazy mountains and Pelzer. With its 4.2 percent growth rate Charlotte's metro area will increase from almost two million now to 6.4 million in 2040!

So armed with double vision, I leave the present behind and picture myself as an 86-year-old geezer driving around the bulging upstate. My geezer vision is troubling: double the traffic on I-85, double the Wal-Marts, double the trash, double the non-point source pollution washed into our rivers and streams, double the monster high schools like Dorman whose ecological footprint is a sign on the trail of what's to come if growth continues at this rate unchanged.

Of course such monster growth won't happen suddenly. Thirty-three years is a long time, even though I clearly remember 33 years in the past. I was 20 back then and there were only about a 175,000 of us in Spartanburg sharing the roads, building yesterday's schools and malls and interstates, polluting the streams like there was no tomorrow, and dreaming up the future we're now living.

The old geezer in me doesn't like the future or the present. In spite of its problems, he prefers the past when there were fewer people and more space, and things moved slower. He once heard someone say the future is always somebody's fiction. He doesn't like the way the future feels when he drives through it in Atlanta and New Jersey and Phoenix. Why does where he lives have to follow the same messy script as these other American boom towns?

Of course I'm not an old geezer quite yet. I try and silence that negative crusty voice within. I try to believe my friends in contemporary planning who say we just might do it differently in the future if we start now. We might grow "smart." We might find ways to create density without stripping the land of all its other capacities-biodiversity chief among them.

Nobody, they remind me as if it is gospel, can stop the growth when it comes. The future will spread out along I-85, and many people will be happy with the change. The future is their dream scenario-housing starts, retail sales, tax base!

But I can't stop the geezer from weighing in. Thirty-three years from now I imagine he's stopped in traffic at 5 pm, and prosperity be damned, there used to be peach orchards and a stream defining the view. Now there's a subdivision and a strip mall that fills the distances.

He curses the change. He remembers what it used to be like here. He thinks those who love change and find profit in it are like blue crabs dropped in a pot of salty water, slowly brought to a boil.