I was intending to write a column in praise of 'smart growth' strategies. When I was a youngster, the metro Twin Cities area had a population of a little more than 1 million. Today, we are at about 2.6 million. Projections are for 3.1 million people by 2020.

Three million is better than 4 million, but it is simply not good enough. We have too many people in the Twin Cities today.

As you sit in your next traffic jam, waiting for access to the highway, or in attempting to make it across town for that very important meeting, just think: Did anyone ever ask you if you wanted to share your community with another 500,000 people? More cars, more homes, more pollution, more strip malls, more traffic jams, more of just about everything.

Agronomists will tell us that the soil in Dakota County is among the best in Minnesota. Its 'highest and best use' is for farming. More people will require more homes, and more subdivisions, in once productive farmland.

More people means more cars and more roads, and more bridges and so forth. More gasoline and more oil will be required to situate those millions and deliver them to work places and malls.

Can we afford this? Can we rely on a never-ending flow from a perpetually pumping oil industry?

M. King Hubbert, the oil industry's preeminent geologist, made the prediction in the 1950s that U.S. oil production would peak in the early '70s and decline thereafter. It did. He made a further prediction, based on data for which the oil industry paid $35,000 a printed copy, that world oil production would peak in 2005-2010. Despite all the exploration, regardless of new finds, every indication is that King's prediction will hold true. (More information regarding M. King Hubbert's prediction about oil production can be found at www.oilcrisis.com/overview.htm)

What that means is simply this: The metro Twin Cities area is planning, indeed seeking, to accommodate another 500,000 people in an era when our oil supplies will begin to contract.

Does that mean merely less driving? Yes, but not only less driving, less of everything. We live in a petroleum economy. The newspaper you read is delivered courtesy of energy provided by oil. The coffee you may be drinking now and the English muffin you are eating are the transformation of oil calories into food products.

With less oil, we will be able to support a much lower population than we are currently capable of doing.

The metro Twin Cities should be planning to accommodate 'no growth' rather than 'smart growth.' We should be seeking a move of exurbanites to the suburbs, and suburbanites to the cities. We should be building transit systems which can move people around the entire region. We should be enforcing ever-more restrictive energy efficiency requirements. We should be discouraging migration and encouraging far fewer births.

Many, many years ago, as a young biology student, I experimented with the population biology of fruit flies. I would prepare a nutrient medium and introduce a male and female fruit fly. Within a few days, the population would expand and, upon reaching a critical mass, die off. The interesting thing about the ``die off'' was that it did not happen only upon exhausting their food source. The die off happened despite the availability of continued food supplies. The fruit fly colonies would die off once they produced a certain quantity of waste which proved toxic. ``Dumb'' growth and ``smart'' growth were equally productive of waste and both resulted in die off.

Humans are not fruit flies. We are capable of creating technology and of submitting our behavior to the dictates of reason. But we are still subject to nature. We cannot continue to grow any more than a cancer can continue to grow without outgrowing our environment and killing our host.

The only ``smart'' policy is no-growth. The only reasonable development is sustainable development.

Winans, of Burnsville, is one of seven Pioneer Press Community Columnists for 2000. He is an attorney involved in public policy research and advocacy. He may be contacted at l.a.winans@worldnet.att.net

© 2000 PioneerPlanet / St. Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press

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