Ranchers, Environmentalists Fight Sprawl In The West - Newsweak

[hatrack]

Oct. 18 issue - "From his ranch outside Helena, Jim McMaster has a sobering view of Montana's future: mile after mile of huge new trophy homes that stop only where his fence begins. For years real-estate developers tried to lure McMaster into selling the property his grandfather homesteaded in 1875, some 5,600 acres of rolling grassland, teeming with elk and antelope, that overlooks a stretch of the Missouri River Valley once traveled by Lewis and Clark. "They wait for you on the road, they call, they hand you fliers to give 'em a call and get rich quick," says McMaster, a burly 79-year-old who works the range in well-worn overalls. "But I wasn't interested in seeing this land parceled off." Without heirs, McMaster was running out of time to find a buyer who would respect his wishes. Then he met an unlikely partner in Gates Watson, a 30-year-old environmentalist with the Conservation Fund, a Virginia-based nonprofit group. Last July McMaster sold the ranch to the fund for a fraction of its $6.2 million value. "I wanted to live long enough to get it into good hands," he says.

As subdivisions devour the last open spaces of the American West, cowboys and "tree huggers," once bitter antagonists, are joining forces to save endangered landscapes like McMaster's ranch from development. The improbable allies face formidable market pressures. Population in the seven Rocky Mountain states has surged 47 percent in the past two decades. Over the last five years, more than 15 million acres of rangeland has been converted from grazing to other uses, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. An additional 25 million acres of ranchland in the Rocky Mountain West is at risk of being developed for housing by 2020, according to the American Farmland Trust (AFT), an advocacy group. The three- to five-acre "ranchettes" creeping out from the edges of virtually every Western city may seem like state parks to the average East Coast suburbanite. But development foes say the web of roads, lawns, power lines and shopping centers serving these new settlements has fragment-ed landscapes vital to wildlife and drained fragile waterways. "We're on the verge of losing the very qualities that people move to the West to find," says Ralph Grossi, president of the AFT.

With newcomers stampeding westward, land prices are soaring. "I've seen properties that sold for $65,000 two generations ago now valued at $5 million," says Rock Ringling of the Montana Land Reliance (motto: "Cows, not condos"), which brokers conservation deals. The pressure on aging ranchers to sell is often compounded by family matters—children and grandchildren who don't want to stay on the land, or can no longer do so profitably. Faced with huge estate taxes, many believe they have to sell to the highest bidder.

For some ranchers, however, preservation is more important than profit, and the conservationists are a palatable alternative to the developers. Often, instead of buying land outright, the groups pay ranchers for conservation easements—restrictions on a deed that bar future owners from developing the land. The practice is gaining acceptance in even the most traditional Western communities, where folks look unkindly on any infringement of their property rights. "When I sold my first easement, I lost some close friends who screamed at me, 'You've gone over to the Greens'," says Karl Rappold, a chisel-jawed fourth-generation rancher who four years ago sold development rights to his family's land along the Rocky Mountain front to the Nature Conservancy. "Now some of the same people are coming to me and saying, 'We need a deal to protect our ranch'."

EDIT

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6214024/site/newsweek/

[davidinalameda]

1. I read that article last night

anything that saves the land from condos and helps bring back the land is welcome in my book

[cprise]

2. MSNBC is true to form

If you want to get to the whole point of this bit of MSNBC article just read the last paragraph:

""The new enviro-capitalists are a different breed from the finger-wagging scolds who used to rely on legislation and litigation to battle ranchers, whom they blamed for overgrazing and water pollution. "We don't do this because we're tree huggers," says Ringling. "We are producing a product, and that is open space." Alex Diekmann of the Trust for Public Land, a nationwide conservation group, holds an M.B.A. and worked on Wall Street before moving into commercial real estate." Now he buys conservation easements outside Bozeman. "I'm still in real estate," he says. "But it feels a lot better to buy land for the purpose of not building on it."""

A little heavy-handed with the propaganda, comrades. It's almost hysterical.

Open space as a commercial product doesn't sound 'public' to me. Above is everything MSNBC wants in an 'enviro' to help them assuage their conscience: capitalist MBAs from wallstreet who buy up land before it falls into government hands. The examples they hold up here are very narrow and not really representative. What the article doesn't mention is that groups like TPL often cooperate with government efforts and also donate purchased land to the park system.

[hatrack]

3. "No one sues anymore - that's SO 20th Century!"

Heaven knows the government doesn't enforce anymore, so I suppose MSRNC's trying to paint the happy portrait of concensus and cooperation. Reminds me of the Nature Conservancy assiduously kissing corporate butt in pretty much every issue of their magazine - whatever it takes to keep the dollars flowing.

What they're really doing in this article is avoiding the matter at hand - the fact that things are so fucked up, and energy/housing development are moving so quickly in western states that the remaining ranchers are trying to link up with environmental groups out of sheer desperation.

Aldo Leopold, John Muir, David Brower, John Wesley Powell - "finger-wagging scolds" one and all, it would seem.

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4. It's PEOPLE who don't sue anymore-- but corporations

...do more than their fair share of suing each other and everyone else.

IMO the 'over-entitlement' attitude problem rests mostly with private corporations.


"What they're really doing in this article is avoiding the matter at hand..."

That's what I thought too. And also that it seems rather NIMBY-ish on the part of the ranchers. Over-grazing and erosion is a problem there, but at least the locals get to keep their view.

[phantom power]

5. Where did we go wrong?

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine a few months ago, and it became clear to me that he also had this mental image of what environmentalists are all about. We're tree huggers. We're scolds. We wake up in the morning thinking about ways to make normal people miserable, and stunt America's righteous economic growth under a mountain of evil gratutious lawsuits.

I tried to explain to him that, if this ever was true, it was an image that's 30 years out of date.

I, for one, am interested in pragmatic things like whether or not I'll be able to feed my family 20 years from now, and whether or not any of our precious economy will survive the ravages of climate change, or the advent of peak oil, or world-wide resource wars, etc.

Even after I tried to explain all of this, I could tell I hadn't made an impression.

In the memetic ecology, we're getting creamed. Where did we go wrong?

[phantom power]

6. OK, and there is a sort of ethical and aesthetic component

Do we have to take *everything*? All the land? All the resources? Squeeze *every* other kind of life out of existence? When do we draw the line in the sand and say "We've taken enough"?

It's obvious that there is no such line for many people. Independent of my pragmatism, I want to fight for that line.

[cprise]

12. Kyoto is drawing a line

...although that line doesn't (yet) extend all the way across. So is the national park system. They are a start.

How is this for drawing a line:

* Towns should not allow the segregation of residents away from most goods and services: I can use my legs instead of a car for my needs.

* No part of a city district should be more than a 10 min walk away from the most remote part: Residents can get to virtually all daily needs on foot. Conveniently.

* No district can be deprived of a substantial subway service or equivalent transportation.

* Local business has the right to convert ground-level residences into shops: When they discover a new local need, let them satisfy it.

* Residential disctricts must average 3-4 floors/units: The above measures aren't effective without a minimum population density. Waste in heating/cooling is also minimized.

* Avg street width matters as much to sprawl as street length. Avg width must be 25 ft or less: Also important for a sustainable population sensity. In order for larger streets to exist, some will be too narrow for cars.

The above is a "carfree" formula of sorts that would, among other things, drive back sprawl and greatly reduce energy dependence and GHG emissions. It hits all of our major energy factors: heating, cooling and transportation. Unnaturally restrictive and strange? Well many of the best cities are pre-car ones, and they meet most of the above criteria. When people talk about a "great walking city" they are usually referring to a place that's old, human-scale, intimate and has great shopping. Venice, Italy instead of L.A.

http://www.carfree.com/district.html


Getting back to the article, I fear the sentiment of this article gives people the impression these ranch-owners are representative of good environmentalism, and that it leads people toward an idea that an "ownership society" of privatized open spaces is the way to save the environment. I know Bush and Cheney think so, and I am certain fantasies of owning Yellowstone natl park dance in the imaginations of Disney's highest executives.

[phantom power]

14. The US isn't backing Kyoto. And the national parks are under siege.

I like your ideas about re-inventing urgan neighborhoods. But I'm at a loss regarding how to make such things happen.

Legislating such changes is likely to be difficult. However, I think that one legislative change that *would* be effective would be to completely re-think the current zoning standards. One reason we have suburbs separated from businesses is the current practice of creating large areas zoned purely residential, separated from large areas zoned for business.

Cities could change that, and allow for smaller busineses to co-exist in residential neighborhoods. I expect that if it is *allowed*, then the economic pressures of increasing transporation costs would influence communities to change in that direction.

[hatrack]

7. Simple - environmentalism isn't shiny enough

It's easy to distract homo sapiens with shiny objects - gleaming cars, sparkling multi-headed shower fixtures, oiled supermodel butts, glittering hotels, flashing chrome-plated slot machines.

It's hard to distract homo sapiens with other, less shiny objects. Pretty photographs of mountain ranges and stunning sunsets are nice but look too much like doctor's office art. Bears and wolves are cute and fuzzy, but vaguely menacing in an old-fashioned predatory sort of way, and way too furry to be shiny.

Most of all, graphs showing topsoil loss, temperature trends, atmospheric ghg content, species extinction rates and so forth don't have nearly the snap and pizazz and shininess of the bright blue and red lines on the stock market programs on the tee-vee. Though "webs of life" and "geologic time" can hold one's interest for a little while, they have little shine and even less short term payoff.

They can't hold a candle to the glowing blue and red lines on CNBC every day that will give you money and unlock the door to the Kingdom Of Shiny Objects.

[phantom power]

8. When it's all gone,

I hope there will still be well-oiled supermodel butts.

[hatrack]

9. They may well be the foundation upon which all shiny objects rest

The Ur-shiny, as it were . . . huhhuhhuhhuhhhuhhuh (insert your choice of Bush or Beavis here).

[cprise]

10. We let commercial interests monopolize US information and self-image

Everything gets filtered through that now tiny yet ubiquitous club called "the media".

Business people, you see, "get things done" and its so sad when they're misunderstood (being belligerant and litigious).

But... Citizen groups, average people, the non-private-sector have "agendas" and "ideology" and are automatically suspect. They "have a problem" when they push an issue because it proves the don't want to be liked. And when they're not getting in the way of big business they're B.O.R.I.N.G. Queue the shark attacks and "swiftboat veterans".

That's a bit of the M.O. and instincts we're up against. They also tricked the nation into thinking (or at least feeling) that since private corporations are mostly traded in "public", that the public ultimately sets the course of big business through investment; their stock value is proof of public approval. How democratic... not. The great preponderance of wealth in the US rests in the hands of a rather small class of well-off investors, so that end of the system is anti-democratic and qualifies as a really bad plutocracy.

Memetic ecology is a very interesting concept! But ours is missing a very important species from its news biome: independant public broadcasters that are disconnected from commercial and political coercion. Like the BBC, they are not perfect but their very presence and populist slant change the news culture they operate in; they do not portray the public interest as something alien and misguided; they are less sensationalist and provide a stark contrast when the far right or far left get too loony. (Imagine if 30% of our broadcasting was like this! Here it is 0%, because PBS is merely a charity that is whipped by its political and commercial benefactors.)


"Even after I tried to explain all of this, I could tell I hadn't made an impression."

Our ideas and terms of debate about public/private life are being co-opted and demonized, where they haven't been completely erased. Even something like 'citizen' or 'civics' is something unfamiliar to the average, um, consumer. When we use 'citizen' at all in discussion, it is to describe someone as a foreigner (ex: a French citizen) but we do not apply it to ourselves as individuals anymore. The conceptual tools for average Americans to even think about this stuff are disappearing. Environmentalists cannot be trusted in such a world unless their first priority is providing gratification to consumers and ranch owners, and because we must assume that everything comes down to personal self-interest enviros operating in the public sphere can't be leveling with us or be portrayed sympathetically.

[hatrack]

11. If it involves making money, it has purpose and legitimacy . . .

It doesn't matter if it's drug running, kiddie porn or human organ trafficking, it's part of the marketplace and therefore understandable. It may be depraved, exploitative or disgusting, but if money changes hands, it's understandable, and therefore legitimate.

If it's about any other values, it is incomprehensible, and thence suspect, since money now serves as the measure of everything. Conversely, values unattached to money are unmeasurable, hence invalid.

[cprise]

13. I do not think liberalism alone will help

It is too open and can be dragged all over the map. It certainly hasn't defended democratic structures and process, nor held up public enterprise and collectivism as essential vehicles for responsible prosperity. It has nothing to say about the environment (although its reverence for science does help) and it turns into neo-liberalism when no one is looking.

I've recently come to the conclusion that only a substantial socialist presence on the political scene can shore-up and defend leftist ideals and policy (and make it safe for all the more moderate leftists in between). I believe in elected government that must shape and direct parts of the economy, although I don't believe in a "planned economy". But the former cannot last unless there are people with a tradition of creatively supporting the latter. Countries with prominent socialist movements to balance capitalism are the ones that are simultaneously at the fore of environmental protection (regulating industry to that end) AND have the highest standards of living; It is no coincidence.