Earthlings, this will be short. I have a dinner to scarf down and plenty of tasks in line behind that.

It's a week until Thanksgiving. Many of us will be engaging in glorious gluttony next Thursday, and more power to us. I love making Thanksgiving dinner—the menu planning, the Wednesday baking, the Thursday beet-and-pumpkin-and-peanut-soup madness.

However, I do not love Styrofoam plates, paper napkins or plastic cups. Here is my personal holiday plea: Skip the disposables!

Seriously! Not just because of their impact on the size of the undoubtedly overstuffed Hefty bag that will hit your back patio sometime late Thursday night. It's also because of their symbolism. When we celebrate our good fortune in being warm and well fed, we owe it to ourselves and to the occasion not to create silly waste as a byproduct.

Similarly, buying your wild rice in bulk and your apples and onions from a local farmer makes for a much greener meal than opting for the over-packaged, South American-grown stuff in most grocery aisles. But you know this. I shouldn't harangue you. Really, what I hope is that we all have a beautiful day on Thursday, eating well in good company, and that a certain humble spirit pervades the holiday.

Anybody else got green Thanksgiving strategies? What's on your menu?

Last night I had a wild time hanging out at the Albemarle County Planning Commission meeting. (Not really. I mean, I really was there, but it wasn't really that wild.) Interesting news, though: The commissioners discussed, among other things, a proposal to allow small wind turbines in the county, on residential, farm, or commercial property.

County staff have been hammering out all the administrative procedures (in some cases, turbines would be allowed by right, while in others, you'd have to go through additional review before putting one up.) The commission voted 4-0 to approve the idea and it will go before the Board of Supervisors on December 9.

During the public hearing, one county resident stood up to say that she was "thrilled" about the idea of wind turbines. Other speakers—Jeff Werner of the Piedmont Environmental Council and Morgan Butler of the Southern Environmental Law Center, both frequent commenters on green and development matters—expressed enthusiasm too, but with some caveats. "What I'm most concerned about is we know folks will say something when they see these things going up," said Werner. "The visibility issue is going to be there. We've all worked so hard on [protecting] viewsheds and we don't want to give that up, even with the benefits of wind turbines."

So here we have an interesting conundrum. Renewable energy = good. Unsightly structures = bad. Some people certainly find wind turbines appealing, but others will recoil at the sight of tall, industrial-looking structures within Albemarle's bucolic landscape. If we start putting up wind turbines, will we open the door to other, more ugly development?

For me, there are further questions: What does it mean that our usual sources of power—coal and nuclear plants—are completely hidden from view most of the time? And how do you weigh the other effects of those plants (environmental, social, health) against the value of a beautiful, "unspoiled" view?

Today in C-VILLE, the feature story is yours truly's look at Albemarle County's Neighborhood Model, and how one of its main principles—walkability—is playing out so far in Hollymead Town Center. HTC, by virtue of its size and complexity, has often come under this paper's lens. We think it bears watching because it represents such a huge change on its northern Albemarle site, and because it's one of the first main developments approved after the Neighborhood Model was adopted.

It seems the county's lofty goals—keeping growth contained in designated areas, having it follow a more dense, urban, mixed-use model rather than contributing to car-centric sprawl—are tough to implement. I took a sort of test walk through the residential, office and retail sections of Hollymead and found that, during this long phase of construction, the prospects for pedestrians are mixed at best.

One of a number of places in HTC where walkers are not yet well-served.

Walking for transportation (as opposed to pleasure) continues to be something a very small, determined minority undertake. It's particularly tough in Northern Virginia, and the state overall ranks last in per-capita spending on bike and pedestrian projects.

Meanwhile, the Post recently published a different take on "smart growth"—this one based on a study of Maryland policies, which found that although that state attempted in the late '90s to channel growth into concentrated areas, "'There is no evidence after 10 years that [smart-growth laws] have had any effect on development patterns.'"

Ouch. It seems that, in many places, powerful development interests are at least part of the reason why more enlightened patterns of growth prove less satisfying in reality than on paper. Here in Albemarle, builders are reluctant to put in sidewalks until the buildings they front are completed. That's why you see this start-and-stop network of sidewalks at HTC right now (it's been under construction since 2003). And developers, as opposed to the county, seem to call the shots on that point.

In Maryland, political compromise with builders meant that the 1998 smart-growth laws are all carrot and no stick—so developers have kept putting in new projects more or less wherever they want.

Clearly, despite a widespread unhappiness with where development occurs and what it looks like, state and local governments have yet to figure out a better way. Anyone know of an instance where smart growth has actually fought off sprawl in a successful way?