Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine
A few weeks ago I woke from a dream where I was in a tiny village in steep mountain terrain, talking with some folks outside a cottage on a dirt road. I noticed a gulch dropping off the roadside next to the cottage and stepped closer to peer over the edge… then jumped back. It dropped vertically out of sight into nothingness. A misstep would be fatal. End of dream.
The day before I’d driven through suburban Colorado Springs for the first time in years and was dismayed by the ocean of look-alike homes and shopping malls that replaced the farms, pastures, and grassland that was there not long ago. Thousands of residences served by look-alike chain stores selling mass-produced food, clothing, and stuff, with no sign of the faraway sources of the fuel, food, water, or materials that supply the system. There were none of the mountains of throw-away plastic containers, old appliances, tires, and vehicles that are the system’s end products, that we don’t want to think about. The suburban dream has come true: millions of homes separated by miles of pavement, all built on the brink of the consumption chasm.
Here in my own part-of-the-problem suburban home in Salida, I’m reading through the third draft of the County Comprehensive Plan, a 113-page guideline for changing the Land Use Code that could help avoid turning the Upper Arkansas Valley into another suburban sprawl on the brink of the consumption cliff. The existing code contains regulations that were made when we happily threw things away, things like plastic containers, synthetic clothes, or feedlot animals, or people in homeless camps. Now there is no more “away”. Our County Dump grows by dozens of truckloads every day, and the hills on the edge of Salida are dotted not only with dream homes, but with the litter of summertime homeless camps for discarded people. We live closer to the sources that supply suburban supermarket shelves, lumber for houses, water to spread on lawns, mines for the metal in cars.
The Comprehensive Plan will require concessions from separate interests with apparently conflicting needs and goals. Among them are agricultural producers, real estate developers, tourism business owners, and residents in town and county. Deciding which interests are best for the long-term quality of life in the Valley will be critical... and difficult. But I say “apparently conflicting” because these different interests actually have common needs.
For example, our high property values benefit developers and realtors and give ranchers a chance to monetize property they’ve managed at marginal profit for decades, and maybe replace a worn-out tractor or send a kid to college. At the same time, they force our workers to live in substandard housing or commute here from out of town. Subdivision is like a prescription opioid that suppresses a symptom for the short term, but creates nasty side-effects, with no plan for getting off the drug. Farmland keeps getting subdivided while workers keep struggling to find homes. The side effect is that every pasture taken out of irrigation decreases the water supply in the Valley, not through increased consumption, but because without crop roots in the soil, it loses its water-holding capacity and erodes in summer thunderstorms or blows away in dust clouds that don’t really attract a lot of tourists... or home buyers. Our soil ends up in the Pueblo Reservoir, steadily reducing the volume available for the farms that grow much of the produce we consume in Salida… and elsewhere in Central Colorado.
More people move here every month, but the land area doesn’t grow to meet demand, while the water supply decreases, not only due to development, but reduced rainfall and snowpack. Many newcomers want new homes in attractive rural settings, but very few know anything about the land they (we) enjoy hiking or biking through or are living on. It’s like handing over your checkbook and car keys to a fourteen-year-old: the end result is going to be expensive. In the last year, agricultural landowners incurred $75,000 in cut fences, eroded roads, and harassed livestock. Yet those fence-cutting tourists love their hamburgers, and every new home built on irrigated land invades someone else’s view and reduces everyone else’s water supply. Roads originally built to serve the ranchers now bring in tourists. It’s easy to be destructive if we’re disconnected from the source. The path away from the edge is reconnection: land to water; property values to productivity; health to food and land instead of pharmaceuticals and hospitals, well-being to community instead of possessions; tourists to respect for the land, and ranchers to tourist dollars.
The changes sweeping across the planet has casualties: one must be our practice of separating things that cannot survive without connection. Way back in high school biology class I had to dissect a frog. I separated the skeleton, muscles, and digestive tract, but didn’t learn anything about the frog’s diet and its role in controlling insect-borne diseases. In the end, I had a dead frog in front of me, in pieces. Separated parts don’t make a whole.
There are parts coming back together here. If you shop at Safeway after 7:00 pm, you’ll find some of the disconnected people, buying factory-made food, not looking happy and healthy and not connecting to other shoppers. In contrast, at the Winter Farmers Market on a Saturday morning, you’ll see people chatting with other shoppers and the vendors. You will see and smell livestock and delicious food cooking, but you will not see throwaway plastic shopping bags, nor smell disinfectant. Instead of fluorescent lights overhead, there is blue sky. Instead of partially- empty shelves of foodstuff from far-off places in glitzy plastic containers, there are cardboard boxes full of fresh produce. Instead of linoleum floors underfoot and steel shelves on either side, you will walk on dirt, with snow-capped mountains around you. Reconnecting health to food to water and land is one of the steps we can away from the edge. And it is pleasant.