When Is Progress No Longer Progress

For a few years, I was a runner.  Then I tore a groin muscle three times before seeing a doctor.  (Lesson learned folks:  tear a muscle, see a doctor.)  At least for the time being, I can no longer run as a result.  But, I can bicycle.  So I've returned to that form of exercise after a lot of years of love-hate with it.

Bicycling has given me the opportunity to enjoy the more rural sights of our community. And ponder a question I think is critical to how we move forward as a community, not just locally, but within the State and the country.  This weekend there was an article in the Sacramento Bee about how local homebuilders can't keep up with demand because of the lack of lots to build on. 

Other stories over the last few months disclose how developers want to build on thousands of acres outside the County's Urban Services Boundary.  Every year or two it seems like there is another plan to do this.  It is the never ending push for more and more development.  For expanding the urban footprint ever further out. 

The question is where does it stop?  Where do we reach a tipping point where enough is enough?  Or, in fact, where enough is actually too much? 

The home I grew up in in East Sacramento is on land that was probably covered with hops seventy years ago.  The neighborhood I live in now was farmland barely thirty years ago.  Yes, it could be argued that I'm part of the problem.  To a point.  I look forward to the day when I can leave suburbia behind and return to the city.  To live in a small place without anything approaching the footprint I exist on now.

I bicycle on the back roads around Elk Grove and see the beauty of the old oak trees and the endless meadows and pastures, and the lifestyle of people who still farm and ranch.  I think about the similar lands that have been built over in the name of progress and development in what is now Elk Grove.  I see the plans for ever more and I wonder how long it will be before these places I bicycle past are paved over as well.

The sloughin the picture included here is just a hundred feet or so from a sign that promises custom homes on 2 acre lots. 

Elsewhere in the Patch universe, I've been involved in a discussion about the nature of growth in California.  Whether people are fleeing or not.  The inference from the other side seems to be that one aspect of "progress" is constant growth.  I'd suggest that growth without intelligent planning, growth that just is nothing more than endless sprawl, growth that continues to pave over without preserving some of our natural resources and beauty, isn't actually progress.

We live on a planet that is a finite resource.  Endless growth is impossible.  Where does it end?  When does it become too much?  Isn't it worth preserving these little spaces of beauty that are so close by?