New West Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
The Western landscape is viewed with different economic, social and recreational values, depending on your livelihood and residence. But can we share the same sense of place? Susan Duncan continues her discussion of urban and rural inhabitants, but this time, with examples of common grounds and shared dialogues that assist in understanding each other.
A shared sense of place evolves from dialogue in an atmosphere of mutual respect for differing views.
How much do you know about the people and places that surround you and the forces that affect your daily life? What does it mean (to you and others) to live in this place? How can you and your neighbors work together to adapt to the forces of change to protect what is important to you?
The result of this exploration is a shared sense of place. A shared sense of place is a large jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions – urban, rural, and public land. Your job is to find where you fit into the whole.
The venue for the exchange of ideas can take many forms – newspaper articles, websites and other on-line media, public meetings and presentations, informal get-togethers, events, and tours. Each forum has a different way of illuminating the local situation.
Over the last decade or so, environmental groups have decided that farms and ranches are a better alternative land use than subdivisions for preserving open space and wildlife. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the Sonoran Institute, and the Gallatin Valley Land Trust brought in speakers and assisted in local discussions of growth and development issues. On March 6th, GVLT and the Sonoran Institute sponsored a talk by Charles Wilkerson of the University of Colorado Law School. Wilkerson noted that environmentalists are doing good work but are failing to connect with the public and engage local public opinion in the process.
The Planning Department and the County Commissioners have worked for the last 15-20 years to bring growth issues to the forefront of public awareness. They researched “tools” used in other communities. They held focus groups and offered proposals for public comment. Two Open Space Bond initiatives passed and the money used to protect farmlands in conservation easements and buy 100 acres for a regional park. This work was not in vain. Gravel pit development is now pushing us toward countywide zoning. Gravel pit owners recognize that they need to participate in the dialogue with county officials and homeowners to work out a solution. We have to learn to be good neighbors to each other.
Public agencies and businesses have a place in the dialogue. The U.S. Forest Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks joined together to put forward “Montana Challenge”. The Montana Challenge is to “manage our fish and wildlife for their traditional and deeply personal meaning to Montana and their ability to attract the economic activity vital to the State’s prosperity.” It was presented to community leaders and chambers of commerce around the state. It’s rare when federal and state agencies find a common goal and reach out to local business leaders for comment and support.
The Yellowstone Business Partnership brings together businesses that depend on the health of the wild land environment in the Yellowstone-Teton region. Business members tend to be connected to the tourist industry in some way, but not all. The partnership believes the environment is the cornerstone of the economy, parks are our future, and conservation is essential. They seek to develop “sustainable capitalism” based on the natural resources of the region.
Events provide windows to unfamiliar aspects of the local scene. Rural and urban residents rub elbows at the Manhattan Potato Festival, Summer (4-H) Fair, and Wild West Winterfest, Four-H and FFA programs involve youth and their parents in urban and rural issues. In spring, the Gallatin Valley Agriculture Committee sponsors Farm Fair for fourth graders, countywide. Montana Outdoor Science School holds a Snow Festival, Watershed Festival, and RaptorFest and outdoor science classes for children and adults.
“Dialogue” can be an experience like shopping or dining out. Farmer’s Markets and the Community Food Co-op have increased awareness of locally produced food. The Co-op and Helena based AERO sponsor farm tours. The Corporation for the Northern Rockies in Livingston and the Chef’s Collaborative have worked to get local food into area restaurants and Yellowstone Park. The horticulture program at Montana State University started their own Towne Farm to contribute to the Food Bank, Farmer’s Market, and MSU Food Service. The Gallatin Valley Independent Business Association promotes the value of “investing” in small business through “buy local” campaigns.
Periodicals and on-line media have a role in the dialogue. The Belgrade News has done an excellent job of covering water, agricultural, and small town issues in Gallatin County. Compared to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, it really does cover a different “beat”.
The on-line magazine NewWest.Net is unique in that it offers the opportunity for reader comment. Recent articles have dealt with the issues of countywide zoning, power lines and corridors to serve resort areas like Big Sky, and the threats of wild fires to homes in the wild land-urban interface. And, the Gallatin Grassroots Forum encourages residents to get involved in public policy issues with reminders of opportunities for public input.
Tours allow participants to see the world through another’s eyes. The scenery is the same but the interpretations differ. The Greater Gallatin Watershed Council has been very effective in getting people of diverse backgrounds together for bus tours.
Last summer, GGWC sponsored a tour of the West Gallatin (Irrigation) Canal from its source at the mouth of Gallatin Canyon for planners, realtors, and developers. Irrigators have complained that developers have not understood or respected the legal rights accompanying irrigation ditch infrastructure. The West Gallatin River has 37 ditch companies with extensive infrastructure that has been in place for 100 years. The “show me” trip was co-sponsored by the Gallatin Conservation District, the Gallatin Local Water Quality District and the Association of Gallatin Agricultural Irrigators. During the tour, participants heard the perspective of planners, lawyers, state water rights officials, and hydrologists. As a result realtors, planners, and irrigators have begun looking for ways to work together.
Each encounter with new perspectives leads to a clearer image of the total picture of sense of place and our role in it. Anyone can initiate the dialogue. Anyone can join in.
Read more of Susan Duncan’s articles:
• Discovering Your Sense of Place
• Redefining Urban and Rural: Cooperation in a Time of Local Need
• Redefining Urban and Rural: Agriculture Loses Without Planning
• Redefining Urban and Rural: Why Growth Tools Haven’t Succeeded
• Redefining Rural and Urban: A Community Discussion
• Urban and Rural: Lifestyles Clash Over Differing Views of Open Space
Susan Duncan lives on a 76-acre irrigated farm in the Gallatin Valley of Montana that she and her husband Richard built from a fallow grain field since 1976. They raised registered and commercial cattle, sheep, and hay. Now they are niche market entrepreneurs of Dexter cattle and some produce. From 1999-2004 Susan was a country lifestyle columnist for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle “Fencelines” Section. She holds a B.S. Degree in Forestry from the University of Montana. For the last 20 years she has been an active participant in local efforts to envision a viable future and guide exploding development.
lawyers
“Sustainable capitalism” needs some definition or it becomes just another marketing tool for commercial interests not yet willing to pay their fair share of the cost of natural asset depletion. Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs more slowly still nets you a dead goose.
Steve Kelley is right; sustainable capitalism is a buzz word–capitalism is not sustainable. Never has been, never will be.
And the best alternative to protecting open spaces is to protect the land under public trust principles and dedicate the land to conservation, not production of commodities.
Thanks to Susan for pointing out that the only way we’re going to be successful is by aggressively pursuing community dialogue.
To Steve and Robert – while i appreciate you skepticism regarding sustainable capitalism and the threat of greenwashing, I’d like to suggest that the only way we’re going to get intelligent policies (land use, whatever) passed on private lands is to make sure that somebody can make money on them. If there’s anything the history of planning shows us, its that good planning gets shelved when people aren’t making $$. We’ve got to make it profitable for people to do the ‘right’ thing. Which is why i really appreciate YBP’s approach.
Quote:
Over the last decade or so, environmental groups have decided that farms and ranches are a better alternative land use than subdivisions for preserving open space and wildlife. end quote
The problem is environmental groups only want farms and ranches protected on their terms. The insistance on having wolves roaming on ranches is an example. Another is the insistance that ranchers pay “market price” for grazing or better yet give up grazing allotements, so the forests are “pristine” for the back country users. That won’t work, unless ranchers can make a living their land will be sold for the most money possible. That is their lifetime investment and they have to recoup all they can from that investment.
We simply must recognize the need to protect our ranches and the families who run them.
You say, Susan, that “A shared sense of place is a large jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions – urban, rural, and public land.”
Yet as I read your article I have failed to see all three of those dimensions represented within it. As I read from top to bottom trying to find all three dimensions this is what I see:
“… environmental groups have decided that farms and ranches are a better alternative land use than subdivisions for preserving open space and wildlife …;
“Charles Wilkerson of the University of Colorado Law School … noted that environmentalists are doing good work but are failing to connect with the public and engage local public opinion in the process …;
“Public agencies and businesses have a place in the dialogue …;
” … when federal and state agencies find a common goal and reach out to local business leaders for comment and support …;
“Business members tend to be connected to the tourist industry;
“… (at) Events … Rural and urban residents rub elbows …;
“… promotes the value of “investing” in small business through “buy local” campaigns;
“Periodicals and on-line media have a role in the dialogue;
“… encourages residents to get involved in public policy issues with reminders of opportunities for public input;
“… getting people of diverse backgrounds together for bus tours;
“… for planners, realtors, and developers;
“Irrigators have complained …; and,
“During the tour, participants heard the perspective of planners, lawyers, state water rights officials, and hydrologists.”
=========
Yes, Susan, I did read your closing comments saying, “Each encounter with new perspectives leads to a clearer image of the total picture of sense of place and our role in it. Anyone can initiate the dialogue. Anyone can join in.”
But as Marion noted: “The problem is environmental groups only want farms and ranches protected on their terms.”
In my not-so-humble opinion, until those who own the farms and ranches that all these other entities want to “take” and/or to “plan” are someday included and respected on a scale no less than their ownership contribution would seem to demand, that clearer image of the total picture of sense of place and everyone else’s role in it will remain something much less than the successfully completed large jigsaw puzzle that you are promoting.
Without that grounding (pun intended) bearbait’s clarity of thought, once again, hits the dialogue “nail” that will evolve square on the head with a sledge hammer:
“lawyers”.
They will be the ones who will be defining the ground rules for differing views and one might have cause to doubt that the atmosphere within the courtroom will be one of mutual respect.
… or so it seems to me …
Susan, does it not make you just a little uncomfortable to be deciding what you want done with other folks property, and how you are going to do it? Are the owners allowed any input?
Give me a break, Marion. Nothing in any of Susan’s columns ever justified that comment. Her entire point during the series has been that there needs to be mutual respect and much dialogue by everyone involved in living in this landscape.
That’s the entire point of New West, I think. Look at things a little differently, have an educated conversation… it doesn’t help to keep sledgehammering the same viewpoint over and over with no attempt whatsoever at understanding where others are coming from.
Did I miss where ranch owners were mentioned in these meetings? What input have they had, and why is it not mentioned? Other than Susan’s land, I did not see a statement from any of the ranchers.
What I see is a whole lot of mostly urban folks who want to dictate what rural folks are allowed to do in managing and using their rural properties. However, most of those urban folks are not equal participants in caring for the environment. Many of them belittle rural landowners’ concerns over property rights . . . yet howl like scalded cats when city councils condition their property rights by dictating higher densities in their neighborhoods.
Urban residents are generally the only 100% consumptive water users in their watersheds, often pulling their water from basins where they do not live . . . yet seek to stringently condition farm and ranch water rights.
The urban folks also provide fish and other aquatic species with disturbingly varied cocktails of household chemicals and biopharmeceutical residuals. They demand that rural residents bear the brunt of regulations that purport to help salmon populations recover, while all the while their synthetic estrogen residuals cut fish reproductive success in half.
Until such time as urban residents pick up their share of the load in taking care of the environment, I don’t see a whole lot of opportunity in developing a shared sense of place, largely because urban residents are dictating the conditions of that sharing while being the heaviest burden upon the landscape.
Until everyone involved in this discussion (and the one playing out here in the comment section is indicative of the larger one out in the world) loses their sense of ultimate entitlement and begins to accept some degree of responsibility, we aren’t going to make a damn bit of headway in creating communities that can begin to address the very large issues of change that have been overrunning the western landscape for the past 18 years or so. Norman, Marion, Robert Hoskins, Rosemary, Steve Kelly – do any of you have any solutions beyond pointing fingers at “the other side”? Does anyone else?
You cannot say “urban residents need to pick up there share of the load”. Urban residents are picking up a huge share of the load by living in an urban environment where they actually have the chance to walk around town rather than getting in their car and adding more carbon monoxide to the world every time they need to run an errand. By the same token, you can’t advocate for protecting “open spaces” by turning things over to the public trust because many large rural landowners care deeply about the land and are very appropriate stewards.
The “two sides” here have done a good job reciting established positions. We’re all in this together, people. Reciting those establishment positions is going to leave us exactly where we started.
Change has been overrunning the western landscape for a heck of a lot longer than the past eighteen years, “J”.
Rural landowners have accepted a tremendous degree of responsibility, and have also had “presumed responsibility” heaped upon them by people who have very little understanding of just what it takes to be a responsible rural landowner.
I certainly do have solutions . . . a whole rack of them.
First, as 100% consumptive users of water, municipalities need to tertiary treat their sewage and return the water to the watersheds they took it from. If that is an impractical distance, then the water needs to be pumped into the upper reaches of “closer in” watersheds where it can be used to support instream flows for fish, provide irrigation water to grow the food that is consumed in the urban zones (thereby shrinking the carbon footprint of your food chain), and as a third reclaimed use, to recharge aquifers.
By living in an urban area, urban residents are concentrating their environmental impact into point or near-point sources. In addition to tertiary treat and return (TT&R;), stormwater utilities need to be upgraded to the point where they are fully effective in treating runoff and moving the cleaned water to where it will provide usable water resources, parallel to TT&R;.
Urban water conservation needs to become a reality. Water for food production should take firm precedence as a water use. Until I can fly over southern California without seeing the blue liners of thousands of full-to-the-brim backyard swimming pools and all those acres of desert covered by emerald green lawns, I will not believe that those desert urban dwellers are serious about caring for the greater landscape levels of ecosystems.
Biopharmeceutical residuals need to be filtered out of urban “waste” water. Many of them are harmful to a whole slate of aquatic species, and we know that synthetic estrogen, for instance, is a significant factor in the decline of salmon and other T&E;species.
The environmental community needs to be fully supportive of individual landowner stewardship of the parcels those landowners use or lease. Supportive to the extent of supporting public policy that enables them to be more effective in that effort, without restricting their ability to use their own property to the extent that they cannot make a living with it.
. . . And that’s just a tiny scratch on the surface of the solutions I have.
Excellent Norman. First of all we have to get beyond the idea that recreation is the first prority. Believe me food production is, at least right after clean water.
J
Your critique is profoundly flawed and does not show much understanding of the problems we face in the West. It appears you just want to beat up on those who disagree with the collaborative approach–which has everywhere failed to produce the benefits that it promises.
To offer solutions, one has to understand the problem first. If you don’t understand the problem, then your solutions won’t work. That is my primary problem with Susan’s columns and your comments. They don’t achieve anything.
A careful understanding of “rural” and “urban” shows them to be merely two sides of the same coin. That coin is one of unfettered exploitation of natural resources for the unequal distribution of wealth generated by such exploitation. Conservation of land, water, and wildlife is a largely futile attempt to slow down, mitigate, or prevent such exploitation, because the primary output of such exploitation is unsustainable human population growth.
Conservation is futile largely because our culture, a civilization marked by rural and urban societies that are essentially parasitic upon each other, while both are parasitic upon the earth, refuses to acknowlege that land, water, and wildlife, have moral value and content and, following Aldo Leopold, treats same as mere commodities, property to do with as we humans wish.
And that applies to humans. In case people haven’t noticed, the primary social characteristic of civilization is slavery, either legal or de facto.
Both “rural” and “urban” share the same values of greed for wealth without moral restraint, the same values of contempt for moral concern for the earth.
Practically, the impacts of “rural” and “urban” on land, water, and wildife are different only in degree, not kind.
Consequently, restraint is a necessary component to potential solutions in civilized society.
When we come to agriculture, since that is the topic of Susan’s column, we find the conflict between ag and conservation to be fundamentally rooted in a lack of democracy. Agriculture in the western states got in at the beginning and structured political and economic instititutions to benefit ag and no one else. In other words, ag set itself up as an oligarchy. Rule by the few for the few. Subsidizing ag, especially livestock production, is an acceptable use of the public purse. Funding social needs, for example, is not. How much revenue for the schools is produced by livestock production on state school lands, for example? The vast majority of revenue produced by state school lands is from mineral production, not agriculture, which has treated itself to grazing rights on state school lands at ridculously low rates.
There are people in Wyoming who have built their houses and ranch buildings on state school lands. What kind of contribution to the public good does that represent?
If one is a progressive on any issue in the western states, particularly conservation, you run into this problem immediately–you are disenfranchised, and your concerns are brushed aside, repudiated, belittled on a regular basis. One attendance at an Ag committee meeting at the state legislature should be enough to give an astute observer knowledge of how ag does business–dishonestly and contemptuously. (Predator control is a good example here).
Ag has almost complete institutional control over land and wildlife policy in the states (except when what ag wants is different from what the minerals industry, and increasingly, urban development economic interests, wants, but that is another issue).
In short, we have a problem of governance, specifically, a constitutive problem, in which the valid concerns of members of the community that don’t belong to the dominant and domineering oligarchy are rejected and ignored. We do not have democracy in the western states; we don’t even have republics. The western states are oligarchies masquerading as republics. I’ve always thought that it would make a good federal lawsuit to call upon the United States to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to ensure the citizens of the several states a “republican (small r)” form of government. We certainly don’t have it now.
As a general solution to these problems, I advocate the public trust in all its forms as the best solution we can get in this deeply flawed and greedy civilized society to the problem of land, water, and wildlife exploitation. The public trust may not conserve land, water, and wildlife to the degree necessary for our long-term survival, but it has a better chance of conserving what we have as a public good, as common property from which we all benefit and toward which we all have obligations to take care of, than the private property rights approach that has proven to be so useless and destructive.
To the extent that the public trust is the most practical approach, I support Susan’s call for planning and zoning. Even of ag land.
I came to support the public trust after a long experience with agriculture, in which I grew up (tobacco, timber, and cattle), after extensive travels in the New and Old Worlds as a military officer, and after 15 years as a conservationist in the West. I have studied the land, I have studied the books, and I have talked with people all over the world. And I have thought long and hard about the things I care most about.
When I hear about the responsibilities that rural populations have assumed, I have to ask, just what responsibilities? What I see is the constant externalization of the costs of production to the public purse. Especially with western livestock, such externalization is the only way to make a profit. That subsidization has to end.
As yet, I have not met or encountered no one who can turn me from my decision regarding the public trust. I really don’t care if people don’t like it. I didn’t come to my decision to support it lightly, and I am determined to pursue it with vigor and steadfastness.
Therefore, solutions to the various practical problems we face must be truly democratically-based and decided in favor of the public good, not in favor of private interests.
RH
WOW, Robert!!! That’s some bunch of words you’ve posted!
My goodness! ~ gracious! ~ MERCY be!
Should I believe the words I see?
Would any man be all THAT sure
Of all the miseries he’d endure?
Apparently you think each man
And woman, child, should find a can
In which to crawl into, reside?
A mental place like THAT to hide?
THANK YOU, dear Lord, that I can see
That such a place ain’t right for me!
How lucky I am that I live
In USA ~ MORE thanks I give!
But thank YOU, Robert, for each word
That you have written and we heard.
It’s never wise to just ignore
Such destinies that you implore.
You did not tell WHICH Nation served
Or WHY you thought WHAT was deserved,
So valid it was worth your risk
Of life or limb or ruptured disc.
You did not say WHAT you conserved
Or WHO you might have thought deserved
In New OR Old Worlds what YOU did …
… or were those words said just to kid?
WHICH public do you think is good
Enough to do all that they should
While placing you upon The Throne
Donating mind and soul and bone?
In History words like yours were written
And the populace was smitten.
Bowing to their knees they gave
Until their bones thrown in a grave.
So far the USA ain’t QUITE
To point where ALL give up the fight
Against those who would rise to TAKE,
Crawl into bed that you would make.
=============
THANK YOU, dear Lord, that I can see
That such a place ain’t right for me!
How lucky I am that I live
In USA ~ MORE thanks I give!
God Bless America! ~ PLEASE!!!
Thank you, thank you Rose Mary for this wonderful poem. It made my day.
Obviously Robert, despite his world travels decided the good Ol USof A was the best place to live, even as he tried to make us all fit into his little mold of what is acceptable.
I, too , spent a full career serving in the military, spending time in 68 different nations around the world as part of my work.
I came to a significantly different conclusion than Robert.
I saw environmental destruction in some corners of the world that defy belief, many of the worst being in countries where a national government land use policy resulted in centralized control of how property was allowed to be used. Without local landowner control and responsibility, ecosystems lose . . . and lose big.
What we need is a conversation and action driven by experience, knowledge and skill, not by some utopian ideal that responds to assertions that cannot be demonstrated on the ground. While people from outside the rural community may be able to contribute knowledge and ideas, it’s the people who live in our landscapes whose experience and skill, coupled with knowledge and wisdom you can only gain by living a fully rural lifeway, that will make things happen . . . or not.
People who live in rural areas know that if you abuse the land, the land will no longer support you. They also resent the idea that they should be required to provide the view through the Sunday drive windshield that someone else’s “vision” dictates.
If people who live in urban areas wish to have places where their vision of what rural landscapes should look like are actually be brought to fruition, then those urban folks should pony up and pay for the ecosystem services that will bring their dreams to reality. They should also develop and improve the urban zone ecosystem services that will take another step toward cleaning up our landscapes.
Well, Norman, that’s a perfect explanation of the ideological Jeffersonian yeoman vision of rural life, a vision that, as I learned from growing up in agriculture in a county about three hours south of Mr Jefferson’s University and from paying attention to land and history during my own time in the Middle East and Africa, on what was euphemistically called “the cutting edge of US foreign policy,” has no reality on the ground in the American South or anywhere in the world at any point in human history, with the possible exception of northwestern Europe, as explained in Edgar Hyam’s excellent study Soils and Civilization.
What I remember most from farming in rural North Carolina was how red the streams, creeks, and rivers ran from the erosion of yearly plowing. I remember too the heavy residue from fertilizers in the waters and the indiscriminate shooting of raptors and foxes. I remember also you couldn’t catch fish in the streams, except maybe for the odd catfish. Fish came from stocked ponds that were protected from runoff. Our stockpond was springfed. There were few whitetail deer anywhere; they’d been shot out too. All the bears were up in the Blue Ridge.
From old early 18th century naturalist reports, my part of North Carolina boasted bison, elk, deer, cougars, black bear, wolves, trout, and clear streams, steams so clear that even deep waters revealed their rocky bottoms. Check out William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line, his account of his survey work to establish the boundary between NC and Virginia.
What we had then in the early 18th century was destroyed by farming over a period of 200 years. Wolves, cougars, elk, and bison were eradicated from NC by the end of the 18th century. That’s a fact.
Civilizations all over the world, civilizations that rose and fell long before 20th century “socialist” governments, rose on exploitation of land and fell from the exploitation of land. Name one civilization of the Old World that sustainably managed its resources. Maybe China, but then, China is almost its own continent; it’s a big place.
Perhaps that’s one reason they call it the Old World–something the New World is rapidly becoming–tired, overworked, worn out. Soils mineralized; land eroded; waters polluted; forests felled for fuel, building construction, and naviess (the Greek empire comes to mind here); wildlife destroyed; and zoonotic diseases unleashed–all of that came as a consequence of agriculture and its fueling of civilization to impose an ideological vision of human control over the earth. That’s a historical fact.
It’s also a historical fact that the only sustainable societies over the period of human evolution have been hunter-gatherer societies, which have been the lethal target of pastoral and farming societies all throughout history as farmers and herders expanded onto hunters’ lands and stole them by killing off or subjugating the aboriginals. That’s exactly what we did to the Natives of the western hemisphere, isn’t it That’s also historical fact.
At this point in the 21st century, hunting societies have all been nearly destroyed. Gotta get rid of the competition; have to get rid of the troublesome memories of what we once were but destroyed.
One interesting historical tidbit that has always impressed me is that of the vaunted hundreds of square miles of the Biblical era “cedars of Lebanan,” there are now 300 trees left in a park above Beirut. We can thank the Phoenicians and their shipbuilding industry for that.
To get closer to home, you say you want urban populations to pay more for rural ecosystem services. Well, take a look at the most recent Farm Bill. I can’t think of any sector of the American economy that is so heavily subsidized as that of agriculture, except for the military industrial complex, as Ike called it.
Just how much more subsidy out of the public purse should be sent agriculture’s way to pay for what we’re already paying for and aren’t getting? Might there be a huge scam going on? Might our own agri-culture be a little wee bit socialist, high on the drug of public welfare, incapable of sensing the future?
The fact is, a scientific, objective assessment of the impact of agriculture worldwide throughout human history does not reveal the rosy ideological picture you’re painting of rural sustainability or strategic thinking about the protection of land. To the degree that it does happen, it doesn’t happen anywhere near the scale necessary to do any good.
I’d say American civilization is on the edge of an ecological cliff.
That’s historical fact.
RH
Robert
You and I grew up in a time when farming practices included the plowing, coupled with heavy fertilizer and pesticide use you mention. Let’s not forget that farming practices have changed since then . . . or that petrochemical costs have risen to the point where no family farm can afford to overuse to the point where the stuff is wasted into runoff.
As time goes on, and as we learn more about more securely coupling our presence in our landscapes with advanced approaches to land and resource stewardship, we can build sustainable practices that support us. I’m optimistic that this will result in achievable success. You do need a solid partnership between rural and urban populations where each respects the other, though . . . no more of this branding of the “hicks in the sticks” attitude that so many of our environmental activist organizations carry so prominently on their collective shoulders.
You indicate that the Farm Bill is bloated. I can’t disagree with that . . . but I will point out that the vast majority of those subsidy dollars don’t make it to the family farm level. Those subisidies tend to get eaten up in “administration” and by gifting to large agribusiness entities . . . as well as to folks with names like Ted Turner.
We subsidize agriculture . . . but if we don’t, we lose our agricultural base, and the manufacturing base and infrastructure that make it possible to continue having a viable agricultural component of our economy. Would you rather that we become vulnerable to the development of a food cartel that could use pricing to drive our domestic and foreign policies? Food security is an looming issue, still largely in the background, but looming nonetheless.
You zero in on agriculture as a primary culprit here. How about we wander off into the field of federal lands, recognizing that the natural resources of those federal lands are actually collateral on our national debt? What happens to the ecosystems on our federal lands if a nation like China calls the USA on the dollar debt that China holds?
Remember the many pertinent things Sun Tzu said.
You note the paucity of whitetail deer and bear populations where you grew up. Have you checked into those populations today? Many, if not most of them throughout the east have rebounded. In many areas where we remember few large individuals of the larger wildlife species, populations have come back to, in some cases, pestilential levels.
While what you term American civilization may be at ecological risk, I’d consider it to be more at a fork in the road than on the edge of a cliff. We have choices to make. Those choices often have foreseeable results and consequences, a mix of good and not-so-good.
We are not going to make good choices, though, unless we have a respectful and productive conversation between rural and urban residents. That conversation has to come away from the idea that it’s a foregone conclusion that the urban sense will prevail simply as a result of numbers and political power.
Gee, Hoskins, I hope that you find that earthly place hidden from evil mankind, where you can flourish in a natural world. While you are there, you should do some reading about what it takes to farm today. Or take some classes in agriculture. The fertilzer argument in way too old, out of date. The farm chemical use things is also so out of date. To apply them in Oregon, you are in class every year, accumulating 18 hours of refresher and new data, products education, to renew your license. All farm chemical use is reported, annually, by computer, to the State. Only on computer. No paper allowed. You are required to have accdess to a computer to have a license to apply pesticides, or advise people on using them, or sell or warehouse them or fertilizers. And you evidently don’t buy them, either, or you would know how damned expensive they are. The chemistries have to be monitored so that you are not building resistances in the plants and animals needing control. The GMO, and Roundup Ready crops I am wary of because you will have to control those plants with other chemistries if they become a problem, and Monsanto is not going to be there to help you. Just another story, another problem.
All the farm regulation is urban in origin. The country is ruled by an urban majority. Even megaAg or megaPulp are urban based, far removed from the farm on a day to day basis. But, with 300 million mouths to feed here, and many others around the world, I guess that fending off starvation is not quite the problem it was when this was an agrarian society, trying to grow crops without scientific knowledge of how things really worked, trying to keep the wolf from the door literally and figuratively. It is a far cry from the yeoman installing air conditioning systems in the San Joaquin Valley in the homes of farm workers to the days of trying to grow rye while living in a dugout, gleaning coal spillage from the railroad tracks to keep warm in winter.
The one thing I want to point out in all this discussion about urban and rural in the New West is the human capital contribution of the rural folks. No matter what, you can depend on kids from the rural West to do the heavy lifting of our society, whether it be serving in the Armed Forces or winning a Nobel prize in Physics, playing Olympic or professional sports, heading universities or being the conscience of the Congress. Off those much maligned ranches and small towns have come some real dandy people. How can a place like Russell, Kansas, produce both Senator Dole and Senator Specter? The list of accomplished people from this sparsely populated part of the country is long, and it was the ranch life that produced them. Justice Sandra Day O’Conner came off a ranch. If only we could find more like her. So I find it rather odd, and out of place, to consider the Hoskins theory of ranch oligarchy in any real terms or sense. Tough, persevering people who could manage money, put out considerable work, and have time to educate themselves and their children for the benefit of all of us, cannot be cast aside because they control lots of real estate of low value in pretty places. They want what most of us want: green grass, some respect for their privacy, clean water, access to a good education, and good health. If they were in it solely for the money, it would be ranchettes and condo city across every valley. Oh, if that could be me with all that land, but alas, it is not, and I don’t begrudge those who have it one acre. That land comes to you from the lucky sperm club, from dint of hard work and great luck, from being stupid and stubborn, and finding yourself successful late in life. It is too bad so many are so jealous, so envious, that they want to take it all away, to remake it in their way. That, of course, is the tyranny of the urban majority, and it howls like a wolf, and sues like a NY personal injury lawyer.
I cannot add much to what Norman and bearbait have said, but Robert, I would like to point out that tobacco farming in the south during the 40s, 50s, and 60s is far, is as different as summer and winter from livestock ranching in the Rockies.
The other thing, no civilization has survived making recreation (playing) the most important goal they have. That would apply double to putting recreation over food production.
I think I have posted this photo before, I was trying to show the cow flops that have contributed to this dazzling display. The flowers are too thick, but they are light brown spots near the bottom of the photo. This has provided cattle grazing for over a hundred years and in fact the wooden poles are part of a loading chute.
http://www.pbase.com/mariond/image/81217272
Sun Tzu might have said: There is opportunity in the enemy’s ignorance, for he provisions his unfounded beliefs while starving reality. Therefore, the wise commander assists the enemy in provisioning his unfounded beliefs and starving reality.
And it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who had the insight to notice that “We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.”
Are you planning to re-enlist, Robert? ~ or just in training to become a Soldier of Fortune who travels around the world biting hands?
Ralph Waldo Emerson also reminded us that “Men are respectable only as they respect.”
You might want to practice up on that in your spare time.
Nobody reads Emerson any more.
Maybe THAT’S what ails ya, Robert!
Try it … you just might like it!
And ~ HEY! ~ there’s your golden opportunity to forestall your enemies from preying on your ignorance while you’re starving your reality check!!!
Ahhh, Robert, on this beautiful Easter day, did it never occur to you why there seems to be so many of us commoners that annoy you so much? Maybe those of us who use our land to feed you and millions like you really have a place in this world.
The world is made up of all kinds of people, you just have to live with that.
By the way the American Indians were not displaced by the agriculture folks as much as the city folk who had enough clout to get the government to break their word.
Don’t worry, Marion …
… this beautiful Easter IS a day of Love!
To paraphrase Bob Hope, a Robert Hoskins love scene is one where he lets the other guy live!
Robert —
There’s a fundamental incompatibility of conservation and agriculture? Being aware of and involved with several projects and individual farm owner conservation work, I’d have to say that I disagree with your assertion. Many of the most effective salmon recovery and other wildlife support projects are carried out on farms and ranches, often directly from the pockets of the farmers and ranchers who own the properties. Most of them do much of the work on their own, never asking for our thanks . . . and generally not getting any.
One local farmer I know spends between $15,000 and $20,000 out of his own pocket every year, sometimes more, to enhance habitat and provide refuge for many species of fish, birds, and terrestial animals. He has worked with the power company to prevent the electrocution of eagles perching on their poles, and has gotten the power company to put reflective spinners on their lines so the swans won’t collide with them any more. He has planted native tree species to shade a salmon stream that goes through his property, and works to remove reed canary grass from the stream and other areas of his property.
We are seeing a whole lot of collaborative conservation projects taking place on farmlands and ranches.
One of the bottom-line differences in this conversation is only rarely brought to the surface of the discussion. We are in the midst of a struggle between the Lockesian and Rousseauian forms of property rights. The Lockesian form is basically describable as the concept that a man’s home is his castle, so long as he does not step on his neighbors’ toes. In the Rousseauian form, the property right is inherent in the state, and individuals are granted permission to make use of defined portions of the state’s property right.
While that’s a simplistic description, that’s where the differences are rooted. You appear to be coming from the Rousseauian camp on these issues. Most rural landowners are firmly in the Lockesian camp. The property rights inherent in the Constitution of the United States of America is rooted in Locke’s philosophy, and is incorporated into the Bill of Rights and supported by the writings found in the Federalist Papers. Oh . . . and Rousseau is often honored as the father of modern socialism.
I’d note that the Rousseauian approach to property rights is dominant in urban areas . . . at least until a community is upzoned to make way for greater density, and/or building height restrictions are relaxed. At that point, a lot of urban community residents turn into Lockesians and do everything they can to prevent the upzoning . . . at least for the block they live on and those immediately adjacent.
My experience indicates that we are moving away from agriculture always “taking away from wildlife”. You may be tired of landowners’ palms being outstretched for doing something for the common good. There’s a reason why that happens. When the purveyor(s) of the “common good” demand that a landowner give up a portion of the use and enjoyment of his or her property, the Fifth Amendment indicates that the landowner is supposed to be compensated for the loss. Government has been pretty clever in coming up with ways to avoid delivering on that responsibility.
For rural landowners, it is a matter of rights . . . but these are people who have been increasingly ponying up to their ecosystem service opportunities and responsibilities. Urban residents are not doing as well in that department. For instance, rural landowners do a lot to provide time resources, and property for salmon recovery. Meanwhile, urban residents are dumping synthetic estrogen into the waterways the salmon depend upon for their very lives. That synthetic estrogen, in even very small amounts, and for very short exposure durations, turns out to be a highly effective contraceptive for salmon, too. Until urban residents pony up to pay for tertiary treatment of their effluent, and return the water to the upper watersheds, I will not believe that they are serious about salmon recovery.
I could, however, be easily persuaded that they are happy to take greater and greater control of the lives and opportunities for rural families, without accepting any real accountability for the havoc wrecked thereby.
Leaving Cheney, Bush and Rey out of this . . . and wondering why they were gratuitously tossed into this conversation, since they are not what we are talking about . . . I’m sorry that people like Rosemary, Marion, Bearbait, Dave Skinner, and now, no doubt, myself leave a toxic taste in your mouth. I certainly do not feel that you or the many folks who appear to hold the same range of beliefs as you express, are leaving a toxic taste in my mouth. While I may not be able to persuade you to modify your belief system, at least our conversation is out in front of a lot of people who may be influenced in one direction or another as a result. I call that progress.
All of those stockgrowers, woolgrowers, outfitters, miners and loggers, as well as the farmers you didn’t mention, in common with rural landowners as a whole, have been besieged by activist groups who claim to know better than the rural folks for several decades now. The successes of the largely urban-based NGOs and their lawyers have caused economic and social hardships in our rural areas that extend well beyond anything that could be construed to be reasonable . . . and they keep coming back for more.
I’m open to the discussion the original article’s author wishes to have taking place. I’m not so certain that one who believes that rural businesspeople and families are “selfish, greedy, entitled, and just plain mean” is ready to be at that table. If you wish to find community, you have to learn to be open to the idea that people may not be quite what you understand them to be today.
So . . . are you ready for that dialog . . . or not?
Norman
Dialogue begins with fact and respect for and understanding of fact. That’s reflected in my little parody of Sun Tzu above.
As yet, you’ve not acknowledged the truth of anything I’ve said, all of which I’ve experienced first hand or studied deeply; you’ve merely recounted the ideology that agriculture can do no wrong. You cite the exceptions that prove the rule that agriculture, like industry, which are essentially the same thing, as rural and urban are two sides of the same coin, is inherently destructive of land, water, and wildlife, which is demonstrated in no uncertain terms by our history and by what we see happening before our eyes now.
No dialogue there, is there?
Socrates believed that intelligence could be massaged from ignorance by dialogue. That was an ideal that killed him. Socrates’ experience turned Plato, as so many philosophers have done, to ideas rather than the facts of political and social life as the source of the good, beautiful, and true. That turn, which is essentially a religious turn, has earned him a place in the history books, but Athens and the other Greek city states still cut down all their forests for their ships and impoverished the peninsula through war (e.g., The Peloponesian War; Thucydides constantly talks of “laying waste to land” as part of Athenian military opertions), and western history turned toward the Romans.
So much for dialogue.
Aristotle was much better at fact and understanding human society than Plato, but for that reason he still had to flee to Philip’s court in Macedonia “lest Athens sin twice against philosophy.” How much of what he taught Alexander pushed Alexander to India in conquest?
Locke’s concept of property was profoundly influenced, as was Rousseau’s, by what appeared to be unlimited and unowned, and inherently valueless, natural resources in America. Locke’s labor theory of value of property assumed that natural resources had no value unless altered–exploited–by human labor and transformed into valuable goods and services. It was a nice justification, and consciously used as such, for the rape of a continent and slaughter of its inhabitants and theft of its “unlimited resources.”
People remember Locke for his emphasis upon individual freedom. But they don’t remember that his philosophy of freedom discounted what was happening to America’s native inhabitants, who were being enslaved or slaughtered and their lands, which they did in fact own, by the way. They just didn’t own it in a way that Europeans could understand.
Locke’s philosophy of individual human freedom was written in blood on the backs of America’s indigenous peoples.
What a nice way to create private property rights. And that is how property rights were created in America. And how they are still being created.
Not that Europeans cared about Native cultures, societies, property concepts, and political systems. What they understood was Christianity’s assertion that Indians were pagans and infidels to be converted and enslaved for the glory of God, or slaughtered, and their resources turned into wealth for individuals and of course the Crown. The Spaniards were especially good at slaughtering and enslaving, as we know from the Inquisition and the lives of the Conquistadors. Recent DNA investigations have shown that in lands under Spanish influence, Central and South America, the colonial Spaniards killed the men and married the women. The Conquerors’ right. Their descendant’s are still engaged in it, cutting down the forests of the Amazon for cows and crops and killing off what few indigenous peoples still survive, while contributing mightily to global ecological collapse.
Rousseau’s philosophy was more influenced by the fate of America’s native inhabitants, and so he reversed Hobbes’ concept that natural man was constantly in a state of war prior to the state, and came up with the idea of natural man in a state of peace prior to the state. He was not correct any more than Hobbes was. America’s native inhabitants were human beings, essentially no different–biologically at least–than European colonists. They had cultures, they had societies, they had governments. That didn’t prevent the colonists and their accompanying states from killing off Natives when they could and stealing their land, because agriculture was a higher and better use than what the Natives were using it for. Indeed, in colonists’ view, Natives weren’t using it for anything of value at all. They were no different from wild animals, and wildness was something to be tamed, controlled, and directed, as Cotton Mather often thundered from the pulpit. It was unoccupied land ripe for exploitation.
The same selfish, greedy, mean-spirited concept is at play as we see the continued theft and destruction of wildlife habitat in this country in the name of private property and wealth creation though development. The animals aren’t using it for anything worthwhile, so take it and turn it into corn, beef, and ethanol.
To get close to home, that is precisely what is happening with the bison of Montana, the elk of Wyoming, and the bighorn sheep of Idaho. Ranchers want what wild animals have, what they need to survive, and they’re simply taking it and killing as many animals as they can.
Such a fine concept of sharing the earth and community and stewardship.
Are you going to deny that this is happening at all scales? I hope not, because your credibility goes down to zero if you do.
If I have a concept of property in a western sense, it is based in the Roman public trust–the concept and practice of ensuring that natural resources that all of us rely upon are too important to leave in the hands of private individuals, or groups of individuals (oligarchies), who, without restraint, will exploit those resources until they are destroyed and all will suffer (The narratives in Jared Diamond’s Collapse comes to mind here as an example). My concept reflects what is now known as common property resources, a category of property that the classical and neo-classical economists mistakenly call refer to as “open access” resources, which led to the inept phrase “tragedy of the commons.”
The application of that phrase to common property is incorrect, reflecting the western bias that if it isn’t owned by individuals or the state, then it can’t be property. Generations of indigenous peoples around the world would disagree strongly, as they had rules of ownership and use for common property every bit as complex as western concepts of property. What they didn’t have was the military power to protect their property from conquest by “civilized” societies.
History is quite clear about this process of exploitation and imposition of private or state property schemes on land and resources of indigenous peoples and turning them to the use of colonial and imperialist governments In the Army, we used to call this Internal Defense and Development. It’s had a lot of names through the years. In the 19th century, it was called the “white man’s burden.”
Development. It’s accomplished a lot, hasn’t it?
In a sense then, my actual concept of property is indigenous and non-western, and non-civilized, and is utterly foreign to either rural or urban misunderstandings of how land and resources are to be used. It has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism in industrial or post-industrial societies, which in fact merely reflect nothing more than state capitalism, which is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Recent example: the subprime fiasco and the bailout of Bear Stearns. What an extraordinary waste of capital!
My concept of property, following indigenous concepts, is fundamentally ecological; ecology after all merely means nature’s economy. Nature’s economy relies not upon obstruction or hoarding of the flow of energy and net primary production into systems of “property” that attempt, metaphorically speaking but sometimes actually, to violate the second law of thermodynamics, but upon complex interacting systems of give and take, referred to as “life eats life,” or simply biodiversity. No biological entity, including man, is exempt from this process.
The purpose of civilization however is to exempt humans from this process, and rather than give and take in the great process of biodiversity, humans only take and destroy, giving nothing but pollution and waste, all in the name of human suzerainty for all we survey. What humans are doing is blocking the massive flow of energy through the natural systems of the earth.
Another word for this process is death.
This happens at the individual ranch or farm all the way up to the global ecosystem.
Agriculture started this process, and now, with its offspring industry, it is destroying this earth that is the home of all of us. This is historical as well as contempory fact.
Since you refuse to acknowledge these facts of history, and since you refuse to acknowledge that I have a valid point of view well-rooted in brute fact, from the tactical to the strategic scales of human existence, things that are recognizable by those not bound by the ideologies of agriculture and civilization, there can be and will be no dialogue.
After all, civilization, powered by agriculture and industry, not to mention authoritarian governments worldwide, including our own, is engaged in a great war upon the earth, which in the short term–measured in mere millennia–has been deleriously successful, from our limited point of view. But what is also clear, the Great Ecological Cliff is just ahead, and we may well reach it this century.
Dialogue? Hell. What I am thinking about is what happens after humanity goes over the cliff.
For a military man, Norman, you sure don’t know much about history.
Can you even understand what I’ve said? You show no evidence of the least understanding. You’re no different from Rosemary or the rest, merely more articulate and better read. I’ve heard and understood variations of your account time after time ever since I grew up. It’s the current paradign, in Kuhnian terms. Trouble is, your account reflects a paradigm that doesn’t account for what we see happening all around us when you take off the ideological blinkers.
It’s time to think differently, and act differently, if anyone is going to survive this century.
RH
Robert Hoskins: I agree with much of what you write. The reality is that we live in a world dominated by mythology. Criticisim is Un-American. Ideology rules the day. Facts mean nothing. Your comments are not radical as some of the responders would suggest but worthy of serious consideration.
And one of the grandest issues that confronts our civilization is the “zealous” belief that humanity can breed, consume and kill our way into an “earthly paradise”. And as radical as this may sound, humans are too pro human, we need to be pro life–meaning all life. All of these folks who claim to love the “Creator”, should as Wendell Berry wrote: “give equal love to the Creation”. And before someone accuses me of being a Lundite, I acknowledge that I enjoy & benefit from the “fruits of civilization” while questioning the “inflated costs”.
First of all robert and any others subscribing to his theory, if you truly believe that agriculture and conservation are not compatible, I suggest you go into the pristine land of your choice, withoout any agriculture product whatsoever and see which you would rather have, wilderness all to your self or food and clothing.
For the life of me, I cannot imagine where you got the idea that ranchers destroy the land, certainly it cannot be from first hand experience with land owners separate from yourself. It seems to be based on a form of racism almost, thinking that a certain class of people have to be bad, and no amount of info to the contrary will convince you otherwise.
You obviously have no idea how amny teepee rings, petroglphs, stage coast stations, etc have been protected on private land because recreationalists cannot get to them to deface them.
You talk a lot about seeing , and studying, but I see no acknowledgement that you have ever seen any of the things that ranchers do all of the time. Do you ever see the reservoirs that ranchers build to hold water for wildlife as well as livestock? Or do you think they jsut appear out of the clear blue sky? Surely you do not believe that recreationalists build them, they are among the missing when FS is looking for volunteers to help build trails or restore them to their own use.
My unle built a huge reservoir on his place with an island in the middle for nesting birds to keep them safe from coyotes and other predators, he kept it up and stocked with fish even as he got into his 90s. And you do what for the ecosystem?
Certainly provocative and well-read post, Robert.
Cant say that anything you wrote is historically incorrect. Come to think of it, I probably couldnt say it was incorrect even if it wasnt correct. I dont know history as well. I bet you dont know knowledge from beign in a field or in a tree farm everyday, either.
With a bachelors and a masters in environmental studies and a few decades of life with travel to various palces around this earth, aand a little knowledge gained form the land itself, I dont come to the same place regarding what matters: the future.
I happen to agree with the concepts, again concepts, that were origninally laid out in the article by Susan above.
Interestign to note that Robert did bring the discussions to the Cheney, Bush, Rey level. I believe this is where the departure from our ability to have constructive, reflective dialogue at the local level occurs. Also interestign is the comment that Norman made regarding the fact that farmers didtn kill off the indigenous cultures of this continent. Perhaps they did, only not as directly as perhaps we would think. There was a level of strategy and decision making that was directing the genocide, as with all genocides it would seem, that transcended the individuals doing the killing. A form of group think as it were.
It seems that this type of “someone else telling us what to do” is playing itself out in this discussion as well. I am not implying anything other that the CONCEPT of others telling others what is reality is the problem here.
And while we are throwing out old military phrases……..Divide and conquor is the ultimate winning strategy that those at the highest levels have been succesful using. Seems that we here in the “new” west have and continue to be looked upon as an opporuntity for additional exploitation based on our dividedness. Perhaps thats why any elected official gets wind of a collaborative group coming up with a mutually agreeable solution to a problem at the local level, they get on board, quick.
SO, the CONCEPT of people in a community creating a shared sense of reality (or place, or whatever you call it) may in fact be one of the most effectvie ways to undermine a top-down plan to head us off that cliff (however that cliff can only be characterized as the “sustainability” cliff which includes social and economic values as well).
When one thinks of “collaboration” with folks from the “other side” as a simple capitulation to the “enemy”, thats exactly what folks with high level aspirations to control your local place want. Look over here where all this fighting is going on why I quietly take control over here…….oh, and here’s another bone thrown in the melee to keep you busy fighting.
Many folks denouncing the process of “collaboration” lately either have no practical experience with it (or have had a bad experience with it, which DO happen…..like relationships) or cant even conceptualize a process where you walk out of the room and you, upon reflection, actually learned something you didnt know before……not from a book, but from someone who you didnt think knew anything. Perhaps they learned somethign from you too? If not this time, then perhaps next. It’s an infectious sense of optimism that things will be better next time you show up to talk. This also contributes to an ever-greater trust among community members so that when real problems occur that make our current quibbling over timber and wilderness seem petty, like no clean water, we are much better euipped to deal with them in a non-reactionary, send us into a tizzy-fighting each other-tail spin kind of way.
If this all sounds like naive idealism, then good, I am glad I am still naive and optimistic.
Now, lets talk about what we want this place to look like in the future, realizing that if we dont, it will probably look like whatever “conquistador” that shows up next wants it to look like.
Sounds a little like direct democracy doesnt it Robert? Its called coalition building, and it trumps top-down political fixes almost every time. Perhpas Wilderness advocated could learn a thing or two from this approach, doesnt seem likely after 25 years. NOT to get off on that waste of energy topic.
I would in particular like to hear a little bit about “subsidizing” (compensating more appropriate) private landowners for the public ecosystem services that they provide such as carbon sequestration services:
Quoting Norman: “If people who live in urban areas wish to have places where their vision of what rural landscapes should look like are actually be brought to fruition, then those urban folks should pony up and pay for the ecosystem services that will bring their dreams to reality. They should also develop and improve the urban zone ecosystem services that will take another step toward cleaning up our landscapes.”
Atatat
Well, someone I can talk to. However, you’d lose your bet; I’m actually a working naturalist and am in the field quite a bit–worked on a whitebark pine project this past summer, hope to continue with it this coming summer. We’re looking at pine beetle infestation of whitebark pine in the Greater Yellowstone. Too, I was in elk hunting camp in September and October wrangling horses, and I was of course in the field all fall. I would have had more time this winter in the field but I came down with human parvovirus in late October, of all things, which floored me for a month, and I still have lingering symptoms. That unfortunate situation has provided the opportunity (temptation?) to spend more time online that I normally would or should.
Regarding your questions and points, I would recommend as a beginning for discussion that your read my essay on Aldo Leopold, “Outstretched Palms,” which you can find on the New West website at
http://www.newwest.net/main/article/outstretched_palms_aldo_leopold_and_the_failure_of_economic_incentives_to_a/
I wrote this essay in 1999 and presented it at a conference of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Sand County Almanac. I got a lot of complementary comments on it, even though I’m not a working academic. In it I directly address the problem of economic incentives (subsidies? a term that landowners hate, so they use “incentives” instead) to private landowners for the “services” they provide. Much of the essay actually cascades through many of your points above. I would pay special attention to a couple of footnotes regarding Wyoming’s Private Land/Public Wildlife program, which had a number of theoretical and practical flaws–the primary flaw being, it was being pushed by wealthy ranchers (few of whom were born here, it is true, but they came out of big corporate money elsewhere) to establish private property rights in hunting licenses so they could sell private land trophy elk hunts on the open market for thousands of dollars apiece. The mantra repeated by PLPW supporters was the “need to provide economic incentives to landowners for wildlife habitat,” and they quoted Leopold constantly in support. That didn’t sound right, so I researched Leopold’s thoughts about economics, which no one had done before, and worked out what he was thinking about economics.
After you read the essay, you’ll perhaps understand why I do not support economic incentives to landowners for the “services” they provide. Indeed, I think the whole incentives argument is a sham. You probably won’t like it; Terry Anderson at PERC certainly didn’t, because I took away a propaganda point PERC liked to use that Aldo Leopold supported economic incentives to landowners. Actually, Leopold came up with the idea “of rewarding the landowner for services rendered” in the American Game Policy of 1930, but by the end of the decade he’d turned against it. My essay explains why. His experiences with private landowners helped drive him toward the Land Ethic, which is a little known aspect of Leopold’s biography.
Let me know when you’re finished reading the essay.
RH
MW
Forgive me for skipping you. I do not consider myself either a radical or a conservative; like “rural” and “urban,” these terms really don’t mean an awful lot, particulary as they are so misused these days. The ecological, political, social, economic, and cultural situation we find ourselves in at the beginning of the 21st century is so dire that the old political paradigms are worthless; they prevent us from perceiving what is there. I think we have to keep focused on the complexities of what our five senses tell us and what our sixth sense integrates into knowledge.
Mythology is a very complex term; for what most people use it for, as something untrue or false, I prefer to use “ideology,” which is a mythology that fails to adequately explain the world around us. Some current ideologies once had explanatory power as myths, now they are merely ideologies that explain nothing and obstruct the need to change how we perceive and think about the world. The ideology of private property rights, which has been one of the guiding mythologies of western civilization, especially here in North America, is such an ideology. It’s helped drive the development of North America; now we can see (if not blinded by the ideology) what great damage it has caused. We need to think of property in different way– in my view, in ways that are more in tune with what we’ve learned about ecological functioning and biodiversity. The ideology of private property won’t get us there.
RH
RH
Robert, are you actually saying that you believe we should not be allowed to own private property?????? Does that same feeling extend to your property? Are you jsut camping on public property instead of owning it?
You say you have traveled the world, why did you come back to this country where ownership of private property is important to our whole way of life?
Hi folks,
A comment violating our terms of service (reminder: http://www.newwest.net/plain/entry/terms_of_service/) has been removed from this thread.
We ask that you take a gander again at these parameters and keep this forum civil and respectful.
One of the VERY few ~ if not The ONLY ~ voice published on NewWest.net daring to discuss “the rest of the story” regarding land planning and land use can be found at:
http://www.newwest.net/main/article/and_now_a_few_words_fromthe_antiplanners/
As Susan suggests, “Each encounter with new perspectives leads to a clearer image of the total picture of sense of place and our role in it.”
I would suggest you take the time to read this article posted by Christian Probasco on 3-04-08.
You may or may not agree with a word of it but it will certainly offer you some of that “Food For Thought” not easily found elsewhere on NewWest.net.
Hopefully it will not be deleted before you have a chance to do so!
Courtney, I am sorry that you felt insulted by Rose May’s comments. We should all be alarmed when anyone decries our ability to own property in this great country as Mr. Hopkins does.
I reread her post since it is still in my inbox, and I still fail to see what is derogatory or bad. There is none of the filty language some use regularly on this page.
I realize that there seems to be somewhat of a culture battle going on between rural landowners and others, but surely you do not propose that property owners whould be left out of the debate, and the decisions made by others.
Hi all,
I’m going to ask this one more time. If you cannot refrain from personal attacks (detailed in our terms of service as grounds for comment removal or banning) your comments will be removed and you will be banned from the forum.
We provide this forum for the purpose of discussion, not for pointless tit-for-tat attacks against people with whom you disagree.
We err heavily on the side of leaving comment threads alone, the whole point is to give everyone an equal opportunity to have a say. But, we cannot allow these forums to become open fields for personal attacks. We will have no choice but to ban people — no matter what your opinions are — who can’t find a way to engage in civil discourse.
Hi Marion, I agree with Courtney’s statement of purpose for NewWest discussion.
That being said, I have no memory of NewWest ever stepping in to stop the vicious personal attacks against you for your opinions. You are like a fine Swiss watch with the sturdiness of a Timex. The insults just seem to break against your bezel while you keep on ticking.
I have noticed a sharp decline in conversation across the internet. That certainly is apparent here as well. Perhaps there are common reasons.
Hmmm, despite Susan’s hopeful examples, from what I’ve read above, the answer to her initial question appears to be a resounding “no.”
I should note that, as a truck driver, I am opposed to “buy local” campaigns. I would prefer that you “buy distant.”