q. i. f?

“It’s the first time the state has ever done anything like this,” said Richard Josephson, director of planning services. State planners have had the legal authority to draw up a statewide development plan since the 1970s, he said, but have never acted on it. Now, though, amid signs that Maryland’s Smart Growth laws and policies haven’t slowed the spread of suburbia over the past 12 years, state officials are dusting off that unused planning tool. “If we continue [developing] at the rate we’re going, we’ll use up 560,000 acres in the next 20 years,” Josephson said. That’s nearly equal to all the land in Anne Arundel and Prince George’s counties combined, he noted, calling it “staggering to think about.”

From a Sun item on the latest in Maryland government efforts to get to ‘Smart Growth’.

I’ve come to see that in all of our identity, we have two different parts of ourselves. We have a consumer self and a citizen self. And that consumer self is spoken to and validated and nurtured from day one, so that muscle is really well developed. We all know how to be consumers; we know how to get online right now and get any product from anywhere in the world delivered to our door. And one of the things about familiarity is it can lull us into staying there. So we stay in this consumer realm.
   Meanwhile, the citizen part of our self, our citizen muscle, has atrophied. I really see this when I show The Story of Stuff at public events. Somebody will almost always raise their hand and say, “What can I buy differently to solve this problem?” And I tell them, You know what? You can’t. Because the solutions that we need are not for sale. Even at Whole Foods.

Annie Leonard, on Marc Steiner and in Urbanite.

It’s no waste of words to say again that this is a most remarkable moment in American history. I’m very grateful to be here to see it.

My prayer is that President Obama is right, that something in us as a country really is ready to enter a ‘new era’ — not of rest & dubious reward but of responsibility.

A Jan. 1 op-ed in The Sun: thoughts upon the anti-sprawl agenda, going into 2009. This time we really really mean it, right?

A decade after the initiative began, what works and what doesn’t? What hasn’t worked, according to the Maryland Department of Planning, are efforts to reduce sprawl development. By contrast, the essential finding of a study presented at the 2007 conference of the National Center for Smart Growth is that state programs targeted to support existing communities and downtown revitalization promote more development and private investment in these areas, where the state wants new growth and development to occur. The list of successful downtown communities in Maryland is extensive and growing. . . .
   Let us suggest an alternative to top-down oversight over local planning and zoning. This alternative approach is not so driven by artificial statistics — such as land “consumption” numbers or statewide goals for land preservation — that have no real relationship to how people live. It is driven by the goal of making existing communities more attractive places to live, work and play.

Hm. Three easy-to-understand components, eh? Do go on . . . .

Forty-five Years

Conscience would not allow me to vote for him, but I feel a swell of gratitude with the outcome of this election, even so. It’s a great day to be an American. We need to pray that the Obama presidency, too, is a great presidency.

Briefly observed on the roadside this morning in Silver Spring: a lone figure, sandy-haired, bearded, in t-shirt & jeans, holding out toward passing traffic a small poster-board sign, red & blue lettering, reading,

If you love your MAMA
vote OBAMA

I’m pretty sure McCain can’t hope to generate any expression of support quite as warm & communal as this, no matter what he does. Who knows, though? National politics brings out all sorts of weird in people.

(Via Endlessly Rocking, via Boar’s Head Tavern.)

We have confused, as a society, wants and needs, and a lot of people have raised up their wants way above their needs and way above their abilities to support all those wants. . . . What we have got to do is get back to the basics in difficult economic times like this and explain to people that you will not wither up and die if you don’t have that wide-screen TV.

— Millard Fuller, formerly of Habitat for Humanity, speaking in Arkansas yesterday. From The Examiner.

Better perhaps if we leave out the ‘in difficult times’ part — and give some attention to just what basics should mean.