Room Enough for Multitudes in the Empty Spaces

NewScientistFlyover country is mostly empty space -- and there is more emptiness every day. Rural America is emptying out, as more people move to cities and suburbs, looking for opportunities.

The map above reveals the distance of any point in the continental US from a developed road. The map below reveals all of the developed roads superimposed upon the continental US -- a "road density" mapping. Using either or both maps, one can easily find the empty spaces.NewScientistPersons looking for a bit of solitude -- or persons attempting to predict the flow of desperate refugees after a large EMP event or other broad-scale disaster -- should be able to intuit some answers from the maps.

Newer technology will allow every person to be his own utility company, his own food producer, his own water treatment facility. The building of smart, integrated homes should grow easier with new robotics and nanotechnologies, as will the custom production of fine consumer goods within a person's own home, town, or neighborhood.

As high speed internet finds its way to the most remote of places, accessibility to the world's best educations, culture, and entertainment are suddenly just a mouse click away. As virtual realities create convincing environments of all types, in all places, where a person happens to be physically is not so important.

The professor-authors of this piece describing the death of America's hinterlands, are not only patronising and uninformed, they are not thinking clearly. When most of the benefits and none of the crime or expense of cities can be brought into the remotest part of the continent -- where is the advantage in joining the lemmings' rush to cultural and demographic suicide that increasingly typifies so many modern cities?

Crime, debauchery, and corruption can be found in the rural counties of America, just as they can be easily found in the cities. But it is also easier to find the traditional strengths and courage of America across broad swathes of the rural and semi-rural countryside. Recent civil protest across America attests to a growing impatience with the city-bred arrogance and over-reach of much state and federal governmental leadership.

The flow of the intelligent high achievers has gone largely one way for well over a hundred years on the North American continent. But things change so easily, so profoundly. Subtly at first. Then comes the deluge.

Images from New Scientist

Update 24Sept09: Here is another story on demographic trends across the continental US.

"People are moving away from the major cities to smaller cities — cities of 1 million to 2 million — and away from cities of 4 million-plus," he said. "In a sense, the exurbs are what's happening. What you'll see is that folks are moving out of the city cores into the periphery. They're willing to move away from the big cities into the medium-sized metropolitan areas."

According to Hall, people are motivated to move by a combination of reasons. He said they are influenced in their decisions by factors like climate, jobs and tax rates. Also, he found that younger people are more inclined to move, along with Americans who have reached retirement age.