{"id":709,"date":"2006-10-17T09:42:49","date_gmt":"2006-10-17T09:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=709"},"modified":"2006-10-17T09:42:49","modified_gmt":"2006-10-17T09:42:49","slug":"population_milestone_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/10\/17\/population_milestone_1\/","title":{"rendered":"Population Milestone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just in the last couple of hours, the population<\/a> of the United States topped 300 million residents. About 2.5 million of those 300 mil are right here in Utah, and about 2 million of those are clustered along the Wasatch Front<\/a>, i.e., the part of the state where I happen to live.<\/p>\n

No wonder my commute sucks so bad…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Joking aside, I’m very sensitive to the issue of population growth, because I’ve witnessed first-hand the dramatic consequences of what happens when a lot more people suddenly encroach on any given area. In my 37-year lifetime, and, more specifically, just in the last twenty years, I have watched the wide-open, largely rural landscape I grew up in and loved vanish forever beneath a sea of concrete, cookie-cutter tract homes, and fast-food franchises. Not to be too melodramatic about it, but this process has been deeply painful for me, and even worse for my parents, especially my father, who I fear will never get used to The Way Things Are Now. (If he has to drive farther than a couple of miles, he inevitably ends up in a wild-eyed, frothy rage because he just can’t deal with the amount of traffic and congestion. I worry that he’s going to have a stroke behind the wheel one of these days, because he gets so frustrated and angry about it. Shopping is even worse for him; he’d never admit it, of course, but I strongly suspect he experiences genuine panic attacks if he makes the mistake of visiting Costco on a Saturday afternoon.)<\/p>\n

For someone like me, who admittedly struggles with the very concept of change, the transformation of the Salt Lake Valley has been nothing short of emasculating. There isn’t a damn thing any individual can do to stop or slow the juggernaut of progress (and there’s not much more that citizen’s groups can do, either, at least not around here, where the interests of developers and business owners constantly trump the concerns of people who don’t want another damn shopping center in their backyards). All you can do is stand and helplessly watch with a sick, fluttery feeling in your stomach as the bulldozers do their work. And that’s a humbling realization.<\/p>\n

I hesitate to say this, because I know it will sound naive or even laughable to people who live elsewhere, where urbanization happened a long time ago and rapid, constant change is just part of life, but my overall feeling about the development of the SL Valley has been one of broken continuity. It wasn’t that I never expected things to change — I don’t think I’ve been that foolish in a very long time — but I did think that the valley I knew as a child, which was pretty much the same as it had been for my grandparents, would be pretty much the same for my own children, when I finally got around to having them. But that’s not how it’s turned out. When and if I have kids now, they will grow up in a very, very different Salt Lake than the one I did. And that fills me with a sorrow I can’t quite explain.<\/p>\n

All this sense of loss and disconnection is because new people just keep coming. I know Utah is sparsely populated compared to other places, and that Salt Lake, for all that I perceive as being urban, is still a comparatively tiny city, and that my own hypothetical children will be part of the very phenomenon I’m disparaging, because they will, after all, grow up and need homes of their own. But I never said I was rational about these things…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just in the last couple of hours, the population of the United States topped 300 million residents. About 2.5 million of those 300 mil are right here in Utah, and about 2 million of those are clustered along the Wasatch Front, i.e., the part of the state where I happen to live. No wonder my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}