The buy-out was generous. And if enough of us agreed to move to the same city, we would still have each other. We would constitute a neighborhood, or part of a neighborhood. We would have enough to live on. We could come back here once a year and see the place, see the land. After a while, those of us who had actually lived here would die, and then there would be no reason to come. Then they would let the buildings fall down, presumably, or salvage them for building materials. The land would become part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the greatest ecosystems on Earth. Buffalo, wolves, grizzly bears, elk, deer, wolverines, muskrats, beaver. Fish in the rivers, birds in the air. The animals would migrate, and maybe if the climate kept getting hotter they would move north, but in any case it would be their land, to live on as they liked. The people still here, or still visiting here, would be like park rangers or field scientists, or some kind of wildlife wrangler, or even I suppose buffalo cowboys. Buffaloboys. The authorities were vague on that. They admitted it was a work in progress.
They planned to pull out a lot of the roads in the region. A few railroads and the interstate would remain, with big animal over- or under-passes added every few miles. Some regional roads too, but not many. Most would be pulled up, their concrete and asphalt chewed to gravel and carried off to serve as construction materials elsewhere as needed. Making concrete was bad in carbon terms, so the price on new concrete was astronomical now, taxed to the point where anything else was cheaper, almost. Recycled concrete from decommissioned roads and old foundations of deconstructed buildings was a way to get rich, or at least do very well. We were given shares in the roads that came through town, also the town’s foundations and so on. A kind of trust fund going forward. Later, with the roads gone, the animals and plants would have it better than ever. Fish in the creeks, birds in the air. The Half Earth plan, right here in the USA.
So we talked it out. Some people broke down as they spoke. They told stories of their parents and grandparents, as far back up their family tree as they could climb, or at least back to the ancestors who had first come here. We all cried with them. It would come on you by surprise, some chance remark, or a face remembered, or a good thing someone did for someone. This was our town.
All over the world this was happening, they kept saying. All these sad little towns, the backbone of rural civilization, tossed into the trash bin of history. What a sad moment for humanity to come to. City life— come on. All the fine talk about it— only people who never lived in a small town could say those things. Well, maybe it only suited some of us. And not the majority, obviously. People voted with their feet. The kids were leaving and not coming back, plain as that. So we would move too. Seemed like about half wanted Bozeman, half Minneapolis. That would be like us. Maybe all little towns had that kind of either-or going on, a nearly fifty-fifty split on everything; the mayor, the high school principal, the quarterback, the best gas station, best café, whatever. Always that either-or. So we would split up and go on. Become city folk. Well, it wouldn’t last forever. This was degrowth growth, as the facilitator pointed out. The facilitator was really good, I have to say. She encouraged us to tell our stories. She said in towns like ours it’s always the same. She had done this for a lot of them. It was her work. Like a hospice preacher, she said, looking troubled at that. Everybody cries. At least in towns like this. She said that when they do this same thing in suburbs, no one cares. People don’t even come to the meetings, except to find out what the compensation will be. Sometimes, she said, people are told their suburb is going to be torn down and replaced by habitat, and they cheer. We laughed at that, although it was painful to think of people that alienated. But that was the suburbs. For us— we had a town.
But it was happening everywhere, she said. All over the world. And after that, in the years and centuries that followed, there would come a time when the world’s population drifted back down to a sane level, and then people would move back out of the cities into the countryside, and the villages would come back. Villages used to be just part of the animals’ habitat, she said. Animals would walk right down the streets. They do here already! someone shouted. Yes, and it will happen again, she replied. People who like knowing their teachers, their repair people, their store clerks and so on. The mayor. Everyone in your town. All that is too basic to go away forever. This is just one stage in a larger story. People lived like this for a long
