Holyoke, City of Ruins—and Renaissance
This week the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth takes place in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It has been organized by Bolivian president Morales and international non-government groups to challenge the apathy that we witnessed at the Copenhagen Climate Summit a few months ago.
As I listened this morning to Amy Goodman interviewing Bolivians who ten years ago fought a desperate and successful battle against US multinational Bechtel to regain the rights to their water supplies, I felt a resurgence of the passion that got me into the environmental philosophy “business” in the first place. It is through the sharing of stories such as this—of people 1) knowing how their lives are directly linked to their biomes and 2) how they protected those links for future generations—that the will and intelligence needed to reform our environmental practices is summoned.
The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth is especially focused on highlighting the effect that destructive environmental practices have on the poor. The fact is: as biomes are destroyed to achieve short-term economic goals, the people who live there are left essentially homeless when the economic goal is achieved and the destructive industries depart from the scene. You can think of clear-cut rain forests and over-fished coasts—many examples of industrial slash-and-burn come to mind.
But what I was thinking about was Holyoke, a once proud industrial city, one of the first in the world to harness water to power its engines. What is happening in Bolivia this week made me think how Holyoke is our own startling example of how **biomes are destroyed to achieve short-term economic goals, and how the people who live there are left essentially homeless when the economic goal is achieved and the destructive industries depart from the scene.** Drive through parts of Holyoke, and you might cry when you witness the ruins of once-profitable industries, and pass by once-elegant turn-of-century brownstones that held mom & pop stores. It’s a ghost town, in places a dangerous one, just 10 or 15 minutes away from Northampton, one of the nicest small cities in the US.
We all know that our economy is struggling, and how hard it is to make ends meet. The idea of worrying about Holyoke might seem ridiculous when we’re all struggling to remain employed, insured, sane and healthy. But we ought to worry about it.
Our region—the Nonotuck bioregion—harbors both the ruins of industrialism run amok and the still-productive fields of the Connecticut River valley. I’d like you contrast them both, and consider their overall value to the generations who lived here, live here now, and will live here.
I’d also like you to consider this: as long as Holyoke malingers and decays, so do the towns that neighbor it. The successes and profits—and enlightened liberal culture—they achieve at the exclusion of Holyoke are smaller, less stable and less interesting than they would otherwise be. I have visited nations—France & Germany—where cities and country feed each other: cities providing the arts and industries that contribute to “advanced” civilization, the country providing the raw materials for industry, fresh food, and a place for urbanites to revitalize their bodies and senses. Somehow, we have to (re)establish this healthy, exciting civilization-enlivening give-and-take between city and country, and the simplest proof that we are achieving it will involve the sharing—instead of competition—of human, natural and economic resources. These resources are “wealth”; and if the affluent towns upstream of Holyoke truly intend to achieve sustainability, they must realize that their “wealth” is insecure as long as Holyoke remains a ruin. As a long-term regional planning and development policy, it behooves our business and political leadership on local and state levels to route industrial land-uses off of precious agricultural lands to Holyoke.
As Cisco, the computer giant, moves into Holyoke to take advantage of the low energy costs and stable energy supply that hydropower provides, a chance for renaissance appears.
Can we, who care about our—and our neighbor’s—quality of life, and about the sustainability of communities, harness this chance and re-build a better, more beautiful world out of the ruins our forebears left us?
The answer has to be yes. But a new influx of industrialism will not, by itself, re-create our civilization. The economy of short-term profits is still our economy, and there is nothing to prevent a repeat today of the failures of yesterday—except a sense of common mission based on 1) a historical understanding of how our communities ended up looking and behaving the way they do, and 2) a creative moral and ethical response to that historical understanding: a response that infuses the effort of Holyoke, and its neighbors, with a goal that is not only dollar-oriented.
What, you might wonder, would that goal be? The goal of living “the good life” of hard and noble work, in a healthy environment with one’s family and friends, in a community that celebrates its linkage to its biome.
This goal is not ridiculous or unattainable: I’ve seen it achieved and celebrated in Munich at Octoberfest, in Kyoto at the blessing of the rice planting, and in Holyoke at the Nuestras Raíces Harvest Festival.
This is the goal that is being advanced in Bolivia this week: our economy must serve to strengthen, not weaken, our link to our biome, because it is only by respecting and nurturing that linkage that we can have economic sustainability, cultural vivacity and—on the personal level—a meaningful and productive life.
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