Even though he is now a professor of planning and
landscape architecture at the University of California-Berkeley,
Timothy P. Duane manages to fold his childhood memories and love of
the “Range of Light” into this hefty and complex book about one of
the West’s rapidly developing mountain zones.
Like many Westerners with an attachment to a rural place, he is
critical of the “equity refugees’ bringing their large incomes,
trophy homes and un-rural attitudes with them to exurbia. But
mostly, this is a detailed, theoretically informed report on
development in the Sierra Nevada. His diagnosis is that the growth
machine and its economic driving forces, in collusion with the
American ambivalence about individual rights and community values,
will eventually overwhelm the carrying capacity of Sierran
ecology.
Duane makes no simple argument, and the
theory may come a bit too fast and furious for many readers. But
the book comes together in case studies, especially of the politics
of planning in Nevada County, Calif. This is a classic tragicomedy
of American land-use planning, in which the creators of a
comprehensive plan meant to control growth understated how much
growth they had built into the plan, and the growth machine won
again. As in an encounter with the Borg on TV’s “Star Trek” series,
resistance is futile, Duane finds, when it comes to growth. This is
especially true on the rapidly appreciating real estate of the New
West’s most charismatic landscapes.
But this
book does not wave a white flag. Duane wants us to resist, to seek
ecologically based development. He offers a bio-regional
prescription melding ecological analysis with renewed
community-scale politics. He wants political subdivisions redrawn
to natural boundaries, and he calls for planning that recognizes
ecological limits and the value of smaller-scale, collaborative
planning.
The prescription is a lot to hope for.
I take Duane’s analysis to support my conclusion about Western
geography: We ain’t seen nothing yet. A lot more development is
coming, and Duane’s analysis, while meant to show the absolute
necessity of land-use reform, also shows the improbability of such
reform.
Still, perhaps our love of Western
landscapes can steer the growth machine in a slightly different
direction, and we can thank Duane for using his own love of place
to point out the needed course
correction.
” Bill
Riebsame
Bill Riebsame is an
associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado,
Boulder.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Shaping the Sierra.
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