The Bedford Falls Test: BDO Zones and the path to Rural Development

I’ve seen Main Streets where the hardware store is closed and now there’s a payday lender, where the once-bustling main intersection is home to perhaps a Wal-Mart, maybe a Dollar Store, maybe just boarded up buildings, the bank’s gone, the gas station’s battered, the feed store’s probably in the next county. You’d think that was the end of the story. The heart of these towns, once vibrant, seems to be fading.

But sometimes you go to a place like Lewis County, Washington—or Region Nine in Minnesota—and you hear something else. A different kind of story. One where the people never gave up. It’s in these resilient communities that you find a profound truth: the story of a place is fundamentally the story of its people, and their unwavering determination to live, to build, and to remember.

At the BDO Zone Summit this week, I saw it again: the quiet math of resilience. Not flashy, not famous—but structured. Strategic. And real. This isn’t about grand pronouncements; it’s about the tangible, daily acts of holding on and building anew. Like Ma Joad, the enduring symbol of American fortitude, said: “We’re the people that live”. And BDO Zones are showing us how they live, why some places are ready to be reborn—again. They reveal the deep, often unspoken reasons why certain communities persist, even when the economic tides turn against them.

Yes, they are about the bioeconomy, they are places in our supply chains. Yes, they are about Opportunity and Development, they are places in our economy. In the end, they are Zones, places in the heart.

The Transition: From Ritual to Reality

I thought of Bedford Falls—that malted milkshake at the drugstore, the wedding night chicken dinner, the melody of Auld Lang Syne at the end; George Bailey, with his friends, all holding a town together in song. And I thought: it’s not just innovation that keeps a place alive. It’s recognition. Familiarity. The rituals that never went away, even when the money did.

The best BDO Zones aren’t just shovel-ready—they’re soul-ready. They don’t just prepare land; they prepare meaning. This brings us to the core dilemma many rural communities face. Let’s look at that in more detail, shall we?

The Places We Long For: a Framework for Understanding

The General Theory of Evolutionary Systems and Information gives us a mathematical, tested framework to understand and measure inherent resilience, as seen through a human lens. And that’s what we’re looking for in finding communities to preserve, settle, develop and invest in, isn’t it? We want good things to last, knowing that brittle things go away. GTESI gives us four vectors: Information Persistence Rate (IPR), Structural Continuity Density (SCD), Thermodynamic Response Friction Index (TRFI), and Entropy Export Delta (EED).

IPR – Information Persistence Rate: How well useful knowledge, skills, and traditions are retained over time.
SCD – Structural Continuity Density: How tightly a place’s infrastructure, institutions, and routines hold together.
TRFI – Thermodynamic-Response Friction Index: How hard it is to adapt when the energy changes—whether it’s capital, population, or literal fuel.
EED – Entropy Export Delta: How much disorder a system can throw off without breaking down itself.

The Click-Your-Heels-Three-Times Test

What makes a place the kind you want to click your heels and return to, like Dorothy in Kansas? It’s not just the place. It’s the encoding. It’s where you know what song they’ll sing on the 4th of July. Where someone will still bake a pie when you show up unannounced. Where the town square lights up—not for profit, but for memory.

These places feel like home because they run on something deeper than energy: They run on pattern, trust, warmth, story—the hidden architecture of persistence. That’s what a real BDO Zone needs. Not just roads and jobs—but a reason for people to stay. A sense that this place still knows who it is.

Let’s look first at Bedford Falls and Pottersville — if Bedford Falls is a place we believe in, and wish it to endure, what does it have? What does any place have when it has that special something that makes things endure and succeed?

Bedford Falls vs. Pottersville: A GTESI Reading

The tale of Bedford Falls and Pottersville from It’s a Wonderful Life serves as a metaphor for the choices communities make in their pursuit of economic revitalization.

What is Pottersville?

Pottersville is a system with no IPR—nothing remembered. No song worth singing, no ritual worth repeating. It’s all neon and noise, but nothing sticks. It processes profit, not meaning. There’s “no fireside, just fluorescence. No malteds, just gin rickeys in cheap bars. No Mary, no Zuzu’s petals—because in Pottersville, there is no petal to remember”. Pottersville is entropy in human form—the collapse of narrative into transaction. It represents the soulless pursuit of efficiency at the cost of identity.

What is Bedford Falls?

Bedford Falls is different. It’s not about income. It’s not even about industry. It’s about meaning encoded in form. It’s a drafty house full of love. A broken-down car you can’t let go of. Bread, salt, and wine for new homeowners—symbolic, not practical, but precisely for that reason: indelible. These places work like language, like lullabies—they survive through pattern and performance. They are places where, as Nick Andrews from USA Bioenergy shared regarding his project in one of Texas’s poorest counties, “this gives them a chance to go get educated, then come back to their hometown, which is very important to these rural communities”. This is the very essence of community, connection, and the heart of what a BDO Zone can foster.

The three forms of community persistence

The enduring spirit of a place can be seen in three distinct forms of persistence, each woven into the fabric of North American culture:

The Ritual Loop: Americana That Keeps on Rolling

GTESI Signature: High IPR (Information Persistence Rate), High SCD (Structural Continuity Density), Low TRFI (Thermodynamic Response Friction Index)

This is persistence by repetition, familiarity, and cultural imprint. Think of the iconic scenes in American Graffiti (1973), a film about a night that never ends, capturing the timeless essence of youth and cruising. Or the eternal drive of “Rock Around the Clock” (1954), with its simple three chords that still get feet tapping. It’s the simple comfort of a Cherry Coke, still requested by name, or a hamburger with fries, ritualized everywhere from diners to drive-thrus.

Why do these things persist? They fit. They comfort. They require no learning curve. You know the tune, you know the taste. They are plug-and-play systems, offering easy adoption and minimal friction. As one GTESI Insight reveals, communities that survive often have these built-in loops—Friday football, Sunday supper, Main Street parades—rituals that knit people together. These are the everyday anchors, the familiar patterns that provide stability and a sense of belonging.

In the context of BDO Zones, this translates to a Classic zoning + trusted developer approach—where established structure meets ingrained habit, and new projects genuinely get built. It’s about leveraging existing community rhythms for new growth, a concept that Todd Chaput from Lewis County, Washington, has observed first-hand. “It’s exciting to be able to go out to these small communities with realistic opportunities that could really have some likely industrial investment in these small towns that they would have never seen before”. This is how new industries can slot into existing community structures, benefiting from the foundational stability already present.

The Prestige Anchor: Elegance with a Memory

GTESI Signature: High SCD, Moderate IPR, High TRFI

Here, persistence comes from symbolic structure, selective adoption, and a capacity for slow, graceful change. Consider Casablanca (1942), a film of timeless love and complex moralities. Or the longing evoked by “As Time Goes By”. It’s the slow-sipping sophistication of brandy or a Martini, and the upscale comfort with gravitas found in steak and potatoes.

Why do these persist? These elements are encoded in aspiration. They survive not through flexibility, but through cultural anchoring—they don’t bend, they wait. They act like cathedrals of meaning—not efficient, but enduring. These are the aspirational touchstones that define a community’s character and its enduring legacy.

For BDO Zones, this means Specialty zones with long runway projects—initiatives that may be a slow burn but offer high reward, built on reputational scaffolding. They require patience, but the long-term impact on a community’s identity and prosperity is profound.

The Sentimental Core: What We Keep Remembering / What We Remember in the Dark

GTESI Signature: High IPR (information held through emotion), High EED (symbolic export), Medium SCD

This is where the heart beats strongest, where persistence is rooted in emotional encoding, communal memory, and symbolic export. Think of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—a film that answers the question of a life’s worth with a community’s echo, representing thermodynamic restoration through symbolic care. Or “You Are My Sunshine,” a melody of love and fear of loss that passes “voice to voice, hand to hand”. The innocent, nostalgic appeal of Root Beer, or Apple Pie—America’s hearth on a plate. And the globally ritualized “Auld Lang Syne,” a song half-forgotten, half-remembered, and all feeling, acting as a symbolic binding agent at goodbyes and thresholds.

Crucially, these don’t scale; they root. They are emotional persistence nodes—resilient not because of capital, but connection. At the BDO Zone Summit, Bob Russell from Lewis County, Washington, highlighted this communal aspect, stating that the BDO Zone process created an “independent review committee” which has fostered a “working group of like 20 people” who now actively vet and respond to opportunities, echoing the sentiment that “a rising tide is raising all ships”. It is about the shared rituals and memories that communities cherish.

Consider a malted milkshake from the corner drugtore: “Community in a glass. It’s a ritual act that pairs identity and memory—and reminds us of childhoods, shared stools, and jukeboxes. One straw, two people, one life”. Or Macaroni and Cheese: “Comfort. Simplicity. Memory that warms rather than dazzles. This isn’t cuisine—it’s emotional caloric transfer across time”. These aren’t efficient or fast-growing, but they are deeply encoded, persisting in symbolic form because of their friction: the slowness, the weight, the ritual. A BDO Zone doesn’t have to be fast-growing to be enduring—some projects are themselves malt shops in a world of fast food. These are high-EED, high-resonance projects: slow to build, but impossible to forget once you’ve seen what they can do. They’re not selling something new—they’re reviving something we already miss.

Why We Choose Bedford Falls

When it comes to revitalizing forgotten towns, there are two models. One throws up a warehouse, dangles a tax credit, installs a gas station, and prays for an exit ramp. That’s Pottersville. The other builds slowly. With memory. With meaning. With care. That’s Bedford Falls. And when it works—really works—it doesn’t just survive the storm. It remembers itself through it. That’s the secret. That’s GTESI.

The panelists at the BDO Zone Summit underscored this. Shauna Carr of Sarnia-Lambton highlighted how BDO Zones helped attract investment from companies who “did not know my area, my region existed before they connected through the BDO zone”. Chad Schreck from North Iowa Corridor noted that the BDO Zone rating provided “a third party, independent resource” that validates a region’s assets, proving “incredibly valuable” for both new projects and existing ones seeking funding. Rod Cock from Nova Scotia shared that receiving an A rating for Southwestern Nova Scotia was “a little bit of a life for the forest industry… to say, hey, yeah, we knew we had something good, and somebody else has come in and verified that”. This verification and validation are key to attracting the right kind of investment.

From the project developers, we hear a similar refrain. Matt Boger of Regen Corp. emphasized the creation of opportunities “especially in these communities where, you know, we’re targeted, which are, you know, often agricultural communities that struggle to keep the kids there in the community, working on the farm, can’t support the whole family”. Doug Binsted of Azure Sustainable Fuels added that the “high impact jobs” created are “very coveted jobs in those communities, and they give those communities an opportunity for their young people to stay, to stay at home”. Nick Andrews of USA Bioenergy confirmed that the BDO Zone rating was “very helpful” in the capital raising process, providing the necessary “independent third party review” for funders. As Jordan Solomon eloquently put it during the panel, without these connections, underutilized biomass assets are “just trees in the forest,” but “when we put them together with you, then all of a sudden we create something out of something that this wasn’t there before”.

The Bottom Line

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of hosting more than 30 of these regions, towns and counties on our Digest TV show The BDO Zone. At the end of each episode, I ask the guests “if tomorrow a developer came to your town for the first time, what’s the one thing they would find that would make them fall in love with your part of the world and never go anywhere else for their project?” Sure, some answers touch on infrastructure, incentives, abundant and affordable feedstock, but the vast majority talk about the people, the quality of life, the community spirit.

So when we ask what makes a place worth building in—or fighting for—it’s not just tax incentives or square footage. It’s whether the town knows the second verse of the song. Whether the coffee’s still served in heavy mugs. Whether kids still play in the same fields their parents did.

That’s the difference between Pottersville and Bedford Falls. One forgets. The other persists. And that’s the kind of place GTESI—and people—bet on.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey gets a glimpse of a world that could have been—a version of his hometown without memory, connection, or care. Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville: neon-lit, soulless, and profit-maximized, with no trace of the small kindnesses, local trust, or quiet endurance that once gave it meaning. We know towns like both. Some persist. Some vanish. The question is: what makes the difference?

In the real world, it isn’t just about angels or bankers. It’s about infrastructure, opportunity, memory. It’s about keeping the spark alive when the factory closes, the kids leave, and the high school football team becomes a page in a yearbook nobody opens anymore. And that’s what BDO Zones are really about.

Yes, they’re economic tools. But more deeply, BDO Zones are maps of structural memory—signals that say: this town still has what it takes. It hasn’t forgotten how to work, how to build, how to show up. It’s ready for biomanufacturing, renewable fuels, sustainable chemicals—the new economy. The numbers speak for themselves: $4 billion in capital now in play across just four BDO Zone projects, and $30 billion in potential investment across 61 certified regions, potentially creating 60,000 rural jobs. These ratings are downloaded an average of 850 times by project developers and investors, leading to a 69% increase in investor inquiries within six months. That’s not fiction. That’s a foundation.

Every BDO Zone we’ve visited passes what we call the Bedford Falls Test. Some still have the old pharmacy. Some sing the old songs. Some still serve the same pie—not out of nostalgia, but because it works. And it’s ready to be remixed. You can hear it in the stories, feel it in the town halls, see it on Main Street—even if it’s mostly gas stations and McDonald’s now.

This isn’t nostalgia. This is persistence. A different kind of resilience. The kind that remembers. Because you don’t build a future from scratch. You build it from what holds on.