Urban Sprawl Like Me

 I've been thinking lately, much under the influence of my Geography 339 Environmental Conservation class, about the history that has brought America to this point. Our ancestors (or more aptly, the ancestors of people who did not emigrate here in the last generation as my family has) have gone through a few crazy phases in which they had this desire to chart out the wilderness, to conquer it, and then not to conquer it, and then to use it, then not to use it, and to keep it safe by spraying it with pesticides, and then to not spray it because the pesticides killed what was beautiful, and then to sprawl to live in it, only to destroy it with cars, with overuse, with pavement.

Our relationship with the environment is just like any other. It's an issue of balance, of using but not abusing, not of needless reverence, but of respect. We can have fun with the environment, we can play with it, we should hang out with it, and we shouldn't smother it with our violent love.

In gaining this new perspective, I've come to examine the great problems with my life that I had dismissed as the way things are. It was easy in my old living arrangement. When I lived in Fitchburg, I lived right next to my middle school and elementary school, my daycare was biking distance as were most of my friends.

Things got worse when I had to go to high school in a different district to accomodate a move to the area just between Madison, Fitchburg and Verona, kind of in the country. While at the time, I suppose, my parents who were building their dream house-- the physical reflection of their hard earned hopes and dreams-- thought that this living arrangement would give us peace of mind, I soon realized that it was very far away from my school; my mother commuted downtown each day (a 20 minute drive) and my father drove (35 minutes) to Stoughton everyday. It was little consolation to me that it was mostly highway/country road driving, when I was at school as late as 9:00 waiting for my working parents to pick me up, unable to take the bus because the city didn't send buses to my house save two school buses.
As I became more conscious of environmental concerns, I came to see the error in this arrangement. Not only did I feel like a leper, living amid nature and beauty, while it bore the costs of our inhabitation, but also, I felt guilty when I had to go anywhere. How could I cope? My whole life was accessible only by car across ten minutes of country road.

When I got a car and a license, the feeling of freedom was unbeatable. It was the sense of freedom I had always desired, not having to rely on someone else to get somewhere. But with the car, came the anxiety that comes with diminishing fuel tanks, and driving a 1999 model Lexus with one person in it.

We are the definition of sprawl and bad infrastructure. Living on campus, I see the immediate improvement. The farthest place I have to walk is a twenty minute slow walk, and the buses are abundant. I can survive without the aid of anything big, except a few textbooks. My legs are my vehicle. Living this way makes me reject the concept of a dream home. Honestly, it's never really appealed to me. For me, my dream home stole me out of my school district, away from my friends. It always gets dirty, requiring constant upkeep. Though sunny and spacious and "environmentally designed," it still kept me away from it all. It felt like there was green space and parks, but no one went to them, no one wanted to sit in nature away from it all.

I found that my friends in closer neighborhoods, who lived among each other, as well as green places went to their parks more, and then they went to the library, and then they biked downtown because they could. They had everything in their backyard, their friends, their library, their school, just like I had once and they took the 10 minute walks and experienced it. While I didn't venture out because there was nothing there for me.  I'd look in my backyard and see a wide empty golf course that we technically weren't allowed to walk on, and an endless stretch of road that if I took a good 3 and a half hours to walk along (I would create a nice thick desire line), I could go to Target by the time it got dark.

The worst thing was that I never rode my bike anymore because I had no place to bike to. The terrain in my neighborhood, with its hills and patchy sidewalk, was quickly my enemy.

With a true love of mine, I drove to West High School (the western equivalent of my high school) and decided that it was entirely not fair that their school was surrounded by trees reddened by autumn.  I felt surely that this must be the only way to live, amid nature, where the roads were more like paths, and nature was not just gardening but a pervasive element of the architecture itself. I felt that if I had lived in this neighborhood, my home would be a two minute walk, my friends would come over after school and I could run out for some flour if we decided we wanted to bake something spur of the moment.
My high school on the other hand was next to a mall, two busy roads and a bank.

So I've made the decision to get my bike fixed and bring it to campus. I want to rebuild my love for biking, in a city that I love. I want to be one of "those people." And when I get older, I want to live in a city, where I can walk to where I need to go, and I can go outside and lounge around without feeling like I'm in the middle of the wilderness.