Preserving Eden
Redefining Rural and Urban: A Community Discussion
By Susan Duncan, Guest Writer, 1-11-08
Near Sypes Canyon. Photo by David Nolt.
It’s the $64,000 question. The query everybody wants the answer to: “What can we do to keep this place the ‘Eden’ that it is?” Bob Ekey, Regional Director for the Northern Rockies of The Wilderness Society posed this question in an opinion piece in the December 22, 2007 issue of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
Ekey suggests four approaches: leadership by elected officials, leadership from institutions (media, education, public events), individual activism in community affairs and events, and community visioning about the future.
That’s okay as far as it goes, but I’d go much farther.
Leadership: Taxpayers have relied on elected officials, land trusts, and environmental groups to solve this problem for us. We have asked them to find “tools” to protect landscapes and they have tried. I have watched and participated in this process for nearly 20 years. This process has brought the issue to its present prominence. But “tools” can only take us so far and we have reached those limits.
Want to see a real leader on this issue? Look in the mirror. It is time for each one of us to step up to the plate and lead. Mr. Ekey points to “the values that attracted and hold us in the valley” and how much all of us would like to protect them. Can you identify what those values are for yourself? Can you talk to your friends, relatives, and people you don’t know (and those that may not agree with you) about what those values are? Can you tell your elected officials what they are?
Institutions: Institutions like the media, educational institutions, and community events and forums can offer opportunities to compare “notes” with others in the community to forge a common set of values we all can work to protect. I don’t think we have used our institutions as fully as we need to in order to bring about a sense of common ground. Too often, we have left that process up to the political arena in the form of contentious public hearings.
Determining shared values is a sifting and sorting process, sometimes chaotic, and not always without heated emotions. Individually, we won’t get everything we want. Individually, we will begin to see why our values (protected to the fullest) impinge on our neighbor’s values and we have to find some middle ground that we can all support.
Community Activism: Mr. Ekey seems to define community by city limits (Bozeman). I go much farther than that. In order to protect what we value, we need to define community as much larger area than by city limits, school districts, or donut areas.
Define community based on the interdependence between urban and rural. If you can’t think of any reason you need to look outside the boundaries of your own neighborhood, consider this: Urban folks need rural folks for employees in their businesses, retail shoppers, farmer’s market food, summer in-stream flows for fishing (West Gallatin farmers hold all the water rights), open space, wildlife habitat, and retention of country and Western heritage influences. Rural folks need urban resources for job opportunities (preferably with benefits), medical, legal, and accounting expertise, shopping, entertainment, marketing and transportation for farm products, and support for business infrastructure (seed, feed, parts, and equipment).
Urban and rural are in this together. We need each other to support our quality of life. Whatever happens, we both have to live with the results. Understanding our interdependence creates an atmosphere of mutual respect. Neither the urban or rural view has to win. We can define “progress” knowing that if “progress” undermines our interdependence, we both lose. In too many places, we have forgotten that and let one side “win” at the expense of the other.
The goal is to develop a Shared Sense of Place – something like a Code of the West. Newcomers soon learn that we think this place is “special”. We understand what values make this place special. We understand the climatic, social, economic, and political forces – both local and non-local – that affect this place and we stand ready to support and strengthen the networks among ourselves to protect what we collectively value.
In this light, community activism isn’t just local community service. It’s getting to know all your “neighbors” – urban, rural, and small town “neighbors”. Expose yourself to people who don’t agree with you (other than that they love this place as much as you do). Get to know what their lives are like, what they value. Listen and share your life and your values with them. Look for ways to connect. Live your life as if your values (and theirs) mattered. What can you do to support their values? What can they do to support yours?
How can this search for common values occur? Media, especially those that offer an opportunity for feedback, can be very helpful. Tours offer a first-hand look at what others in the valley are experiencing. Any event that tells participants about what is here and how this valley works in terms of resources and land uses is helpful.
Community visioning: For community visioning to be successful, you have to know how your community is hooked together to provide the things you value so much. You have to understand that we are all in this together. We all share the same environment. Progress is not about winners and losers. You have to know who all the “community members” are (urban, rural, plants, animals, water, energy, blue sky) and what roles they play. You have to know how the players interact to provide the things you value (open space, lights, game to hunt). And then, you can choose what to do to protect the things you value – how to protect your home.
More next time.
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.
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In the last 20 years, the progress has been slow because the people who want to save open space are not the ones who own the land they want to save. Therefore, open space advocates have to convince, bribe, cajole, or pass regulations to encourage landowners to make choices that please the open space advocates. No where did the open space advocates consult with the landowners first to determine how they viewed the situation or make any effort to include them in the dialogue. Consequently, they feel demands are being imposed on them without their consent. Predictably, you get a strong private property rights backlash.
For the most part, urban and rural have not been talking to each other. Each assumes that everybody thinks the way they do and everybody they know agrees with them. That's not so. That's why I agreed to write this series.
You can't solve a problem if you don't take iadapt to the factors that affect the problem.
What has been gained in the last 20 years? Farmers and ranchers have decided to consider putting land in conservation easements. Areas with significant public values (historical (Kelly Ranch, Gateway) riparian and wildlife habitat (Skinner Ranch, Belgrade),and wildland urban interface (Goering Ranch, Springhill) have been put under easement.
County Commissioner Skinner put a large acreage of important riparian and wildlife habitat on his ranch in a conservation easement. That opened the door for devout conservation easement foes like Ranger Dykema (Amsterdam) to go for a conservation easement, using the funds he received to buy more land so his sons could farm in the future. Skinner was in the right place at the right time with the right credentials and credibility to move this forward in the ag community.
In the early 1990's I attended a meeting with planners and ranchers at Dry Creek Church (north of Belgrade) where planners proposed incentives for clustered development away from riparian areas in developments on former farm ground in the county. The planners were nearly forcably evicted. Emotions were running very high. At that time the ranchers (many of whom I knew from running mail routes out of Belgrade) could not see the subdivisions looming on the horizon. Today they can see development headed their way. And they can and are working more directly and constructively with planners.
As a case in point, agricultural irrigation systems (ditches, headgates, and canal infrastructure) are being threatened by subdivision development. Realtors and developers can not tell the difference between a ditch (man made water conveyance device) and a natural stream. They did not know that irrigation ditches have maintenance easements on them that have to be respected. Last summer, the conservation district, the watershed council, the water quality district, and the irrigators got together and sponsored at tour for realtors and developers. I was one of the two tour guides. We took them up to the headgate for the West Gallatin Canal south of Gateway and showed them the extensive infrastructure that is 100 years old and told them that any projects they plan will have to overlay and fit it with the existing infrastructure of 39 small utility companies that control the water rights of the West Gallatin River. Out of this has come a request by realtors for better ways to find out about affected ditch companies. The planning department is also drafting regulations to require developers to put ditches on the plat and consult with agricultural water users before the final plat. This is HUGE progress.
In the mid 90's I sat on the Economic Development and the Agriculture and Environment Committees of a visioning effort called Gallatin Valley Tomorrow. It lasted a year. I seemed to be the only person from outside of Bozeman who attended and the only person with any farm background. So, like it or not, I became the voice and conscience of agriculture.
In the Economic Development Committee, the head of the Chamber of Commerce stood up and dismissed all discussion of economic development in the agricultural sector because "there are no high paying jobs there." I bugged them about it but they never did address agriculture as an industry to be considered at all. One lady said she just thought ag would always be there. Nobody had any conception that ag was holding the cards on open space and numerous other amenities that Bozemanites hold dear.
The Ag and Environment Committee was no better. There was quite of bit of representation from envrionmental groups but none but me from ag. Gallatin Valley Tomorrow finally made some effort to include some ag representation in the discussion at the very tail end of the process. Ag leaders claimed they were never informed of the effort and meeting times (starting at 6PM in Bozeman) were inconvenient when they were in the field until dark.
As you noted the forces pushing for unlimted urban sprawl are huge. But, also on the horizon, are equally strong forces that are pushing rural and urban to work together, namely the price of energy and global warming and its affects on global and local supply systems. Environmentalists are talking to ranchers Irrigators re talking to developers. Greater Yellowstone Coalition even donated $100 to fund the start up of the Association of Gallatin Agricultural Irrigators. When environmentalists work with ranchers (on predator and water issues, for example) they get a reality check on how their proposals work in real life.
The 1890 census showed that there was no longer a clear line between the settled part of the country and wilderness. Noted historian Fredrick Jackson Turner proclaimed the "closing of the frontier" in 1893. That had important implications for how American culture defined itself. Is the Jeffersonian vision of America as a nation of small farmers dead? We have reached a point in history where the line between urban and rural is no longer clear cut and we have to, once again, decide what it means for American culture. That's why I'm writing this, so we can figure it out together.
Trying to find consensus on which values, and how to best protect them is a messy, but necessary process. Its called zoning. In Montana, like everywhere else, like it or not, zoning is the most cost-effective regulatory tool available.
Neighborhoods/communities have choices to make. But they'd better make them soon or the only choice left will be urban.
Sure the consensus process is messy. We won't get everything we want. Balanced ecosystem advocates (environmentalists) want wolves in the ecosystem. Ranchers don't want any. Ranchers are going to have to live with wolves. Predator Project, Defenders of Wildlife and others tried to find ways to help ranchers live with wolves. They found that their proposals didn't always work as well as they thought they would. The key here is that both sides learned how to work with each other in productive ways and there are getting to be more and more examples of "strange bedfellows" that never worked or tried to understand each other before. That's why I have hope.
For instance--is there anybody who believes, once the Feds stop with wolf protections, that ranchers are not going to start again with bounties?
The county agent will not be paying the bounty this time around, of course; but he will know who is...
I am not interested in restoring the West to its indigenous, mountain man, or pioneer settler past. We can't do it anyway. But what traits or skills from that past are worth keeping into the 21st Century? The future has to be a blend of the old and the new. There are not "good guys" and "bad guys" here because we are all in this together. In the book, "The Bloodly Bozeman" a lady in the wagon train on the Bozeman Trail complained with distaste that there were people in the wagon train that did not observe the Sabbath and quite a few of them were "secess" (Secessionists, Montana became a territory in 1864 just at the end of the Civil War). And I have to point out - Lady, Guess who your neighbors are going to be when you get to your destination? We are all on this journey together. Even if you don't like the behavior of your compadres, the only person's behavior you can control is yours. Start there. Do you play fair all the time? Do you get your way all the time? Do you listen to what other people have to say or only listen to yourself?
The world around you reflects your choices. Are your choices concious? Even if you don't agree with me, thanks for responding anyway.
We agree on one thing, “I am not interested in restoring the West to its indigenous, mountain man, or pioneer settler past.” either. What I am saying is that everyone’s vision of Eden is different. Some people obviously thing that what we have now is “Eden”, and that is all right. Personally, I know what “Eden” is and I look forward to finding it again but it will not be here and that is all right.
As to what can be done... land will be developed, but apparently no one in Belgrade is taking notes on how to do it. There are competent commissioners in that town and getting new vision in that town needs to happen soon. Limited experiences create limited thinkers...
That was probably true when Montana joined the rest of the United States of America as a territory--and perhaps even when it became a state; but now it is necessary to somehow control everybody's behavior.
Otherwise we're going to keep pissing in the soup until it begins to taste like urine.
That is why we go to the polls so frequently--in the vain belief our votes will matter more than the corporations who're buying our legilators, our executives and our judiciary..!
Susan Duncan's latest article is posted.
You can read it here:
http://www.newwest.net/city/article/redefining_urban_and_rural_agriculture_loses_without_planning/C396/L396/
Thanks!