Dear HCN,
I used to live in the
subdivision below Susan Ewing’s in Montana’s Gallatin Valley (HCN,
5/10/99). As a geologist with experience in groundwater consulting,
I became involved in our neighborhood’s concerns about the impacts
on our wells of yet another proposed subdivision in the area. While
Montana’s intermontane valleys host abundant groundwater supplies
in alluvial aquifers, the benchlands have very limited groundwater.
Also, steep gradients and coarse rock and gravel on these benches
make poor soil for septic tank drain fields. Studies indicated that
in 1993 some wells were already contaminated by nitrates above EPA
drinking water standards. Nitrates come from lawn fertilizer, which
few homeowners used on their native grasses, manure as from
feedlots, of which there were none in the area, or from human
sewage.
We on the lower bench were drinking our
uphill neighbors’ toilet water. Another 100 septic tanks looked
like a prescription for a serious public health problem, or
considerable expense to the existing homeowners to redrill their
wells (at the going rate of $20/foot) or add vigorous testing and
treatment devices to their water
supplies.
Incongruously, these benchland
subdivisions overlook the municipal sewage treatment plant, lying
closer to it than homes in Bozeman that pay for this service.
Septic systems were never meant to be congregated by the hundreds
on alluvial soils. Just as our attitudes about open sewers have
changed from indifference to disgust, it is my hope that we will
come to realize that congregations of septic tanks are equally
repulsive and unacceptable.
I suppose one could
argue, as Dan Flores has in your “beautiful ranchette” issue, that
we shouldn’t be trying to “freeze” rural open space anyway, because
that space was created by “an agrocapitalist pattern of land
consolidation,” and that this consolidation “subverted the original
democratic hopes for the Mountain West.”
Maybe
there are ungodly corporate farms and ranches threatening our
democracy in the Bitterroot Valley, but I haven’t seen them in the
Gallatin Valley. The folks I know who farm and ranch are
hard-working people raising our food and trying to keep their land
long enough for their children and grandchildren to grow up.
Corporate ranching may or may not be what we want, but to justify
fouling aquifers and disrupting wildlife by implying ranchetteering
is the more democratic lifestyle is offensive. I doubt ranchetteers
love democracy more than the rest of us.
Mr.
Flores is right in one respect; we’ve always thought everyone else
was spoiling Montana. I’m from Montana. My family has lived in
Gallatin County for over 100 years. If anyone deserves a ranchette,
it’s me, I reminded my husband as we flew over subdivisions west of
Kalispell on a trip to see family in the Flathead Valley. Like Ms.
Ewing, I feel a strong connection to the land and I want to live a
rural lifestyle. My husband said, “I think there are too many
people sprawling out and ruining the valley and I don’t want to be
a part of that.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but
he’s right. A person either talks about their convictions or they
live them. My sympathies lie with Ms. Ewing, Mr. Flores, myself and
all the others who long to live close to the natural world. But no
justification can make up for the fact that rural subdivisions are
hard on the land and if you buy one you are perpetuating the
problem, no matter how good a person you may be or how simply you
live.
I don’t know what the answers may be, but I
know managed growth is working here in Oregon. I can pick
vegetables for my dinner at any one of numerous produce farms
within minutes of leaving my house. Portland’s urban growth
boundary prohibits uncontrolled development of farm and forest
land, while allowing for the growth of over 400,000 people in the
next two decades. We in the West need to cultivate the mind-set and
the political will to institute growth and land-management measures
for the benefit of all. Because the problem isn’t too many people,
as Ms. Ewing claims, but too few people putting the good of the
land and community ahead of their personal
desires.
Shelly
Whitman
Hillsboro, Oregon
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Toilet water and other woes.
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