All Sustainability Is Local: New Wilmington, Pennsylvania (1994)

Abstract

I grew up in a small town amidst the rolling hills and farms of western Pennsylvania. As towns go, it wasn’t much different from thousands of others throughout the United States. There were four churches and a small liberal arts college. It was a “dry” town filled with serious and hard-working Protestants and a disconcertingly large number of retired preachers and missionaries. It was not the kind of place that greeted Elvis and rock and roll with open arms. The prevailing political sensibilities were sober and overwhelmingly Republican of the Eisenhower sort. The town would have seemed stuffy and parochial to a Sherwood Anderson or a Theodore Dreiser, and it probably was. But for a little boy on a bicycle it was a paradise. By the standards of the 1990s, the town, the college, and its residents would have failed even the most lax certification for political correctness. It was a man’s world, neither multicultural nor multiracial. The sexual revolution lay ahead. And almost everyone who was anyone in town bought without question the assumptions of midcentury America about our inherent virtue, the certainty of economic progress, the evils of Communism, and the beneficence of technology. J. Edgar Hoover was a hero. Boys were measured for manhood on the baseball diamond or the basketball court. It was also a place, like most others, in transition from one kind of economy to another.