John North Editor & Publisher

I recently attended a panel discussion titled “Peak Oil Perspectives” at the West Asheville Library, during which sustainability activist Jim Barton segued from a discussion of the world food crisis to showing a slide of “an ideal city.”

Barton described a city in which “instead of grass in the front yards, there’s gardens with food for people to eat.”

A few days later, while I was sweating behind a lawnmower for the first of many grass-cuttings of the season, I began pondering Barton’s utopian image of  an ecologically conscientious city-dwellers’ paradise.

If Barton’s vision came true, I imagined that, instead of wasting gas, time and money mowing grass, I would be planting a vegetable garden — though in the case of my black thumb, about all I could manage is a radish garden.

My flight of fantasy then soared as I began re-envisioning Asheville as it might be under an “ideal city” scenario.

First, I would reduce traffic-choked Merrimon Avenue to a bicycle and walking path, with a streetcar trolley line extending past Beaver Lake to Weaverville, just as it once did. In fact, I’d dig up the old tracks and start running streetcars all over the city again.

Considering how much I enjoy wandering around the Botanical Gardens at Asheville, I thought of how nice it would be if, instead of constant new construction everywhere I turn, the gardens were expanded to encompass most of the city. Instead of a contruction boom, we actually could have a deconstruction boom.

I’d take Joni Mitchell’s famous song lyric — “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” — and stand it on its head.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Asheville became famous for tearing down non-historical (read “ugly”) buildings?
As for the controversy over widening I-240 to eight lanes in West Asheville, my “ideal city” solution would be to turn the freeway into a giant greenway.

Of course, passenger-rail service would be returned to the Paris of the South, perhaps with rickshaw services provided by our soon-to-be physically fit Asheville residents. The city’s cycling enthusiasts could pedal free-spending visitors to hotels, shops or other attractions.

Asheville would become a city like no other, easily weathering the recession as it becomes known as the Green Mecca of the world.

Think of the good-paying jobs breaking up all that concrete and asphalt would create, not to mention health benefits from exercise, more nutritious food and less pollution. We’d once again be famous for our healthy air.

Back to reality, though — this vision must have been the result of the fumes I was breathing from my gas-guzzling mower, because it could never be.

Far more likely, at the rate we’re going, we will soon be covered with wall-to-wall luxury condos — and all of us will be cutting grass for the few who can afford to live in the swank high-rise wasteland of an Asheville that could have been so much more.

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John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .