Why save the small town?

Cities, it seems, are inevitable. Economies of scale make it difficult to maintain the essentials of living in rural places. For most of human history, transportation and information exchange have been arduous, time-consuming and expensive; even the Pony Express operated at a loss. The idea that everything is more efficient, and therefore cheaper, when done in bulk has helped encourage cities’ growth, said Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist with the Santa Fe Institute. West is researching the relationship between economies of scale, growth and long-term sustainability. It makes sense, he said, that cities are powerful economic engines.“Cities can be thought of as this great engine that we invented that facilitates social interactions and this positive feedback mechanism, so that we can be highly innovative, create wealth, increase the quality and standard of living,” West said. “That meant that we could do something that no other part of the biological world could do.”That historical rural-urban divide takes on a new meaning today, as only about 20 percent of the country’s population lives in rural places, compared to 60 percent in 1900. Still, the same technology that decimated some traditional ways of living in rural places may open doors that didn’t exist in the past. Do we owe anything to rural communities, which have powered and fed the country since the U.S. began?Some have gone so far as to suggest that, since the government in effect made life possible in some of these towns, that the government owes those communities a responsible exit plan. Major settlement didn’t occur in Truth or Consequences, a town of 6,000 people and several popular hot spring resorts off Interstate 25, until the federal Reclamation Act of 1902 authorized massive irrigation, which drew hundreds of construction workers needed to build a major dam. Rural electrification efforts in the New Deal era were marketed as a way to give rural Americans “a fair chance,” encouraging more people to stay in the countryside. Farming, a sometimes volatile industry where earnings can rise and fall dramatically year-to-year, has long been federally subsidized.