Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Yesterday was Opening Day for Major League Baseball. We have a few baseball fans on staff. Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn is a Twins fan, as you can see above, as is our program director Rachel Quednau. Content manager John Pattison roots for the division rival Kansas City Royals.
We’re nearing the end of our sixth annual Strongest Town Contest, and it’s been wonderful to get to know all the scrappy, dedicated cities out there doing their best to grow more economically resilient. Congrats to the two finalist towns: Lockport, Illinois and Oxford, Mississippi! Make sure to tune in next week for a series of live webcasts with the competitors, past winners, and Strong Towns members.
On that note, we’re also looking forward to an online event next Thursday (April 8): Late Night with Strong Towns. All Strong Towns members are invited to join us for a behind-the-scenes chat plus trivia and prizes. Join as a sustaining member today to get your invite.
Finally, we also just announced a new internship position opening up for the summer. We’re partnering with our colleagues and friends at the data analytics firm, Urban3, to hire a paid intern who will serve as a translator and liaison between these organizations, uniting our goals to produce content that speaks to a broad audience about issues of land use, transportation and economics. Please apply here and share with anyone who might be interested.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Lauren: On this episode of Michael Malice’s podcast “Your Welcome,” Madison Cawthorn, the youngest representative for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, speaks in plain terms about learning to live with a disability after a near-deadly car accident. Malice and Cawthorn don’t beat around the bush in their discussion of depression, physical therapy, and changing family dynamics through tragedy.
Rachel: I always enjoy reading about how small businesses got their start. This story features the first tribal-owned brewery in Southern California, Rincon Reservation Road Brewery, discussing all the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, especially during the past year’s pandemic. They’ve pivoted and adjusted their business model (and even their name) over time to respond to changing needs and customer interest. Rincon Reservation Chairman Bo Mazzetti says: “These are the economic engines for the future, and Covid has put a damper on it. But the reservation isn’t going anywhere, this is our home.”
Daniel: Urban planner James Rojas is one of my planning inspirations, both for his brilliantly novel approaches to public participation that tap into a whole different kind of community wisdom than the usual dry opinion survey, and for his research on the fascinating phenomenon of Latino Urbanism. The latter is the focus of this recent interview with Rojas. He describes how Latino communities in places like Southern California go about creating lovable spaces that strengthen community ties, often in cleverly ad-hoc ways and using improvised materials. There is a huge amount of wisdom to be found in the bottom-up, collective innovations of Latino Urbanism—such as the use of front fences to serve a pro-social function that is absolutely the opposite of everything you’ve ever been told a fence was for.
Chuck: I came across this article from J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, about his conversion to Catholicism and I felt an even closer bond to him and his writing. While I was brought up Catholic and he was not, I had an extended period where I walked away from the Church—physically and spiritually—and found myself consumed by my secular intellectual pursuits, for a lot of the same reasons Vance cites, a willful shedding of the small town I grew up in. Coming home, so to speak, was not a moment but a process, one that is ongoing and deeply meaningful. I found this particular insight poignant, especially on this day.
I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her [his grandmother] kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.
John: In his 1980 essay "Solving for Pattern," the Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry wrote about some of the differences between bad solutions and good solutions. A solution is bad if it makes the problem worse or causes new problems, acting "destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained." The standards for a good solution include (but aren’t limited to) that good solutions accept limits, have wide margins of failure, are made by people with skin in the game, solve more than one problem, and are in harmony with the larger patterns.
I thought of Berry's essay when I read this article in Scientific American about how eight Western states are "seeding" clouds with silver iodide in order to increase precipitation and combat a megadrought “heavily influenced by climate change.” Does cloud seeding qualify as a good solution or bad one? While cloud seeding does seem to produce the desired snow, what's not clear is whether it can produce enough precipitation to make a measurable difference. And what are the ecological effects of dumping or pumping silver iodide into the clouds? How does that fit into the larger pattern? And does weather modification meet the standard of solving more than one problem? I’m obviously not qualified to explore these questions; I can only hope someone qualified is. In the meantime, I’m concerned that we’re holding out for new silver-bullet (no pun intended) technologies to save us from the much harder work of changing how we live.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Will Riley, Stephanie Rose, Lucas Liseth, Kati George, Wanda Cochran, Marsh Stevens, Jake Miller, Marguerite Dykstra, Carl Hoogesteger, and Luke Distelhorst
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!