Dear HCN,
I appreciated George
Sibley’s essay, “How I lost my town” (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my
town), and I can certainly empathize with his
loss.
In 1981, I spent a month near Crested Butte
as a student on an environmental policy field course. Locals were
celebrating AMAX’s cancellation of the proposed Mount Emmons
molybdenum mine, the town planner spoke passionately to us about
efforts to preserve the funky character of this cool “slum” town,
where home-made mountain bikes * clunkers * were the hip mode of
transport.
Four years ago, I returned to a much
wealthier-looking (and sprawling) Crested Butte. My host at a
well-known local inn talked incessantly with his friends – all of
them residents since the kick-out-AMAX days – about real estate
portfolios, rental income, property management rates and consistent
double-digit returns on their investments. None seemed concerned in
the least about recent news that AMAX might revive their mine
proposal. The passionate town planner had long since emigrated to
Park City, Utah, and most of the mountain bikes (mostly $2,000,
full-suspension models) rode around atop shiny new SUVs. The
hippies, as Sibley wrote, had indeed become real estate
hipsters.
I’ve watched a similar story unfold in
each of the mountain towns and regions I’ve lived in over the last
20 years: Steamboat Springs and Breckenridge, Colo., Truckee,
Calif. I fled to the supposed hinterlands of Driggs, Idaho, a few
years back, but sure enough, now I’m getting that Groundhog Day,
dej`a vu feeling all over again.
Yes, I’m part of
the problem. We newcomers bring capitalist tendencies (I got my
piece of dirt while I could) and a desire for “just a few more”
amenities, even as we profess an alternative, green ethic. Then
again, many old-timers up here in Teton Valley bemoan the loss of
rural values (values apparently incompatible with government
regulation of any kind) while subdividing and peddling the family
spread to the highest bidder.
As long as we allow
community and environmental values to take a back seat to market
forces, that special mountain town “sense of place” will continue
to devolve into a something like the generic feeling found across
the country and much of the planet: a high-altitude version of
McWorld.
Rob
Marin
Driggs, Idaho
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Those darn capitalist tendencies.
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