Dear HCN,
Dan Flores’ essay on
ranchettes in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley interested me, since I am
a fellow Bitterrooter who makes a living working for the very
ranchetteers he discussed (HCN, 5/10/99). I do tree planting,
ecological restoration and native landscaping for them, and so I’ve
done much brainstorming on what makes a “good ranchette.”
Dan is right that the Bitterroot Valley still
has a relatively small population for its size, with approximately
one person for every two acres (an interesting statistic when
talking about subdivisions). We drift and pool in the bottomlands
like the ever-increasing smog in the wintertime, amorphous and yet
with our secret, singular intents. We bump into each other and
exchange the names of mutual friends – a functioning community, in
other words.
I’ve only lived in western Montana
for 20 years or so, but all of us who’ve been here that long or
longer can remember a time when land here was being subdivided and
sold to people who were homesteading those parcels much as Dan says
he’s doing. They were building modest houses, often earth-bermed,
putting in a garden and a root cellar, composting food waste,
“getting off the grid” with solar panels or kerosene lamps, putting
up an outhouse out back and calling it home-sweet-home for
$10,000.
The term “ranchette” was something you
occasionally came across in real estate pamphlets; it gave you a
queasy feeling of foreboding but did not apply. That was when land
was going for anywhere between $500 and $1,500 per acre, and
oftentimes it was economic necessity that drove decisions in favor
of outhouses over drain or leach fields. Bitterroot wages have
always been low, and that hasn’t changed.
The
current reality is the 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot home, built
smack-dab on the most prominent ridge on parcels that cost as much
as gold mines used to, owned by folks not even vaguely interested
in reading by kerosene lamp. “Ranchette” not only applies but is
now virtually synonymous with “subdivision” as
well.
I do agree that the human equation is a
legitimate ecological concern. But while the land speaks to me all
the time, it’s getting harder and harder to hear through the
cacophony of incessantly barking dogs, and if the human equation in
nature is going to be truly honored, it is going to be done by
something called “planning,” which is anathema to “ranchette”
developers. In this unsustainable atmosphere of sacred
private-property rights, the only planning tool we currently have
in Ravalli County is the septic permit. The homesteader with the
outhouse is being priced out by the same forces that are giving the
fish in the Bitterroot River sorer and sorer lips from being caught
and released, used and abused, too many
times.
The crux of the subdivision issue to me,
as a restorationist and as a human animal deeply rooted in American
individualism, is the very idea of Jeffersonian democracy that Dan
evokes in defense of the ranchette. But I think Jefferson was
envisioning a population of small landowners who were planning to
stay on the land, to live and learn with it, and to pass it on to
their kids.
Jefferson couldn’t have foreseen the
degree of mobility we now enjoy, and which I believe is our biggest
obstacle for groundedness to the land today. It’s the kind of thing
I focus on, because I see so much of it: the many well-intentioned
people who try to restore the ecology of their postage-stamp
parcels of land and then move on, only to have their efforts
subverted by the new owner who has a very different set of
priorities.
That’s why, from a strictly
restorationist’s point of view, it is always preferable to deal
with one large landowner rather than lots of little ones, even if
that land has been hammered by cows. A hammered sagebrush habitat
is, sadly, better than a patchwork of lawns irrigated by
300-foot-deep wells. And from a human point of view, the
incessantly barking dogs are at least a few acres further
away.
So I think Dan dismisses too quickly the
“real Californians’ who don’t end up staying: They are the essence
of this particular land-use issue. We are all stereotypical
Californians if we leave our little parcels to the forces of the
“free market,” which are always corrosive to environmental
integrity. Ranchettes aren’t going away anytime soon, and we need
to come to sustainable terms with them. But the only way I can see
to be a good ranchetteer in these interesting times is to connect
to your little piece of land for good, either by staying with it
for the long haul (which a lot of ranchers are still trying to do,
by the way) or by placing environmental covenants on it and then
hooking it to an organization, such as the Bitterroot Land Trust,
that can enforce restrictions when inevitable attempts at
circumventing them occur down the road when you’re long
gone.
This forfeits some of your perceived
Jeffersonian ideals of “doing what you damn well please” with your
own land, but unless you’re willing to give something substantial
of yourself to the land, then in the long run, 25 acres is way too
small a parcel to preserve any wildness at
all.
Bill
LaCroix
Hamilton,
Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Stand in the place where you live.
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