Where this road has led, and how we turn around

December 28, 2010-by Carol Polsgrove in the Bloomington Alternative –Carol Polsgrove is author of Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement and other books. She can be reached at ccpolsgrove@gmail.com.

I remember my first ride on a new four-lane highway through the Kentucky countryside, and what a fine road it was: smooth, wide and uncrowded. We just floated along in our Chevrolet — Mother, Daddy, my little brother and me, back home from Nigeria where roads were usually unpaved laterite, and we bounced through clouds of dust, moving over now and then to let herds of long-horned cows pass. It was 1956, and America was zooming full-bore into what looked like a bright future of suburban homes with two-car garages.

I think of that now as state surveyors move into Monroe County to chart the route of an interstate highway — maybe the last interstate highway that will be built in the United States, if it is built at all, a question I hope still hangs in the air. As our town tries to dig its way out of the mess that 20th-century America has made of itself, we can hardly imagine that what we need now at the dawn of the post-oil age is a highway.

“Fix the roads we have” has been the mantra of Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, which has led the battle against I-69. Hundreds turned out at a state transportation hearing at Bloomfield in August to call attention to ways I-69 would tear up the existing network of our county’s roads, separating neighbors from neighbors, farmers from their fields, children from their schools and firefighters from their fires.

I-69 construction progress in August 2010 in Gibson County, IN. Photo © 2010 John Blair

What I-69 would do to the human community, it would also do to the non-human community, smashing turtles and deer and sending polluted highway runoff into streams and groundwater. Entire habitats would be erased — forests felled or fragmented, wooded hills replaced by rocky canyons.

The highway would cut across a sparsely populated and still beautiful part of southwest Indiana — but one that is already heavily engineered. Early farmers ditched wetlands to dry out their fields. Underground and surface coal mines pockmark the land and contaminate groundwater and streams. Close to where I-69 crosses the Patoka National Wildlife Refuge, you can see the remains of the Wabash and Erie Canal. Coal-fired power plants crowd the state’s southwest region.

This is just a fragment of the damage done by the industrial world that gave me that smooth ride on a four-lane Kentucky highway and has been building big highways, power plants, factories and landfills ever since. On a recent visit to Bloomington, my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry urged us to “open the books” — study the accounting of our industrial world, examine what we have lost as well as what we have gained. I see what he means.

In light of global warming — a big item on the debit side — we should be committing ourselves to recovery from the carbon age. Instead, just an hour west of Bloomington, draglines scour out the biggest surface coal mine east of the Mississippi, while not far to the south, Duke Energy is building a giant coal gasification plant. Meanwhile, I-69 is about to arrive on our very doorstep. Read More