The Small Town Project (http://www.smalltownproject.org/)
An excellent new website (begun July 2005) by John Feeney: Ph.D. psychologist, retired professional poker player, now a part time writer. John grew up in the Phoenix area, spent twenty years in San Diego, and in 2004 moved with his family to Mount Vernon, Iowa “to enjoy the benefits of a classic American small town. From the start of his two year stay in Iowa, he was struck by the effect on the area of ongoing residential development, including changes sure to come if development proceeded as planned. That inspired him to launch this site and sparked a growing interest in environmental issues.” He and his family recently moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he says he’ll maintain this and/or a similar site.
The Small Town Project website is hard to beat – and not just because it provides a link to the ASAP site (“Virginia group with very much the same message as ours.”). The home page states “This site is one of the Web’s most comprehensive sources of information on the problem of needless urban growth and the benefits of a no-growth policy (emphasis mine). It began as an effort to help Mount Vernon and Lisbon, Iowa, preserve their small town characters and open spaces. It subsequently adopted a broader focus on issues of growth, sustainability, and the environment.” The visually attractive and easily navigable site includes articles, informed blogs, book reviews (e.g., of Ed Stennett’s “In Growth We Trust”), links to other sites, etc. It’s fun and informative to spend some time surfing around this site and the interesting places it sends you. It makes me wish Feeney lived in Albemarle County.
Citizens for Responsible Community Planning [CRCP] (http://www.saveparadise.org)
CRCP has an attractive, lively, education- and advocacy-based website about Kelowna, a city of about 110,000 in British Columbia, Canada, with built-in on-going blogs on dozens of topics. CRCP “rejects the population growth rate assumptions for Kelowna implicit in the Kelowna Official Community Plan 2020. CRCP affirms that allowing Kelowna to grow above 150,000 residents by the year 2020 will exacerbate many of the problems Kelowna is presently facing by increasing traffic congestion, further burdening our imperiled eco-system while undermining our cherished sense of community.” The website includes up-to-date City Council voting records on all local growth-related issues, and a quirky page that provides a warning to potential new residents thinking of retiring to Kelowna: given the “crisis” in overcrowding at the local hospital, the community is “dangerous place to be ill.”
Pro-Whatcom (http://www.pro-whatcom.org/)
Formed in 2003 in Bellingham, Washington, and focused on the surrounding Whatcom County, this group is as close to ASAP as any we’ve found in structure and aims. The first sentence in Pro-Whatcom’s vision: “Our community will identify—through a democratic and scientific process—an optimal Whatcom County population size and work to reach and level off at that size.” Among the organization’s objectives: “Expand the growth debate from how and where we should grow to whether we should grow.” Over the years ASAP and Pro-Whatcom leaders have shared ideas; regrettably, Pro-Whatcom has recently become least temporarily dormant, if not semi-permanently moribund.
AGO [Alternatives to Growth Oregon] (http://www.agoregon.org/index1.htm)
Launched in 1999 to “lead a statewide effort to build sustainable communities that recognize limits to growth,” AGO was a model for ASAP until it suspended operations in 2004 when it simply ran out of funding (their website, though dormant, lives on). Andy Kerr, the Chair of AGO until its demise, maintains a lively, informative, and slightly wacky page about population growth on his large website (http://www.andykerr.net/Growth/GrowthPT.htm) headed with the sentence: “The only thing more radical than the end of growth is continuation of growth.”
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Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population |