DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

Last week’s Scottsboro-Bell’s Bend community meeting was not fun, except maybe for fans of the Jerry Springer show.  There was very little in the way of new information, but there was plenty of emotion.  People interrupted each other. Developer Tony Giarratana, in his red power tie, was openly contemptuous of the locals; and this time, planning commission representative Anita McCaig really did get driven to tears.

The first thing that came up, in terms of information, was that the Maytown crew had decided their best option for access was to cross the river from Centennial Boulevard with only one bridge, which will be six lanes wide rather than four lanes.  They’re waiting for the results of the traffic study on this.

My preliminary calculations say that, if they spread their “rush hour” over enough hours, and nobody has any breakdowns or accidents, and especially if there’s a lot of carpooling, this might kinda work. Maybe. Kinda. And a big if.

Then, of course, there’s the question of what spiraling gas prices will do to the practicality of commuting any distance, not to mention Life As We Know It. Both the pro- and anti-development speakers at the meeting seemed to assume that the future is going to be a lot like the past, in terms of development pressures and possibilities.  I think they could both be very wrong, but that’s not exactly good news for either side.

The Centennial Boulevard option has some upsides.  It does not involve neighborhood destruction and it provides direct access to Tune airport, which will be convenient if anybody can still afford to fly an airplane in a few years.  Well, the top !% of the US population has more money than the bottom 80%, and they’re getting richer, so maybe Tony Giarratana’s clients will still be able to make use of the airport.  Access via Centennial Boulevard will also involve driving by Nashville’s Cockrill Bend Minimum Security Prison, which is not exactly an upscale, inspiring kind of intro to the wonders of Maytown Center–which, Tony reminded us, will be constructed according to the highest standards of Green Building.

That leads to the repeatedly raised question of how “green” it is to put a development in a cow pasture. Planning Commission rep Jennifer Carlat clung to her assertion that, because Bell’s Bend is only 7 linear miles from downtown Nashville, developing rural land there is not sprawl, at least compared to paving farmland in southern Williamson County or any other, more outlying areas where a corporate campus might be induced to locate.  They went over the strengths and drawbacks of the several areas in Davidson County that are most ripe for redevelopment, pointing out that Bell’s Bend is the only location that fully fits all the criteria.

The criteria in question are “rural or upscale suburban,” proximity to executive housing,” and “premiere/gateway location.”  None of the other possible redevelopment areas–the Fairgrounds, Metro Center, the East Bank, or McCrory  Creek Road–qualify on all these counts, although the East Bank (across the river from downtown) is considered a “premiere/gateway location.”  The presentation also noted somewhat ominously that there is  “significant existing office development in the (McCrory Creek) area that is not entirely leased.”  That doesn’t bode well for Maytown’s projected “5 to 10 million square feet of office space.”  And with consumer spending in this country sinking like a rock, will another million to million and a half square feet of retail space really support itself?  America has ten times more retail space per citizen than any other country in the world.  Do we really need to add to that?
It seems to me that the reason corporations seek “rural or upscale suburban” areas has to do with wanting security–making sure that their buildings, personnel, and automobiles will not be the target of hungry locals.  As I have said before, the extraordinarily restricted access that Bell’s Bend offers probably looks very good to some forward-looking but pessimistic corporate officers, and, to repeat myself again, Bell’s Bend offers prime sites for new “executive housing,” never mind that it will tend to drive out the locals it doesn’t enrich.

Some of the information that came out of this meeting was that there is no information on some critical topics.  The Planning Commission reps admitted that they have not done a study on the potential financial benefits to Davidson County, and in fact do not have the funding to do such a study.  “We know that, in general, corporate campuses are a good tax deal for cities, but we don’t know the specifics of this situation,”Planning Commission rep Jennifer Carlat said.  To fill this void, the Scottsboro-Bell’s Bend home team has commissioned its own study, which will be ready in time for the Planning Commissions consideration on June 24th.

Now, as I said when I started talking, this was not a happy meeting.  The local crew literally drove Anita McCaig of the Planning Commission to tears, repeatedly interrupting her and questioning her competence and trustworthiness. Her words as she started crying were, “Will you please let me finish when I’m answering a question?  I know how you could defeat this proposal.  All you have to do is ask me.”  Nobody asked–but hey, the Devil himself, Tony Giarratana, was in the room, so nobody was going to tip their hand to him.  Maybe some folks asked her what she was talking about later.  I certainly hope so.

Ah, Tony.  He was not taking guff from anyone.  He was not being polite.  When people asked him questions that he felt they already knew the answers to, he just brushed them off with, “That’s a rhetorical question,” and even got openly sarcastic with some questioners.  But, to his credit, he stopped and turned on a dime when his taunt “How come you people haven’t done more to buy the development rights on these properties if you’re so concerned about it?” was met with, “Because it costs about ten thousand dollars a property owner to do it, most people can’t afford to donate their rights, and we don’t have that kind of money.”

Suddenly, Tony was quite seriously saying that this was something the Mays brothers would very likely be willing to help fund.  He certainly sounded sincere; it was a distinct switch from the middle finger approach he had been taking, and, since one of the things the Mays family is known for is funding the regreening of East Nashville after the tornado of 1998, this could be a way to make lemonade out of the Maytown lemon.  If it happens.

The most common, and obvious, expressed reason for all the venting at this meeting was the feeling that the community had been betrayed by the Planning Commission when the Commission started trying to write Maytown Center into the plan, but I think that’s only half the story, or maybe a lot less.

We are all starting to wake up to the fact that we have been massively betrayed at every level of our society.  Our expensive educational system is increasingly irrelevant.  We built a petroleum and automobile-based society as if we would never run out of petroleum and always be able to afford individual private vehicles, and now we are running out of both petroleum and money for consumer spending.  We have sucked up all the money and credit that could have been used to re-establish society on a more sustainable basis and burned it in a futile war of aggression, and the leaders who have masterminded this colossal trainwreck remain not only unapologetic, but thoroughly insulated from any consequences for their irresponsible behavior.

We don’t get to yell at Bush and Cheney, not in any way they have to listen to.  We don’t get to express our displeasure at the faceless suits who have moved our industry to China, our farming to Central America, and our dollars to the toilet.  They are segregated off in gated communities, safely inside the Beltway, or, like the May brothers, in some foreign country.  Their money, which used to be ours until they took it from us through some medical emergency or retirement home or stock market flimflam or corporate downsizing, is safely tucked away in foreign accounts so that no matter what happens in the USA, they’ll be OK.  They’re not going to see or hear us.  But the poor ladies of the planning commission were sacrificial lambs,  scapegoats exposed to the wrath of the masses and made to pay for every insult that anyone in Bell’s Bend has ever suffered from the faceless rich.  Their only sin was needing a job, just like the rest of us, and finding one that put them in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fortunately, we’re all still civilized enough that the abuse was only verbal.  But, beyond the immediate issue of land use in Bell’s Bend, the April 29th meeting was a reminder that, as Mr. Obama has famously remarked, there is a vast well of bitterness in America’s heartland, a reservoir generally glossed over by the polticians, pundits, and mainstream media.  As long as it is ignored, it is only going to grow and deepen, until some accident of history turns it loose.  It will take some extraordinarily gifted people–thousands of them, all over this country–to transform this simmering rage into constructive politics that reshapes and redirects America.  Without those people and that redirection, we will instead see a social explosion of volcanic proportions.  It will not be pretty, it will not be constructive, and it will make Mad Max seem like the good old days.  I know which path I prefer, but I make no claim to be able to predict the future.  It’s up to all of us.

music:  Burning Times “The Only Green World”

The Green Party of Tennessee met in a smoke-free back room at Nashville’s Italian Market last Saturday.  I’d like to say we decided the future of Tennessee, with Party co-chair Katey Culver playing the part of capa di tutti capi, but overall I’m afraid our effect on Tennessee politics is just not that powerful.

The party is, however, beginning to make itself felt.  Chris Lugo, who is once again the party’s candidate for US Senate, reported that the two months he spent as the only person seeking the Democratic nomination finally shamed the Democrats into running somebody against Lamar Alexander, who has been all but endorsed by our so-called Democratic governor.  It’s a bad news/good news situation for Chris–while he’ll be in competition with a Democrat, candidate Bob Tuke is calling for a slow, “phased withdrawal” from Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving Chris as the “get out now/settle by non-military means” candidate.  The rising tide of frustration with the war and the Democrats’ failure to end it, plus the fact that this is Chris’s second run, will hopefully improve his showing.

The party nominated TSU political science professor John Miglietta to run against 5th District Congressman Jim Cooper.  John has a tremendous advantage over just about anybody else the Green Party could run, because he is not now, and never has been, a hippie, unlike most of the rest of the party.  If most of us got anywhere close to mounting a serious challenge to the two-party system, the Demopublicans would have no trouble finding dancing skeletons in our closets, which they would use to fan the flames of voter hysteria, and, if necessary, have us arrested or at least publicly humiliated for daring to think for ourselves.  But John, bless his heart, is just as square as they come, and he still sees things our way.  That means a lot to me. For him, it means he could go all the way to the top.

One of my old hippie teachers used to talk about the importance of acceptance of our ethos by “honest squares.”  This is actually quite scientific; if the hippie/Green world view can be arrived at by someone through a process completely independent of the counterculture, that amounts to independent validation of the results of the decades long “thought experiment,” to borrow a phrase from Einstein, that was originally launched by the late and much lamented trio of Dr. Hoffman, Dr. Leary, and Aldous Huxley.  Well, this doesn’t have much to do with our current race for political office and against time, and will probably embaras the hell out of many Greens, but I just had to go and open my big mouth, now, didn’t I?  Well, I’m not responsible for the fact that the Green Party’s lineage goes back through the North American Bioregional Congress to the Haight-Ashbury Diggers to the San Francisco Mime Troupe.  I just think we should be proud of it, that’s all.

Back to the subject at hand!  We also selected delegates to the party’s national convention, and determined who they should vote for–five out of eight are committed to Cynthia McKinney, with Kent Mesplay, Kat Swift, and “uncommitted” each getting a delegate.  I have a hard time getting excited about Green Party Presidential candidates.  In my view, it’s just a publicity stunt unless we’ve got a shot at getting a majority in Congress.  We’re a grassroots organization, know what I mean?

Anyway, Cynthia is black, she’s a woman, and she hasn’t sold out.  I wish her well.

Speaking of grass roots,  I wish I had a whole lot more candidate news for you.  I wish we had a crew of people running for the state legislature, where many races are uncontested, but we are awfully thin in the ranks.  However, we do have a plan afoot that could change that.

The plan is our Ballot Access Lawsuit.  The Demoplublicans have written the rules for getting on the Tennessee ballot in such a way that it is virtually impossible for any other parties to get their party name printed on the ballot.  The only problem is, that’s unconstitutional, according to a court in Ohio, where the laws were about as tortuous and monopolistic as they are here.  The Tennessee legislature could have changed that, but, being made up of Demopublicans and Republicrats, they had more important things to do, like allow mountaintop removal in Tennessee.  So, we are having  to sue in Federal court to overturn Tennessee’s laws.  Since it’s the same Federal Court that overturned Ohio’s laws, we think we have a reasonable chance for success.

The State Attorney General, being a committed Demopublican, doesn’t want to let the Green Party on the ballot, and so he is doing everything he can to drag this case out past this year’s election, just as the state’s election officials are doing everything they can to stall legislation that will replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with equipment that will produce a verifiable, recountable paper trail.  Put that together with the fact that the US has more people in prison than any other country in the world, a quarter of the world’s known prison population, in fact, and you can get downright cynical about what a wonderful, free country this is.

Well, anyway, the Ballot Access lawsuit will put our party name on every ballot in the state, even if the newspapers won’t give us the time of day.  That could just be the little match that starts the big fire.  Maybe that’s a lot to hope for, but the future of the human race is at stake.  “Once more unto the breach, good friends…..”

The North American Bioregional Congress is coming to Tennessee in 2009.  Its three hundred or so participants will arrive at The Farm, in Summertown, next September. They will spend a week in intensive interaction, and then journey back to their respective bioregions, inspired through communion at the Congress to ever more deeply reinhabit their home watersheds and bring their friends and neighbors back–or is it forward?–to Earth as well.

What in the world am I talking about?  Bioregions?  Communion?  At a Congress?  Reinhabit their watersheds?  Maybe I’m the one who needs to get “brought back to Earth”?

Well, thank you for your concern, but I feel pretty well grounded.  I am reinhabiting the place I live–staying home a lot, learning my local flora and fauna, water cycles, weather, dirt, and my human neighbors–though sometimes that seems like the hard part.   It’s the culture we live in that has come ungrounded.

Now, in the course of human events, it has become obvious that the political system we have built since 1776 no longer serves us, or most of the other inhabitants of the planet–human and otherwise–either.  We need to reimagine our relationship with our communities at all levels.  Politics is a function of culture, and to truly and deeply change our politics into something that will work in the coming centuries, we have to initiate a culture change, a psychological and spiritual change that starts with renewing and revisioning our felt connection with the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the plants and animals that make it possible, as well as the way we relate to our children, our mates, our families, and our friends. The North American Bioregional Congress is a safe space in which to join with like-minded people and do all that.

“Bioregonal”?  What’s “bioregional”?

A “bioregion” is, to quote from the North American Bioregional Congress’s website,

A geographical area whose boundaries are roughly determined by nature rather than human beings. One bioregion is distinguished from another by characteristics of flora, fauna, water, climate, rocks, soils, land forms, and the human settlements, cultures, and communities these characteristics have spawned. “Local community is the basic unit of human habitation. It is at this level that we can reach our fullest potential and best effect social change. Local communities need to network to empower our bioregional communities. Human communities are integral parts of the larger bioregional and planetary life communities. The empowerment of human communities is inseparable from the larger task of reinhabitation — learning to live sustainably and joyfully in place.”

and a “Congress,” in the Bioregional view, is

a way of holding a working meeting of fully-participating, well-informed, aware equals who see themselves in some sense as representatives—officially or unofficially, formally or informally—of groups, or organizations, or movements, or ideologies, or philosophies or of regions or watersheds, or of natural ecosystems, and plant and animal communities. It is an assembly of peers working consensually in a representational capacity. In this a congress is much different than what we commonly call a “conference”.

In order to allow this community of equals to fully form and maintain coherence, there are no “drop-ins” allowed.  Participants come for the whole thing, or not at all, and that includes the media.  Everyone helps with the cooking, the cleanup, and the childcare.  This is not a “conference.”

At a “conference,” attendees’ main duties are to show up for workshops and meals and have food and information poured into them.  At a “conference,” there are well-known outside speakers, big-name entertainment, and a set schedule of workshops.  A “conference” tries to draw in as many people as it can. This ain’t no stinking conference.  This is do-it-yourself, participatory, and by invitation–and, by the way, you are invited.

This temporary village is considered a “sacred space,” not in any narrow, sectarian sense, but in the broadest possible terms–that the gathering of this intentional community for the purpose of reconsidering everything from one’s most intimately personal thoughts and attitudes to the state of the planet is itself a holy purpose and that all participants are worthy of respect.  Rituals and blessings are shared and invented.  Lives get changed.

Bioregionalism goes far beyond mere “environmentalism.”  Here’s another quote from the website that explains it better than I could:

While environmentalism does much good work in consciousness raising, it is only a part of what must be done. Environmentalism fails to propose comprehensive and systemic change at all levels — based on ecology. Bioregionalism does, reaching for something far deeper and more holistic that must be manifested.

Bioregionalism is an all-inclusive way of life, embracing the whole range of human thought and endeavor. It advocates a full restructuring of systems within a given bioregion, orienting toward regeneration and sustainability of the whole life community. This inclusion of the nonhuman in the definition of community is vital. Indeed, one of the basic tenets of bioregionalism is the notion of “bio-centrism,” or “eco-centrism,” where reality is viewed from a life-centered or ecologically centered perspective, rather than from a human-centered focus (anthropocentrism).

Bioregionalism speaks to the heart of community. If we are to continue to live on Earth, the definition of community has to include all the living things in our ecosystem. Without the flowers, mammals, insects, trees, birds, grasses, and the living soil and waters in community with each other, we would not be here at all. Humans need other life forms in order to survive. Without a respectful, cooperative relationship with others, we are both physically and spiritually impoverished. Without their ecological teachings we are ignorant and cannot know how to live.

Elsewhere on the website, somebody comments, “If you think you’re an independent organism, try seeing how long you can hold your breath.”

The bioregional movement is a seed for a new human culture, one in which the proposals of the Green Party, so often a voice crying in the wilderness, would be as sensible and obvious and implemented as the next breath you take.  We need a new culture and a new politics, and we’re running out of time to get on the road there.  Got ideas?  Bring ‘em to the North American Bioregional Congress.  We’ll listen.

music:  Kate Wolf:  “Medicine Wheel”

(Note: this is substantially the same story I posted in late March, with some updates for the show.)

I was witness to and participant in another heated community meeting in Scottsboro last month. Without Tony Giantarra and his suited cohorts present, the ladies of the Planning Department had to bear the community’s wrath all by themselves. They stood up nobly under the barrage, but I suspect that afterwards there may have been a few good stiff drinks poured in the privacy of home. The people were not happy, and with good reason.

I would have to admit that, along with the good reasons, there were a few clunkers. For instance, the Planning Department, as a government agency, has to balance the needs of all parties in a dispute, whether they live in Bell’s Bend or, like the Mays brothers, in Mexico. The neighborhood wanted partisanship from the Department, and that was not forthcoming. On the other hand, the planning commission had made some judgement calls, and these were rightly unpopular with the populace.

One call was that there ought to be access between Maytown Center and the rest of Bell’s Bend via Old Hickory Boulevard. This concession, coupled with stories that the Mays family has been offering up to $20,000 an acre for large tracts of land “all over the Bend,” clearly demonstrated to the crowd that the initial proposal was just a beginning, and that what the Mays had in mind was (although nobody used the word) the gentrification of Bell’s Bend, which in their vision would be host to upscale executive housing developments (Hey, who else is going to be able to afford a new country house in the post-meltdown economy?)

One of the planning commission representatives said she visualized Scottsboro turning into “another Leiper’s Fork,” which sounds nice, but I have to point out that what has happened in Leiper’s Fork is that it is no longer affordable to its original inhabitants. As you travel down Tennessee 46 and cross the bridge into town, you are not driving through real country, you are driving through an extremely wealthy neighborhood, where front lawns are measured in acres rather than square feet, and any farming that is being done is strictly for the tax writeoff. Leiper’s Fork has become a Disneyfied faux-small town where the wealthy come to play and the poor get to bus their tables. That’s what I’ve seen in the twenty plus years I’ve been passing through there. I don’t want to see that happen to my neighbors in Scottsboro.

Another judgment call that the Planning Department made was that, while the significance of Bell’s Bend as a rural area had trumped attempts to place subdivisions, a dump, and a large manufacturing facility there, because all these activities could be located elsewhere, the possibility of a major new revenue source for Davidson County bore equal weight with the importance of keeping Bell’s Bend rural, and so they wanted to see if a plan could be drawn with safeguards that would sacrifice part of the Bend and insure the preservation of the rest of it. I’ll get to those safeguards in a minute, but first let’s look at the “major new revenue source” claim, and the claim that Bell’s Bend is the only appropriate place for it.

The Maytown crew posits a $75 million dollar a year increase in Davidson County tax collections from their project, which comes to $150,000 per acre on the 500 acres they propose to turn into a new town. That comes to $4 a square foot just in taxes. No wonder they want to build all those highrises!

But…one very important fact that emerged in the course of this meeting is that there has been no independent study done on the economic benefits of this proposal. The only word we have on the subject so far is the word of the developers. Would you buy a used car strictly on the sayso of the salesman, without not only test driving it, but taking it to a mechanic you trust for a thorough inspection? I didn’t think so, especially not a used car this expensive.

And it is getting more expensive. Tony Giantarra now admits that it will take two bridges to handle all the traffic the project is likely to generate. Somebody at the meeting pointed out that Maytown’s projected daytime population of 44,000 people approaches the daytime population of downtown Nashville, which gets seriously congested every day in spite of having about 18 exit routes, as near as I can count.

And we should not lose track of the fact that the US has an infrastructure maintenance crisis. Over a quarter of this country’s bridges need maintenance, with the bill estimated at $180 billion back in 2005. This is just a small part of a larger need for $1.6 trillion to keep our nation’s water, electrical, sewer, and transportation systems functioning—and that was three years ago, and you know how public works estimates go, and you know that when mechanical devices start to go downhill , they deteriorate faster and faster.

We could have fixed up America, but NO! we spent the money tearing up Iraq, instead. Well, actually, we borrowed the money for that. That’s even worse. But, I digress. The point here is that, in the face of such needs, building two more bridges to aid a private developer seems extravagant, at least to me, but hey, I’m not the developer. And let’s give the Mays boys some credit. At least they moved to Mexico, where they don’t have to worry about hiring illegal immigrants for their domestic help, y’know? And besides, they work even cheaper down there! Damn, I’m still digressing.

Residents took exception to the notion that Bell’s Bend was the only place such a project could locate. They pointed out that there are hundreds of acres in urban Davidson County that are underutilized, already have sewer, water, electric, and road services, and are much more accessible than Bell’s Bend. Not having to build two bridges and run in all those utilities really cuts the cost, doesn’t it? How much of that projected $75 M a year would get eaten up by additional infrastructure costs? Nobody really knows.

Perhaps what makes the Bell’s Bend site unique is that the Mays brothers have bought land there and are used to getting their way. To their credit, the Planning Department representatives said that they regularly point out to the Mays brothers that they are trying to change rural zoning in an area that has been historically highly resistant to it.

In one telling exchange, a Planning Department rep said, in response to a comment about Bell’s Bend being a “potential breadbasket,” that she saw Nashville as being the governmental and business center of middle Tennessee, not its breadbasket. What I think we have here is colliding world views. Some of us are pretty sure that the global commercial web that has been built up over the twentieth century is going to break down over the course of the twenty-first, and that Nashville will need its own breadbasket if it wants to have bread. Other people, all too frequently the ones in power, believe that we are going to be able to continue on more or less as we always have, only with LEED buildings and hybrid cars. I suspect that they are in for a serious shock in the next few years, but I wish I could change their minds first.

And along in here comes the question of maintaining Nashville’s revenue stream, so that we can keep on having schools and garbage pickups and roadway maintenance and streetlights and libraries and police patrols and that sort of thing. In the short run, I am sure there are other ways to “enhance Nashville’s revenue stream” besides sacrificing the county’s last major unspoiled rural area.

In the long run, I don’t think Nashville, or any city, is going to be able to “maintain its revenue stream.” Property values are going down, sales tax collections are going down, incomes are going down–for most of us, anyway. Sooner or later, hard choices are going to have to be made, and no, it’s not going to be pretty. It almost feels like science fiction to inject a paragraph like this in a story about land use in Bell’s Bend, but this is where theory meets practice, folks.

Another major bone of contention between the neighborhood and the Planning Department surfaced when the planners insisted that, due to the dense, compact nature of the proposed development, it could not be called “sprawl.” I’m sorry, ladies, but when you ignore underdeveloped but already urban areas in order to build two new bridges, create a network of roads, sewer, water, and electric lines, and introduce 44,000 people into an area previously inhabited largely by cows, and are presented with conclusive evidence that the developer’s plans don’t stop there, you are sprawling. Any questions?

There was a fourth judgment call that the Planning Department made that was largely overlooked by the meeting. On page 12 of the “Detailed Land Use Policy Descriptions” document that they handed out, one of the specific “triggers” that would allow development of Maytown Center reads “development of the Alternate Development Area (e.g., Maytown Center) should be tied to specific preservation triggers to the north…..Preservation of the ridgelines and area to the north…could be accomplished by purchase of conservation easements, purchase or transfer of development rights or other methods with the end result of limiting intensive development to the north …and along Old Hickory Boulevard and preserving the natural/rural/residential feel of the rest of Scottsboro/Bell’s Bend.”

I appreciate their attempt to build some safeguards into the plan, but those safeguards have already been undermined, both by the Planning Department’s decision to feed Old Hickory into the potential development, and by the Mays’ search for development property elsewhere in the Bend. Furthermore, when, after the meeting, I asked one of the planners whether she knew how many property owners were amenable to such an arrangement, and whether there was money available to buy the rights of those who are not in a position to donate them, her answer to both questions was “no.” This was not reassuring, and she did know that.

There will be another meeting Tuesday, April 29, at 6PM, once again at the Scottsboro Community Center. I think we can be reasonably certain that nothing will have been decided by then. On the other hand, we can be reasonably certain that the economy will keep on deteriorating, making it less likely that front money will be available for the city and state to start the infrastructure extensions that will be necessary before this project can move into the construction phase, and making even more hollow the Mays’ brothers threat to subdivide their property into two acre lots and turn it into a subdivision if the Maytown Center proposal gets shot down by the Planning Department. Six miles down a winding, two-lane, dead end road? Twelve miles from shopping? The end of a long, skinny water line? Four dollar gas? Five dollar gas? That subdivision is dead in the water and they know it.

At a certain level, the Mays brothers are in the same position as Bear Stearns. They have made a big, foolish investment, and they want the government to bail them out. Now, the government bailed out Bear Stearns, but the government does not have enough money to bail out every rich, influential schlemiel in America, no matter what Ben Bernanke says or thinks. A line has got to be drawn, the buck has got to stop, somewhere. Bear Stearns got lucky, far luckier than they deserved. Saying “no” to the greenwashed sprawl of Maytown Center is where the buck should stop around here.

music: Drive-By Truckers, “Uncle Frank“

A couple of years ago, my friend Ginny Welsch ran for US Congress here in the 5th District, which, unlike many bizarrely gerrymandered districts in this state, neatly encompasses Nashville and its near suburbs, and is known as an island of Democratic Party dominance in a sea of rural, redneck Republicanism. Ginny thought she would get a lot of traction with her left-wing challenge to our blue dog Democrat congressman, Jim Cooper, who is widely known as a strong supporter of the Iraq war and the Bush administration, but Ginny couldn’t get no respect. She tried renouncing her Green Party endorsement, she tried pointing out that Cooper’s nominal Republican opponent was a flat-earth type who was way out of the mainstream and couldn’t possibly win a serious three-way race, but nothing seemed to work for her. She got little media coverage and financial support, and precious few votes, considering the growing depth of antiwar sentiment even two years ago. She reported that even the most seemingly liberal people were strongly defensive of Cooper, as a nominal Democrat.

This year, the Green Party’s John Miglietta is preparing to take up the David-and-Goliath task of challenging Jim Cooper, so when I stumbled across the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s page on Cooper, I was delighted to discover a massive cache of pebbles for John’s slingshot.

Here”s the executive summary: out of 65 legislative proposals that the FCNL supports, Cooper has been willing to co-sponsor only three. One of those supports punitive sanctions against Iran. Another proposes measures against illegal immigrants, and is supported by more Republicans than Democrats. I don’t pretend to understand or support everything FCNL does, but overall I think they’re a good standard for the more liberal wing of the Democratic party, and Cooper flunks it big time.

Here’s a partial list of the proposals he doesn’t support:

He doesn’t support habeas corpus for prisoners at Guantanamo.

Not only does he support continuing US aggression in Iraq, he is against insisting on Congressional oversight of the war effort, and wants to give the NSA a pass to go around the FISA courts. Guess he just trusts the Cheny-Bush junta to do the right thing. He’s not willing to allow more Iraqis who have worked for the US to seek asylum in this country. That’s just plain mean. Meaner still, he has refused to support any additional aid for Iraq’s four million refugees, who would not be refugees if the US had not invaded their country. Well, they shouldn’t take it personally. Jim doesn’t want to take better care of formerly interned Japanese-Americans, either. I guess it’s a compassion thing–he doesn’t have any.

He has refused to support efforts to find a diplomatic solution to this conflict.

He has refused to support legislation that would hold mercenaries (aka “contractors”) to the same standards of conduct expected of American soldiers. Considering how many wrist slaps have been issued for serious crimes, and how some low level soldiers have been severely punished for following the illegal orders of their superiors (who were not held accountable) that’s not even asking much, but hey, it’s something–but Jim ain’t buying it.

He has refused to push for a ban on cluster bomb use in the vicinity of civilians. Hey, with the planet this crowded, civilians are everywhere, and that would practically mean we couldn’t use cluster bombs at all. Can’t have that, now, can we, Jim? Just leave enough o’ them cluster bomblets laying around populated areas, and it’ll thin the population down some–is that it? Can we try it in your neighborhood, Jim?

He has refused to sign on to legislation that would investigate and probably reign in WHINSEC, the US government’s notorious training school for torturers and terrorists. We ain’t even talking banning it, here, just shining a light on it…not for Jimbo. Ignorance is bliss, eh?

He has refused to support the “Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007,” which would make “significant changes to provisions of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 by restoring the writ of habeas corpus for individuals held under U.S. jurisdiction, narrowing the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant, preventing the use of evidence gained through torture and coercion, and requiring the U.S. to live up to its Geneva Convention obligations.” Our Congressman, Jim Cooper, has declined to sign on to legislation that requires the US to live up to the Geneva Conventions. Got that? I’m going to get back to it in a minute.

He won’t support legislation to close Guantanamo, a bill that was introduced by Jane Harman, who I have characterized elsewhere in this chronicle as a lapdog of the CIA. The CIA wants to close it, the junta wants to keep it open, and lookie where Jim Cooper stands. What loyalty!

He won’t support legislation that would ban the so-called “outsourcing” of torture. Helping preserve American jobs, Jim? Nor will he act to preserve habeas corpus for American citizens, and he’s not interested in repealing the so-called “Real ID” act. In case you hadn’t heard, “Real ID” is a neocon job that was slipped through without debate a few years ago. It gives states a very expensive unfunded mandate to create a national ID card, and many privacy experts see the data base it is supposed to create as an invitation to snooping and identity theft.

And don’t get me started on his apparent support for an attack on Iran, or his lack of support for strong environmental measures–and that’s “strong” by Congressional standards, not even by the standard of what needs to happen to prevent catastrophe.

Now, about those Geneva Convention violations that our boy Jim supports. The last time a Western democracy suspended habeas corpus and allowed the executive branch to rule without oversight or input from the legislative branch was in 1933 when the Reichstag passed “The Enabling Act” that turned the government over to Cheney and Bush…excuse me, I mean Hitler. Hitler, of course, went on to violate the Geneva Conventions and kill millions of civilians. In part because they abdicated responsibility so early in the history of the Nazi regime, members of the Reichstag were not held responsible for war crimes and tried at Nuremburg.

Here in the US, however, we have a different situation. Congress has, at least technically, retained its power, and has passed legislation to fund US aggression in Iraq, as well as declined to investigate its excesses or whether it was warranted at all. This suggests to me that, unlike members of the Reichstag, members of the US Congress who have been actively complicit in the war effort are culpable in the event of some Nuremburg-type trial convened to punish those responsible for the widespread, unprovoked devastation that has resulted from US aggression in the Middle East. That means you, Jim Cooper, not to mention you, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Hillary Clinton and all the other Democrats who have failed in their sworn duty to protect the Constitution, uphold international treaties, and enforce the law, even if it means impeaching the President.

As for all the “good Americans” who have kept Jim “War Criminal” Cooper in office with their votes and their blind allegiance to his party label, all I can say is, “Wake up! It’s almost midnight! Do you know where your conscience is?”

music: James McMurtry, “God Bless America”

Forty years ago, I stood on a hill in San Francisco with my best friend and, as we clung for dear life to a couple of trees in a tiny park, I visualized spending my life taking San Francisco down–tearing it up building by building, street by street, replanting the native flora, liberating the creeks, seeing the regreened valleys and hillsides teeming once again with the birds and beasts that once thrived there, before the human cancer arrived.

Today I read, with joy, that as the “mortgage crisis” deepens into a permanent condition, at least one city has started doing just that…Youngstown, Ohio.  Not the most glamorous location, but ya gotta start somewhere….

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (CNNMoney.com) — Youngstown, Ohio, has seen its population shrink by more than half over the past 40 years, leaving behind huge swaths of empty homes, streets and neighborhoods.

Now, in a radical move, the city - which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up - is bulldozing abandoned buildings and tearing up blighted streets, converting entire blocks into open green spaces. More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far.

Under the initiative, dubbed Plan 2010, city officials are also monitoring thinly-populated blocks. When only one or two occupied homes remain, the city offers incentives - up to $50,000 in grants - for those home owners to move, so that the entire area can be razed. The city will save by cutting back on services like garbage pick-ups and street lighting in deserted areas.

more

They’re taking down the street lights!  That’s some of the best news I’ve heard lately!  There are few individual aspects of Western Civilization that irk me more than street- and “security” lights.  At the least, they should be hooked up to motion sensors so they only go on if something’s moving in their vicinity.

And little farms are springing up…may this spread like wildfire!

Under the rather ill-fitting title “Manhood in the Age of Aquarius,” Tim Hogdon has written the story of the Digger movement in San Francisco, as well as a take on the history of The Farm in Summertown. I haven’t even gotten to the Farm section yet, but if it’s as well-written and authoritative as the Diggers chapter, it’s a great bit of history.

There are copious footnote/links, as well. Two that stood out for me are “Mutants Commune,” an edgy, passionate sociopolitical rant from the Haight Street days, still strong enough to produce a flashback; and an (alas, incomplete) interview with Peter Berg and Judy Goldschaft, who went from being Diggers to founding the Bioregional movement. Although they don’t talk about bioregionalism in the interview, they give a great feel for the matrix in which the movement arose.  As staid as the Green Party gets sometimes, it’s good to remember where we came from.

I was witness to and participant in another heated community meeting in Scottsboro this week. Without Tony Giantarra and his suited cohorts present, the ladies of the Planning Department had to bear the community’s wrath all by themselves. They stood up nobly under the barrage, but I suspect that afterwards there may have been a few good stiff drinks poured in the privacy of home. The people were not happy, and with good reason.

I would have to admit that, along with the good reasons, there were a few clunkers. For instance, the Planning Department, as a government agency, has to balance the needs of all parties in a dispute, whether they live in Bell’s Bend or, like the Mays brothers, in Mexico. The neighborhood wanted partisanship from the Department, and that was not forthcoming. On the other hand, the planning commission had made some judgement calls, and these were rightly unpopular with the populace.

One call was that there ought to be access between Maytown Center and the rest of Bell’s Bend via Old Hickory Boulevard. This concession, coupled with stories that the Mays family has been offering up to $20,000 an acre for large tracts of land “all over the Bend,” clearly demonstrated to the crowd that the initial proposal was just a beginning, and that what the Mays had in mind was (although nobody used the word) the gentrification of Bell’s Bend, which in their vision would be host to upscale executive housing developments (Hey, who else is going to be able to afford a new country house in the post-meltdown economy?)

One of the planning commission representatives said she visualized Scottsboro turning into “another Leiper’s Fork,” which sounds nice, but I have to point out that what has happened in Leiper’s Fork is that it is no longer affordable to its original inhabitants. As you travel down Tennessee 46 and cross the bridge into town, you are not driving through real country, you are driving through an extremely wealthy neighborhood, where front lawns are measured in acres rather than square feet. Any farming that is being done is strictly for the tax writeoff. And Leiper’s Fork has become a Disneyfied faux-small town where the wealthy come to play and the poor get to bus their tables. That’s what I’ve seen in the twenty years I’ve been passing through there. I don’t want to see that happen to my neighbors in Scottsboro.

Another judgement call that the Planning Department made was that, while the significance of Bell’s Bend as a rural area had trumped attempts to place subdivisions, a dump, and a large manufacturing facility there, because all these activities could be located elsewhere, the possibility of a major new revenue source for Davidson County bore equal weight with the importance of keeping Bell’s Bend rural, and so they wanted to see if a plan could be drawn with safeguards that would sacrifice part of the Bend and insure the preservation of the rest of it. I’ll get to those safeguards in a minute, but first let’s look at the “major new revenue source” claim, and the claim that Bell’s Bend is the only appropriate place for it.

The Maytown crew posits a $75 million dollar a year increase in Davidson County tax collections from their project, which comes to $150,000 per acre on the 500 acres they propose to turn into a new town. That comes to $4 a square foot just in taxes. No wonder they want to build all those highrises!

But…one very important fact that emerged in the course of this meeting is that there has been no independent study done on the economic benefits of this proposal. The only word we have on the subject so far is the word of the developers. Would you buy a used car strictly on the sayso of the salesman, without not only test driving it, but taking it to a mechanic you trust for a thorough inspection? I didn’t think so, especially not a used car this expensive.

And it is getting more expensive. Tony Giantarra now admits that it will take two bridges to handle all the traffic the project is likely to generate. Somebody at the meeting pointed out that Maytown’s projected daytime population of 44,000 people approaches the daytime population of downtown Nashville, which gets seriously congested every day in spite of having about 18 exit routes, as near as I can count.

Residents took exception to the notion that Bell’s Bend was the only place such a project could locate. They pointed out that there are hundreds of acres in urban Davidson County that are underutilized, already have sewer, water, electric, and road services, and are much more accessible than Bell’s Bend. Not having to build two bridges and run in all those utilities really cuts the cost, y’know?

Perhaps what makes the Bell’s Bend site unique is that the Mays brothers have bought land there and are used to getting their way. To their credit, the Planning Department representatives said that they regularly point out to the Mays brothers that they are trying to change rural zoning in an area that has been historically highly resistant to it.

In one telling exchange, a Planning Department rep said, in response to a comment about Bell’s Bend being a “potential breadbasket,” that she saw Nashville as being the governmental and business center of middle Tennessee, not its breadbasket. What I think we have here is colliding world views. Some of us are pretty sure that the global commercial web that has been built up over the twentieth century is going to break down over the course of the twenty-first, and that Nashville will need its own breadbasket if it wants to have bread. Other people, all too frequently the ones in power, believe that we are going to be able to continue on more or less as we always have, only with LEED buildings and hybrid cars. I suspect that they are in for a serious shock in the next few years, but I wish I could change their minds first.

And along in here comes the question of maintaining Nashville’s revenue stream, so that we can keep on having schools and garbage pickups and roadway maintenance and streetlights and libraries and police patrols and that sort of thing. In the short run, I am sure there are other ways to “enhance Nashville’s revenue stream” besides sacrificing the county’s last major unspoiled rural area.

In the long run, I don’t think Nashville, or any city, is going to be able to “maintain its revenue stream.” Property values are going down, sales tax collections are going down, incomes are going down–for most of us, anyway. Sooner or later, hard choices are going to have to be made, and no, it’s not going to be pretty. It almost feels like science fiction to inject a paragraph like this in a story about land use in Bell’s Bend, but this is where theory meets practice, folks.

Another major bone of contention between the neighborhood and the Planning Department surfaced when the planners insisted that, due to the dense, compact nature of the proposed development, it could not be called “sprawl.” I’m sorry, ladies, but when you ignore underdeveloped but already urban areas in order to build two new bridges, create a network of roads, sewer, water, and electric lines, and introduce 40,000 people into an area previously inhabited largely by cows, and are presented with conclusive evidence that the developer’s plans don’t stop there, you are sprawling. Any questions?

There was a fourth judgement call that the Planning Department made that was largely overlooked by the meeting. On page 12 of the “Detailed Land Use Policy Descriptions” document that they handed out, one of the specific “triggers” that would allow development of Maytown Center reads “development of the Alternate Development Area (e.g., Maytown Center) should be tied to specific preservation triggers to the north…..Preservation of the ridgelines and area to the north…could be accomplished by purchase of conservation easements, purchase or transfer of development rights or other methods with the end result of limiting intensive development to the north …and along Old Hickory Boulevard and preserving the natural/rural/residential feel of the rest of Scottsboro/Bell’s Bend.”

This could be the deal maker or the deal breaker, but it has already been undermined, both by the Planning Department moving to feed Old Hickory into the potential development, and by the Mays’ search for developable property elsewhere in the Bend. Furthermore, when, after the meeting, I asked one of the planners whether she knew how many property owners were amenable to such an arrangement, and whether there was money available to buy the rights of those who are not in a position to donate them, her answer to both questions was “no.” This was not reassuring, and she did know that.

There will be another meeting at the end of April. I think we can be reasonably certain that nothing will have been decided by then. On the other hand, we can be reasonably certain that the economy will keep on deteriorating, making it less likely that front money will be available for the city and state to start the infrastructure extensions that will be necessary before this project can move into the construction phase, and making even more hollow the Mays’ brothers threat to subdivide their property into two acre lots and turn it into a subdivision if the Maytown Center proposal gets shot down by the Planning Department. Six miles down a winding, two-lane, deadend road? Twelve miles from shopping? The end of a long, skinny water line? Four dollar gas? Five dollar gas? That subdivision is dead in the water and they know it.

At a certain level, the Mays brothers are in the same position as Bear Stearns. They have made a big and possibly unwise investment, and they want the government to bail them out. Now, the government bailed out Bear Stearns, but the government does not have enough money to bail out every rich, influential schlemiel in America, no matter what Ben Bernanke says or thinks. A line has got to be drawn, the buck has got to stop, somewhere. Bear Stearns got lucky, far luckier than they deserved. Saying “no” to the greenwashed sprawl of Maytown Center is where the buck should stop around here.

I don’t know who Sam Smith is, but he sure nails it…

One of the reasons that change is so hard to come by these days is that the things that make it happen have increasingly been forgotten, replaced, dismissed or ignored. .Just as urban migrations have caused tens of millions to lose simple but critical skills of rural survival, so the tens of millions of Americans who have migrated into the purported sophistication of post-modern politics have left behind many of the habits, technique and skills that created democracy in the first place and then sustained it.

Who needs community when you have television commercials and the Internet? Who needs serious conversation when you have tracking polls? Who needs the grass roots when you can afford to lay Astroturf anywhere you want? Who needs local organizing when you have huge national groups that can raise more money in a few days than a nation of precincts once could have in a whole year? Who needs the skills of a community organizer when you can go to the Harvard Business School?

Except for one problem: the corporate based system that has seized control of our politics lacks the interest, imagination, integrity, capacity and soul to produce positive change. Whatever the sign on the side of the political machine says, whatever the TV commercial claims, how ever many times the candidates chant the word “change,” we have, in fact, systematically been destroying the means by which we once achieved what it is we say we want.

This fact is hidden because of the language used by our leaders, the media and ourselves - and our acceptance of it. We happily applaud a politician promising to bring change without demanding to know what the hell the candidate is talking about. We accept hope as an objective though devoid of detail, dimensions or even simple description. We have become a nation mainlining comforting nouns and adjectives as a substitute for the social, economic and physical improvements that used to be the goals of a good politics.

***

I put it this way once: “We have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers.”

We need to do this because, as Lau-tzu said:

Of the best rulers, the people only know that they exist;
The next best they love and praise;
The next they fear;
And the next they revile . . .

But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done,
The people all remark, “We have done it ourselves.”

Last month, I reported to you about Bell’s Bend, a part of metro Nashville that had seemingly succeeded in insulating itself from the rampant sprawl that has overtaken most of Davidson County. Oops. I was wrong. Now another developer has set his sights on the Bend, and may just have the cojones to do what he wants.

When Jeff Zeitlin lost his bid to build 1400 homes in the Bend, he sold the land he had purchased to the Mays family, longtime Nashville movers and shakers, who made a fortune running a hosiery mill here in Nashville in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then invested that fortune in enough different directions, mostly real estate, to turn it into several more fortunes. They own big chunks of the city of Nashville, and that’s a lot of rent money, honey. One non-real-estate venture that they struck gold on was Transcor, a private company that specializes in prisoner transportation, which they sold to Corrections Corporation of America in 1995.

So, the Mays family has very deep pockets. The rest of us are dealing with a credit freeze. They don’t have to talk a bank into financing their plans. They are the bank. They have their own money to play with, and they are playing smart with it. You don’t get that rich being foolish. What they have done is pitch a proposal to where the money is–they would like to create a five-hundred acre, high-rise corporate headquarters “new town” there at the tip of Bell’s Bend, serviced by a new bridge across the Cumberland and a new interchange on I-40.

Very smart. The reason the rest of us are getting poor is because the big corporations are succeeding in their aim of sucking up all the money. But, I digress….

This new town will be pedestrian-friendly, small enough to walk from home to work and shopping. There could even be market gardens in the floodplain bottomlands between the development and the river. How much more local could it get? The buildings will all be designed with the latest “green” technology and the streetlights will be built to “dark skies” specifications so that they don’t dim the night sky. Wish they’d do that at the prisons across the river!

Oh, yes, and the highrises will be designed and positioned so that they will be shielded from the view of the rest of Bell’s Bend by a low range of hills. And, to cap it off, the developers propose to have no public access between their development and the rest of the Bend.

That’s the pitch. Now, let’s look at some aspects of the plan that developer Tony Giarratana doesn’t mention. First of all, is it really practical to have a projected 5,000+ residents plus tens of thousands of commuting day workers access this development via one bridge over the Cumberland that feeds into one interchange on an already overcrowded highway?

Second, nobody believes for a minute that the disconnect with the rest of Bell’s Bend will last for long. One person I spoke with who is familiar with the area commented that, while some big land owners in the Bend are staunchly anti-development, others “are just waiting for the right offer.” My friend thinks the Mays family is well enough connected to make the project happen, and that it will lead to the development of the rest of Bell’s Bend. He said “By cutting themselves off from any compromise, they (opponents of development) will get just that–no compromise–and no preservation.”

Now, in a way, I think my friend is being optimistic to think that Nashville is going to continue sprawling out into the countryside as if gasoline and money were still cheap and plentiful. On the other hand, if long-distance commuting becomes financially unsustainable but the wealthy corporate headquarters at May Town Center succeed, there will be plenty of pressure to build homes close to work for the thirty thousand projected commuters that this project could generate.

Two other potential problems for May Town Center involve airspace. The first is that a pair of Whooping Cranes seem to be considering the Bend as a nesting spot, and development would not be healthy for this fragile species. The other airspace question relates to Tune Airport, just east of the Bend. The proposed development is right in its flight path. At best there would be frequent loud jet noise; at worst we could have an airplane crashing into a densely populated area.

There’s also a kind of almost sinister aspect to the May Town Center proposal. When you see the video on their website, the first thing that strikes many people is that May Town Center looks like a castle, and the Cumberland River looks like its moat. Is this why they’re only proposing one bridge into the place? Is it going to be a drawbridge? Is this why they want to surround it with a thousand acres of open land–to make it easier to create a security perimeter? Do I sound nuts here? Look, there’s a lot of buzz about government contracts to create internment camps in this country. The Pentagon is predicting that climate change will create widespread “civil unrest.” Putting your corporate headquarters and its bedrooms in a small, easily securable area could be a good way to protect your assets from mob violence, kidnappings, or just plain petty thievery. Furthermore, “May Town” will be on private property, which means that it will be completely legal to restrict access and Constitutional rights in general. Hmm…..(Update:  when I talked to a member of the Metro Planning Commission at the March 25th meeting, she assured me that the streets and sidewalks of Maytown Center would be public streets and sidewalks, where we citizens would be free to exercise our Constitutional rights–”not that you’d necessarily get a good reception,” she quipped.)

The May Town folks have not done well at reaching out to the Bell’s Bend community, either. I went to a neighborhood meeting to discuss the plan, and just before it started, Tony Giarratana and his assistants (the only people in the room wearing suits) had to leave briefly to move their cars. They had parked in a way that blocked everybody else in. That’s not a good sign. On a broader scale, they could have made offers to the community to help the Tennessee Land Trust buy development rights, or to help establish the infrastructure needed to promote vegetable farming in the Bend, but they haven’t. What they have said is that if their plan is rejected, they will subdivide the property and put in tract homes. In today’s housing market, that seems like an empty threat.

The plan’s opponents are playing their cards close to their chest. They are up against a well-financed, well-connected, strong-willed opponent. If they are going to stop Nashville’s sprawl from breaching the Cumberland, they are going to need every break they can get.

music: Exene Cervenka, “Real Estate”