"Now coming to a Town Near You: Voices of Urban Sprawl" A young writer, Gina Olszowski writes to share the human toll of suburbia's land grab.
Smart Growth, Urban Sprawl and Sustainability
The Book on Sprawl
From wilderness to suburbs
Twenty-five year old Gina Olszowski has lived in the suburbs all her life, and lives in a split-level apartment in a downtown metropolitian area. "It's not the kind of environment that gets people thinking about how strip malls and suburbs destroy rural farmland, or how that impacts the people who live and work on that farmland."
Her book was little more than a germ of an idea until Olszowski found an organization called The Wild Gift. Based in Idaho.
The Wild Gift
is a non-profit group that links investors with young people who want to improve the environment and "the human community," and they do this through a 17-month approval and training process that includes a 20-day trek through the deep wilderness of the Sawtooth Mountains.
Along the way, recipients of the grant receive mentoring and advice on their projects. In Olszowski's case, The Wild Gift gave her about $10,000 to publish her book.
Her plan of attack was simple. Olszowski packed a bag, drove out to rural areas (all of them within an hour's drive of her apartment), snapped photographs of what she saw. Then she found people from all walks of life, and talked to them about their lives. In the book, the photos -- all of them in stark black-and-white -- are juxtaposed with snippets of interviews with farmers, suburban homeowners, mayors, and, near the end, experts in regional planning.
People were confused about what she was trying to do because sprawl brings to mind that one is trying to profess something, like legislation.
The 12 characters that make up her narrative shape the book. She wasn't looking to write a typical book about the technical details of urban sprawl -- those books already exist, and the average person just doesn't read them. Her plan was to create something more human, something that captured the motions and emotions of daily life.
She realized that everyone was understandable. Whether the characters were from the suburbs, or rural areas, or were mayors, she could relate to where they were coming from. These conversations with people from rural areas and the suburbs are a collection of unique perspectives often missed in the throughs of the political process as each "Notice of Public Hearing" is placed.
Olszowski wonders, at 25, given the opportunity for these conversations, would the same decisions continue to be made. For more information on Olszowski and her book, log onto www.atownnearyou.com.
Katy Slater, President & Ecopreneur
Idaho Blue Insulation
208-340-1107