Saving the world, one city at a time.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: COMMENT

Joel Rogers is no Pollyanna Sunshine. But the well-known academic, activist, MacArthur "genius," and director of COWS, the national think-and-do tank based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is optimistic about building a greener, more just, and happier future.

The secret, he says, is to work at the local level.

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Rogers flies around the world talking to local officials and business leaders about the benefits of the "high road" strategy for development. (He coined the term.)

Taking the high road means building communities where wages are high, the environment is protected, and democracy is strong.

The low road, in contrast, is the Walmart vision of America: businesses seek to lower costs by sweating labor and suppliers, damaging the environment, and avoiding taxes. Low-road politicians abet all this through deregulation, tax cuts, and an assault on democracy that helps big money make the rules.

The difference between the high road and the low road is described in elegiac terms by former University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor John Wiley, in a profoundly moving magazine article he wrote last year, recollecting what it was like to move from the hardscrabble Indiana town where he grew up to Madison, Wisconsin, where he came to the university as a grad student in the mid-1960s.

As soon as he crossed the border, Wiley writes, the road smoothed out, the farms and houses looked bright and neatly kept. The grim poverty, crumbling infrastructure, resentment, and racial strife that formed the backdrop to his childhood faded away behind him. People seemed less beaten down. Gas station attendants and convenience store clerks knew how to make change. There was no trash in the streets and no potholes in the roads.

Wiley got his PhD, and and went on to become a famous and highly patented scientist before returning to the UW-Madison and becoming its chancellor. It cost him a pittance to go to college--about $125 in tuition for his first semester--so he carried no college debt when he arrived, on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which covered his tuition and living expenses. The scholarship would have paid for him to go anywhere, but Wisconsin looked like heaven to him.

Everything Wiley loved about Wisconsin--the top-flight academic institution, the clean environment, the educated populace, the well-maintained roads--are threatened by the politics of austerity and resentment promoted by Wisconsin...