The ingredients for any community should start with the basics: active and informed citizens. Participants in a community’s past (context, knowledge), present (all those factors tied to the weakest and most vulnerable, are they included?) and future (getting to a place where climate chaos, predatory capitalism, neofascism doesn’t completely pull all the loose strings of a threadbare set of safety nets). There are plethora of planning books on the smalltown.
Then what about a sustainable city? Unfortunately, when planners and politicians talk about making cities more sustainable, they are thinking of large urban centers like Portland or Seattle. Oh, the buzz phrases: walkable neighborhoods, traditional architecture, and diverse land uses. It’s neighborhoods that sort of look like small towns. The fix is in for those large cities as planners and developers are B.S.-ing introducing a “small-town feel” into large cities and suburbs. This will never ever create a sense of community, nor will it reduce the use of automobiles.
From the promo stuff on the book, The New American Small Town: “So, what of small towns themselves? We don’t talk about these places as much. They are often assumed to be utopias of the past or crumbling ghost towns of the present day rather than places with potential for sustainable living. This book critically examines narratives of American small towns, contrasting them with lived experiences in these places, and considers both the myth and reality in the context of current urban challenges. Interweaving stories from and about U.S. small towns, the book offers lessons in sustainable urbanism that can be applied both in the towns themselves and to the larger cities and suburbs where most Americans now live.”
Like I stated above, there are dozens of books for planning students and developers and chambers of commerce and policy wonks on how to jigger things for smalltowns.
“The book offers hope-filled portraits of small towns as livable, sustainable, and diverse places and serves as an important corrective to the media narrative of alienated, left-behind rural voters.”
—Mark Bjelland, author of Good Places for All
Thinking of community from that large urban space, Jane Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems. She suggested that over time, buildings, streets and neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in response to how people interact with them. She explained how each element of a city – sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy – functions together synergistically, in the same manner as the natural ecosystem. This understanding helps us discern how cities work, how they break down, and how they could be better structured.
She was looking at big urban places, like her home, New York:
“Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.” (source)
In my small town, population 2,300, we look toward the sea and the forest as reminders of how vital ecosystems are. The county becomes a network of towns along the coast and inland — Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Seal Rock, Waldport, Yahcats.
We drive a lot, and the traffic during tourist summer season balloons. The town of Lincoln City is around 10,000, but on some weekends, it swells to 50,000. All that infrastructure, all that water, all those restaurants and beaches, well, think of five times the impact, or more, since locals do not all swarm to the beaches or the restaurants all in one fell swoop.
We are living on unceded land, and in many cases, sacred burial land: Indigenous Communities in Oregon.
The links below are the websites of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribal communities:
- Burns Paiute Tribe
- Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians
- Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon
- Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians
- Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
- Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
- Coquille Indian Tribe
- Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians
- Klamath Tribes
The story of a community is all wrapped up in its context, history, and in this age of a memory hole crazy presidency — with white supremacists like Jewish Stephen Miller running the Trump team’s Gestapo and Big Brother training camp — we will see history literally erased.
Communities that are small are more vulnerable than those large urban areas Jacobs wrote about, and studied.
From my urban and regional-planning graduate-student days (looking at concepts of small is better and scaling down) there are so many quotable axioms tied to communities that are considered small. Here are some notes from one of my planning classes looking at regional smalltown planning:
- “A small town is where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has a secret.”
- “In the quiet of the village, the soul finds its reflection.”
- “A village is a symphony of nature and humanity.”
- “Simplicity and serenity find their home in village life.”
- “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
- “If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is … to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish.”
For me, big ideas and a global perspective capture where I live. There is a deep economic tie to tourism and Air B & B sort of lifestyle out here. Fishing as an industry is big. Logging and a pulp mill in the town of Toledo are still big economic drivers. A big brewery, Rogue, gobbles up precious freshwater, as does the pink fish industry of Pacific Seafoods.
We have the NOAA station and the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences Center, as well as the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Many highly educated (college) retirees end up here since many worked for those two large entities listed above. I’ve written about “this place” for Dissident Voice, capturing my old gig as a columnist for Oregon Coast Today. I write for the local rag, called the Newport News Times, with a name change of Lincoln County Leader.
Conference celebrates how the ocean connects to all of us — coastlines, people, cultures
This one captures my day in and day out life on the wrack line:
“Respite: Smart People, Concerned Environmentalists, Talking Whales, Kelp, Tidepools.”
I’ve worked with poor people and homeless folk, with developmental delayed clients, and I have had columns in two newspapers, one of which became a book out there, to be purchased on Amazon — Coastal People inside a Deep Dive: stories about people living on the Central Coast and other places in Oregon.
Here’s an interesting one, while I was training to be a bus driver, but alas, that fell through because of bad HR, MAGA co-workers, and a multinational company, First Student, ruling over the local school system’s transportation:
“More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets!”
Here’s a weird idea of mine, a letter to Jeff Bezos’ ex, billionaire MacKenzie Scott Tuttle. “Another 400 Acres Up for Sale!”
The big idea around homelessness. That was more than three years ago, and today, those first 100-plus days in this DOGE — Department of Oppression Greed Excrement — nightmare, and the signs of fascism, “at the foothills of fascism” as professor Gerald Horne calls it, I see the major trauma cracks in this smalltown existence.
Daily, the Meals on Wheels delivery route I volunteer for shows America in a microcosm — old people, alone aging in place, many in homes or apartments that are long in the tooth, with major repair issues facing them. The TV “news” is usually blaring in the background. And the people energy is thankfulness and fear.
Just a few minutes with each free meals recepient will help them feel somehow connected to the outside world, a world not wrapped up in medical visits and isolation. The Meals on Wheels programs get state and federal grants. The MOW programs are on the DOGE chopping block, part of the billionaires’ scheme to hobble the weak, vulnerable, the 80 Percenters.
Just put in your Google-Gulag search, “Paul Haeder Newport News Times,” and you’ll find the thousand word Op-Eds that are still getting published in the local rag, though after a few looks at the stories, the PayWall comes into play. Some of those pieces have been republished in Dissident Voice.
You can search Dissident Voice for those, or Muck Rack.
“Community” includes all those puzzle pieces, from education, health care, environment, economics, people, transportation, etc. From an urban planning point of view, the boiler plate definition of planning encompasses a broad range of fields and specializations focused on shaping the built environment and improving the quality of life in urban and regional areas. This interdisciplinary field taps into various disciplines, including geography, economics, sociology, and public policy.
And I did the “sustainability” thing, even going to Vancouver for the University of British Columbia’s summer sustability program.
Fourteen years ago, and boy have I changed on that green is the new black and new green deal mentality:
“The rise of sustainability as a force to critique, celebrate and co-modify.”
Journalism seems to be one avenue into a MURP degree, as I ended up in the Eastern Washington University program in 2001, just new to the Pacific northwest coming from El Paso. The program included tribal planning, looking at scenic by-ways, neighborhood planning, even planning principles around farmer’s markets and sustainable businesses.
I was teaching English at community colleges and Gonzaga when the advisors at EWU said I should get into that master’s program, emphasizing that many journalists have entered into the field of planning.
One dude, James Howard Kunstler, I brought to Spokane, putting him through a whirlwind set of speaking engagements. Here, myew of him on my radio show, Tipping Points: James Howard Kunstler calls suburban sprawl “the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.” His arguments bring a new lens to urban development, drawing clear connections between physical spaces and cultural vitality. Books like The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere made him famous.
In Spokane, I created local and regional news interest, with a column in the monthly magazine, Spokane Living — Metro Talk. Dozens of columns: “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is just one example of that journalism. Music Therapy? Check that out: “Music to the Ears.” And then a column in the weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander (“War and Peace In Vietnam“), and had a column in the Spokesman Review, tied to Down to Earth (“You Never Know a Place is Unique Until the Story Gets Told“), and then a radio show, Tipping Points.
The guests on that show were varied in background, political leanings and creative impetus. See those shows here at Paul Haeder (dot) com.
Now? At age 68? I teach a memoir writing class for the community college, and even that gig is all messed up with MAGA, or the fear of MAGA, as I was warned this spring quarter that a student who received an email from me along with the other enrolled students complained that she thought the class was misrepresented in the Oregon Coast Community College catalogue. The class is about writing, including memoir writing, fiction, poetry, long and short form creative non-fiction, editorial writing, and flash fiction and flash essays.
My email to the class, all blind copied, included articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education and articles in literary magazine around the cuts to humanities, including the cuts to journalism, writing programs, etc. This person wanted her money back and she wrote to a vice president who, like most in educatoin, are spineless creatures.
Can you issue a full refund for my registration to the “Writing As Gift Class” in Waldport which starts this afternoon? This class is not as described in the Catch the Wave catalgue. I write about nature and short stories of personal experiences. This class appears to be biased towards politics. Can you also let the instructor know to delete my email and contact information permanently? I do not give the instructor permission to forward my contact information or use it for any other purposes.
Well well, you have read plenty of my work at Dissident Voice around the decay-rot-putridity in higher education, part-time faculty organizing, and the rise of the administrative class in education.
See: “Disposable Teachers”
“Fifteen Dollars and Teaching for Scraps”
“Hoodwinked — Hook-Line-and-Sinker the School is Drowning”
So, yes, big towns like Seattle or Portland or El Paso, where I worked as a journalist, educator, activist, and social services person, all the while writing novels and essays, they too are bastions of that mean as cuss Americanism. Seattle and Portland? “Death by a Thousand Cuts: Vaccines, Non-Profits, and the Dissemination of Medical Information“; “Falling into the Planned Parenthood Gardasil Snake Pit.”
I deploy D.H. Lawrence in setting the stage for this brutish culture, America:
America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it.
— D. H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature. Ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey & John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.)
So, here is part of that smalltown community college sort of fearful letter from the spineless administrator, the same sort of spinelessness I received decades ago from the University of Texas, or Gonzaga University or Clark College or Greenriver College:
I’m going to ask that you not bulk email the students henceforth. Our team will send emails on your behalf about any announcements – assignments, presentations, date/time changes, etc. Just send those to us and we’ll distribute. (Of course, any student who wishes to hear from you directly can tell you so and provide their preferred email address; we have no interest in interfering with that.)
Time is short, but we’re forced to consider canceling the class this morning for two reasons: First, in your email, you introduce an experience far from what we advertised in our catalog. Second, in my estimation it doesn’t conform to our Academic Freedom policy. Based on your email, the class certainly does not appear to be an examination of issues, but presents a singular political agenda. (Note that I’m setting aside here the fact that you and I may share many viewpoints raised in your email to students; this isn’t about my personal beliefs and concerns.) If you wanted to present a workshop focused on your personal opinions, and your past writings, about the current or former administrations or other political issues, one alternative would have been to rent a room from the College or a Library and delivered the event without being tethered by the College’s commitment to freedom of expression of all viewpoints. That may be an option to consider in the future.
Ahh, my class will/is explore/exploring writing in a time of “community and societal and family estrangement” which is the blurb at the top of the description printed in the Oregon Coast Community College catalogue. Utilizing fiction and non-fiction.
Writing As A Gift
…to yourself, and to the world
We’ll tackle fiction and non-fiction. We’ll explore writing in a time of community and societal and family estrangement. Personal essay or hard hitting poetry. Writing is an act of internal dialogue ex-pressed to an audience. We will start off with class input on where individuals are in this process. Beginner fiction writer or aficionado of creative non-fiction? We’ll discover through writing who we are as a creative community. Paul Haeder’s been in this game of teaching and publishing and editing writing for five decades.
And so it goes, so it goes. You know that being a dissident, or a voice of dissidence, well, it has always been a Joe McCarthy moment for those of us in academic-journalism who would date challenge people to think.
And the language of the administrator or provost or gatekeeper will always sound like a two-bit lawyer’s verbiage:
01/21/2015: Institutions of higher education exist for the common good, and the unfettered search for truth and its free exploration is critical to the common good. The college seeks to educate its students in the democratic tradition, to foster recognition of individual freedoms and social responsibility, and to inspire meaningful awareness of and respect for a collaborative learning environment. Freedom of expression will be guaranteed to instructors to create a classroom atmosphere that allows students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues. OCCC instructors are responsible for exercising judgment in selecting topics of educational value for discussion and learning consistent with course requirements, goals, and desired outcomes. (Emphasis added, DP)
Not sure how my email exploring higher education’s fear of losing all of the humanities, losing all the Diversity Equity Inclusion courses, and gutting liberal arts in general, how all of that is “not allowing” students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues.
Small towns or big towns, pick your institution and Kafkaesque poison.
But part of my role in community consciousness raising is primarily community journalism, also known as solutions journalism, so in this most recent iteration of Haeder, I have a fairly new show, one hour a week, dealing with public affairs, but truly an interview show, a deep dive with a guest or guests, and alas, all shows, all topics, all of it derives from my own deep well of experience, exploration, education and emancipation — the Four E’s, man, of life!
Some upcoming shows, Wednesday, on the air, 6 to 7 PM, Finding Fringe: Voice from the Edge, KYAQ.org (streaming live) and 91.7 FM, Lincoln County.
I’m shifting some of the program dates around since we have current news around the mayor of a small town, Waldport, being arrested and removed from her position as elected mayor. That’s May 14.
You have to listen to her. May 14. 6 pm. again, stream the show, kyaq.org
- Then, have you ever heard of the Amanda Trail in Yachats?
- Do you know what it is like to be incarcerated and then put on 6 years house arrest? Part I & II.
- Rick Bartow, the famous artist, will be a living reflection at the Yakona Nature Preserve.
- The Rights of Nature and the Community Bill of Rights? Kai of CELDF will tell us all about that.
- Siletz is the Home of the Elakha Alliance, a non-profit to work with stakeholders of every sort to reintroduce sea otters to Oregon’s coast.
- So you leave prison and you have a farm to work on to heal, to reorient oneself, to let the soil salve the PTSD. Freedom Farms.
Past shows are on the website, but only in limited form. Go to archives, and then put in Finding Fringe.
Try listening to a smalltown radio station, tuning into a smalltown resident’s take on what it TAKES to be a citizen of the world in a small town, this one called Waldport.
Here, yet another global thing attached to Waldport — a former Georgia slave paid for his freedom and ended up out here! You Can’t Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!
How about the legacy of genocide out here? Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian
You’ll get the picture that Waldport or Vancouver, BC, or El Paso or Mexico City, we all face the same problems that the rich and the militarists and the oligarchs force us to fight.
Tune in, KYAQ.org, streaming worldwide, Wednesdays, 6 PM, PST.