Treehugger: Vulgarity and Nature: Chapter from Robert Grudin's Upcoming Book - American Vulgar

One of the things that drove me out of Ohio was the local attitude toward "growth" – it was considered good, progress, an improvement. All Icould see was the suburbs of Cincinnati and Dayton growing together along the I-75 corridor.

One of my friends and co-workers had this view of development. He was proud to live in one of the development communities that was spreading out over what had been farm land. (The community, whose name I have since forgotten, was featured a couple of years later in a National Geographic article about urban sprawl.)

Couldn't help thinking of my friend and his McMansion while reading this excerpt from Robert Grudin's "American Vulgar":

Growth is not just a cultural obsession. Growth has become a theoretical model for economists, executives and even civil servants. The idea is that economic entities[...] cannot remain robust unless they keep growing, and that this growth imperative has no chronological limit[...]The most colossal and preposterous of all vulgarities would be a civilization that, in the course of its busy, growing ways, paved over its environment and destroyed its only source of sustenance.