Curmudgeon in the ruins

As a child, I was fascinated with ruins and relics, playing in abandoned houses, the wreckage of old mills and factories. I preferred the rooftops to the streets, the spillway to the beach. I hid treasure in crawlspaces under carriage houses, in the insulation of attics. Nothing could beat the plunder of an old cracked leather trunk. Ruination is an ongoing process. By conventional wisdom, it's the flip-side of progress. More bodies, more mouths—the old must make way. But consider a moment--St. Lawrence County has roughly the same population now that it had in 1910. No more bodies. How does that change the logic of progress? What does the maxim "grow or die" mean, when we seem to have been doing neither for the last century? What would a development model look like where the new was seen as an option, not an automatic necessity? Growing older and more ruinous myself, renovation starts to look more attractive than demolition. After all, this new stuff is just the ruins of the future.