Welcome Back to Civilization! or Where Do We Go From Here?

I must confess that I was a little nervous on my latest bus ride back from L.A. this past Monday. For more on my other hijinks see "More Things I Learned From the Road" 6-25-09 I've taken the Greyhound from my current location to L.A. several times and I like to think that I am an old pro by now.

However, due to circumstances beyond my control, (see aforementioned blog) I didn't take a Greyhound Greyhound bus. Instead I took another line, which leaves from the same station. But this line takes fewer stops, which makes fewer checkpoints between civilization. The inbetween points are really long stretches of California farmland and undeveloped or undevelopable land, not much to see and unfortunately makes the mind, which has been exposed to too many slasher movies, wander and consider the potential for me to star in a real-life version of Jeepers Creepers.

But as I am writing this blog not from beyond the grave, I survived the trip. I was a bit too excited when I saw those 12-foot high fences that attempt to block the noise from the stone's-throw-away freeway while corraling the aesthetically-unappealling sprawling edge suburbs.

The reason I bring this up is because during my bus ride, and yesterday too, in the most unlikely of events- watching one of my favorite movies, Wedding Crashers, I was thinking about the future of development. In Wedding Crashers Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdam's characters take a charmed bike ride through the (probably) Virginia countryside. There are unpaved bike paths, rolling meadows, and centuries-old trees that fill the background. This is the kind of land that I can get behind, that I can defend, chain myself to a tree for, etc.,

But the barren, frankly ugly California countryside I could do without. If anything, it is prime real estate. Sections just like this have been developed an hour, two hours driving distance outside of L.A. One might think that I should be psyched about this. But the environmentalist in me bemoans how expensive the infrastructure is to support these fringe communities. The edge suburbs of L.A. are developed in the desert, not exactly land known for abundant natural sources of water. Then there are utilities, waste management, etc.,

I guess there is no truly perfect solution. Once that beautiful Virginia countryside is razed for development there is no turning back. A good example is one of the final scenes in the surprisingly anti-development movie, Evan Almighty where God, in the form of Morgan Freeman shows Evan aka Steve Carrell, shows what the land used to look like before his development was built. On the other hand, developing in the desert makes sense, at first, no one else is using it, there isn't much of an eco-system or too many animals to consider potentially displacing. But it's really expensive to establish and maintain infrastructure in a land that is technically uninhabitable.

But like the title of Barack Obama's autobiography/call-to-arms, one needs to believe in the Audacity of Hope. That there are solutions, but we need the audacity to hope, to believe that they exist, to look for them, and not to rest until we find some that are win-win for everyone.