Blog Watch: WB and roads

Front Porch Republic » Blog Archive » “On the Grid”: When Electricity (and Other Things) Came to the Countryside.

At the same time, however, I fear that we often have a tendency to confuse scale per se with content. I recall a conversation I had some time ago with a committed fan of Wendell Berry. We were talking about alternative approaches to rural development, and I must have set off some alarm bells for my friend with the suggestion that more networks among communities were crucial. We got into a debate about whether the mere fact of building a road to an isolated village does it some harm, or whether the real problem is what happens to lie at the opposite end of the road. I am inclined to think that if at the other end lies another village of similar disposition, then connecting them can only multiply their strengths. If so, then the best thing anyone can do for places like Pomatambo is not to oppose roads, but to make sure that more roads—and perhaps most crucially, more of the early roads—lead to other villages rather than to Babylon. READ MORE ...