The journey along US Route 2 from Burlington to Bangor is fraught with dichotomies. From a natural perspective, the geography varies little, as serpentine hollows and marmalade leaves flow from Vermont to New Hampshire to Maine with no regard for political boundaries. But while each polity has been given this identical natural canvass, they have diverged aggressively in the degree to which they have allowed this canvass to be shaped by modern development.
Vermont is still by-and-large a mountainous idyll, an unimpeachably beautiful place that in many ways serves as a positive stereotype of itself. From the time one leaves the city limits of Burlington and heads eastward, there are practically no big-box stores; there are no billboards; the highway ambles between compact, centuries-old villages, boxed into vales by shaggy hillsides. This cultural and topographical preservation is not an organic development. It relies on a cavalcade of comprehensive regulations, including the state’s revolutionary Act 250, which affords regional planning boards the ability to reject projects larger than one acre for any “adverse effects” they may have on local “aesthetics, scenic beauty, historical sites, or natural areas.” Also included in these initiatives are an outright, statewide ban on billboards and hundreds of byzantine, yet effective local zoning ordinances that have single-handedly limited the number of Wal-Marts in the state to four. If such regulations seem grounded in government intrusion into the minutiae of construction, it’s because they are; these comprehensive measures are made possible by the semi-collectivist nature of Vermont politics and the civic fabric of its citizenry, represented by an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature and a self-described “socialist” senator in Bernie Sanders. As a liberal, I have no philosophical quarrel with this form of politics, and I imagine that even conservatives with a strong predisposition against the process would admire the sprawl-less, civically harmonious, and aesthetically beautiful end. Nevertheless, I realize that the libertarian argument is deontological, focused on the intrusive means of government, rather than the aesthetics of the result.
Across the border in New Hampshire, this libertarian reasoning has definitively triumphed. Upon crossing the Connecticut River while traveling eastward on Interstate 89, those with an eye for municipal planning might as well be crossing the River Styx. This isn’t to say that I hate New Hampshire; it is, in many places, one of the most beautiful states in the nation. But whereas the journey in Vermont is completely devoid of bland corporatism, the traveler entering New Hampshire is immediately confronted with pallid seas of asphalt and big-box obelisks, a Kmart, a Ninety-Nine Restaurant, a TJ Maxx, a Kohl’s, a Verizon outlet, an Olympia Sports, a CVS, and a Payless Shoe Source all lining the highway within its first mile. A local conservative poet, Robert Frost, wrote in one of his anthologies, “Mountain Interval,” of a boy who is killed by a buzz-saw while he overlooks the Connecticut, a buzz-saw that churns out identical, monotonous slices of stove-length wood in a process symbolic of modernity. Ninety-two years after the poem was written, it is clear that it was not only the boy who was killed by the apathetic strokes of the modern machine, but the community surrounding him as well. In the violent expansion of sprawl, local identity has been gobbled up into strip malls, parking lots, and retail chains, making once compact yankee villages indistinguishable from the highways of Dixie or the suburbs of LA. Far too much of the journey’s remainder is scarred by this demeaning form of development, a frustration expressed by author and New Urbanist, James Howard Kunstler, in his 1996 book, The Geography of Nowhere:
Most of this [new development] is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading – the jive-plastic Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk food joints, the Orwellian office parks featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield…the whole, destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”
Kunstler is generalizing a bit in the last part of his quote. Many non-Republican politicians (and even, admittedly, some Republicans) can distinguish between responsible and irresponsible development. But in the rural north of New Hampshire, where distrust of government is a societal dogma, the difference between responsible and irresponsible growth has become an irrelevant, peripheral point of argument. Regulation has become poison, and the idea that government action could preserve local identity, heretical.
Upon reaching the borderlands of Maine and New Hampshire the traveler is offered a respite against the soulless sprawl that springs from this anti-government virulence. Partially out of local design, mostly out of neglect and isolation, the most rugged uplands of the White Mountains are free of Arby’s and Applebee’s, and a lack of business investment softens the SmartGrowth debate. However, once the traveler arrives in my home in a tourist-laden corner of bumpy western Maine, just to the east of the Appalachian spine, local communities are once again confronted by the continuous prospect of architectural conformity. What’s more, the zoning debate here is made particularly contentious by the composition of the local population: a broad base of Ron Paul libertarians (multiple inland counties of Maine, from Piscataquis to Aroostook, did vote for Ron Paul), sprinkled with a healthy number of Vermont-style, cosmopolitan transplants.
In 1997, current Harvard Business Review writer Joshua Macht wrote an article about this debate, focusing on the regional village of Bethel, Maine, titled “Entrepreneurs Collide: Will Zoning Take Town Downhill?” Within its pages, one paranoid businessman explicitly analogized local zoning proposals with Stalinist Russia, quipping “ ‘There were plenty of comprehensive plans and 10-year plans in the USSR. But did citizens have their freedom?” Another local entrepreneur effectively sums up the libertarian argument, adding “ ‘There are people in this town that wouldn’t mind regulating everything. But they take away some of the Maine heritage I know.’”
Fifteen years after Macht’s profile, the businessman that compared Bethel to Stalinist Russia has by-and-large thwarted the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy afoot amongst a third of the county’s population (including myself, apparently). What’s more, the same man has managed to build several hideous lumber warehouses on the outskirts of town, part of the wave of concentric sprawl that has emanated outward from Bethel over the last two decades. In my own neighboring village of eight-hundred and two residents, a recent comprehensive planning proposal was voted down easily, but not before it exploded into an armed encounter between a belligerent anti-Zonist and one of the plan’s drafters. Thus, it seems that my town of Greenwood will, for the foreseeable future, be as susceptible as ever to the prospect of corporate obelisks gobbling up our hamlets and degrading our community, naturally and architecturally.
In recent years, the political climate for those of us fighting against this “geography of nowhere,” as James Howard Kustler put it, has only deteriorated. On the state level, Maine’s Tea Party-backed governor Paul LePage, former executive of the big-box retailer Marden’s Surplus and Salvage, has effectively destroyed the Informed Growth Act, our state’s watered down version of Vermont’s Act 250, which had previously mandated several town meetings before a community accepted a gross retailer’s construction permit. The Bangor Daily News deemed that LePage opposed the act because he worried that the statutes contained a “bias against big-box stores.” But LePage seems not to understand the spirit of the law. Of course there is an ingrained bias. Does the governor think, after all, that we’re interested in holding twelve town meetings every time a bohemian pottery shop moves to town?
To be sure, this hatred of SmartGrowth by the Tea Party tranche of the Republican Party is not a purely local phenomenon. Focusing on the anti-sprawl Agenda 21 passed by the United Nations in 1992, the Republican Party has denounced compact-growth policies as a form of “destructive and insidious” internationalism, and Tea Partiers have occupied countless zoning meetings throughout the country in an attempt to thwart the supposed multilateral conspiracy. In any case, this brand of Republicanism is not a force for the ironic destruction of local autonomy just in my mountainous slice of Maine, nor in just the states of northern New England for that matter, but in all crannies of the nation where civic-minded citizens are attempting to wrest a sense of cultural uniqueness from the slings of architectural conformity. Such realizations give me a headache, and I’ll have to go down to the new, obeliskoid RiteAid in order to medicate myself as the local apothecary has been driven out of business. Perhaps my neighbor down the slope, the one with the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag on her lawn, will ascend the hillside to ask if she can borrow my axe-helve. I won’t be here, but that is no matter. She can simply travel down to the newly constructed Wal-Mart and purchase a new blade, sold by a man she has never met, manufactured in a country she can’t pronounce, destined to cut the boundary lines of a subdivision populated by flatlanders with whom she’ll never interact. Hopefully, she’ll experience a cathartic moment beforehand, but if not, I my fear that only by surrounding herself with defeated geography and hollow interaction, will this Tea Partier realize which parts of “the Maine heritage,” as she put it in Macht’s article, are most worth defending.