Small Town Life
By: Bruce Kania
Tags: Life, Water, Fishing, Urban Planning, Climate Change

You don’t have to live in a big city to enjoy a great life! In fact, it’s easy to live really well in a small town. Why is this? Check it out:

A lot of us get lost in big towns. Imagine how many years it would take to get to know downtown Chicago? Or Los Angeles? No, life is simpler in a small-town setting, and clear. You know where you are, and that’s really true.

What do you want from life? Here’s a few ideas: love, friends, a feeling of safety, solid base, and sort of a sense that I’m not going to be surprised by something weird. I want to know that my loved ones are not just OK, but really doing well! Good friends, good food, and a place where they feel safe and can stretch out, in terms of their future.

Heaven on Earth

We don’t have to be the smartest kid in the class to know that life is messy! Problems always happen! But what we can do is set up for a neat way to make life good. How do we do this? By being thoughtful, conscious, and kind. By being a loving friend to those we live with. Not just the humans either, but all the life around us.

Here’s what this looks like…stopping to pet your senior pup as she is sprawled across the doorway. Loving her, and being sure she knows it.

Or not stepping on the beetle on the sidewalk. Letting it be. Maybe even brushing it aside carefully so the next person doesn’t squash it.

Think about water for a second.

How does something like water figure into our lives? When it’s bad, we are in a mess. When it’s ok, we don’t think about it. When it’s pristine, we take it for granted. Just another way of saying, “we don’t think about it.” But I’ll tell you what, when we do take care of it, life is simpler. Bad stuff still happens, but life is easier, and less complicated. You can get through the tough stuff faster!

We have to be smart about how we take care of water. If we are, it can support us.

Now-a-days, folks in some urban centers don’t have enough outdoor space to gather and enjoy all of the benefits of nature. Too often, when they do have a municipal park to visit, if there is a water feature there, a natural stormwater basin or a manufactured one, it is green and smelly (we might call this “impaired” water) and something to be avoided at all costs. Fixing this dearth of pleasant outdoor urban spaces for the residents of urban centers isn’t an easy undertaking.

Yuck! This is “impaired” water, an all too familiar sight in urban and rural areas.

If you want to learn about my idea of Transition Water, something I’ve been thinking and talking about for years out here at Shepherd Research Center, I invite you to check out a TED-X Talk I did in Billings, MT., a few years back. No pressure if you aren’t interested.

It’s pretty great that these days urban landscapes are getting more attention. It would be something if large families could come together at an accessible, clean, and productive city pond to catch some nice perch or trout, spend time learning to appreciate that bug on the sidewalk, and get a taste of the small-town speed of life.

What do you like about small-town life? Or, if you live in an urban area, how does the presence or absence of clean water affect you?