Dear HCN,
As retirees and
industries flock to the West, many fear the loss of the region’s
open spaces and wildlife habitat.
Officials from
extractive industries such as farming, ranching and timber
capitalize on this fear, warning that if environmentalists and
others who are demanding an end to subsidies are successful,
subdivisions will proliferate as farmers, ranchers and timber
companies sell out.
It’s an effective threat.
Many conservation groups now wonder if an overgrazed meadow or a
clearcut hillside is preferable to a row of houses or recreational
cabins. Some have taken this to the extreme and now see the
extractive industries as the last holdout against creeping
urbanization.
All these organizations accept the
premise that it is better to reform than eliminate environmentally
destructive practices. The result, we are told, is a “win-win”
situation. Ranchers, farmers and loggers get to keep their jobs,
society gets their products and open space and wildlife habitat are
maintained.
Unfortunately, they are wrong. The
extractive industries have been in place so long we accept them as
part of the landscape. But they are far more destructive, if for no
other reason than the vast acreages they
influence.
Livestock production (including
irrigated hay production and pastures) degrades a significant
proportion of the West’s native biodiversity and ecosystems.
According to the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, some 410 million
acres of both public and private rangelands in the West are in
unsatisfactory condition or ecologically degraded. This equals 21
percent of the United States outside Alaska.
By
comparison, subdivisions affect a tiny percentage of the landscape.
For example, urbanization, including all highways, affects 3
million acres, or about 2 percent of the total land area in Idaho,
Oregon and Washington. In contrast, croplands affect 18.6 million
acres, or 12 percent of the total land. This figure does not
include the 6.8 million acres of irrigated cropland, the 4.6
million used for pasture, the 21 million acres of private
rangelands nor the 30.4 million acres of public rangelands. All
told, agriculture affects 62.8 million acres, or 40.3 percent of
the land in the region.
Industry is also far more
damaging to the environment than housing tracts. Croplands, for
instance, are biological deserts. They are typically planted to one
species, sprayed with fertilizers and pesticides and annually
plowed up. Wheatfields that cover millions of acres in Montana,
eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and elsewhere destroy
functioning ecosystems to a far greater extent than subdivisions.
In fact, a housing tract built on a wheatfield creates more habitat
diversity than the farm crop it replaced.
In
Montana, the blame for the decline of endangered or threatened
species can be laid squarely on the shoulders of industry, not
urban development. These species include grizzly bear, Arctic
grayling, Columbia sharptail grouse, wolf, bison, black-footed
ferret, and swift fox, to name a few. If the only land use in
Montana were for urban dwellings and summer cabins, most of the
state would be as wild and full of wildlife as
Alaska.
In the long run, the best way to prevent
subdivisions is to prevent population growth. Beyond that, we need
to work with conservation easements, outright fee purchase of
lands, strong zoning and other permanent methods of keeping land
development from inappropriate locations. New subsidies, like tax
breaks or cash payments, will only delay the day of reckoning,
ultimately driving up the eventual cost of acquisition or
conservation easements.
Subdivisions are not
necessarily more desirable than farming, ranching or logging.
Poorly designed and located, they increase congestion, destroy some
wildlife habitat and reduce the sense of open space. But let’s not
kid ourselves. For every acre of land paved over or covered up with
a housing tract, there are 10,000 acres being plowed up, cut up or
pounded to death under the hooves of
livestock.
George
Wuerthner
Livingston,
Montana
George Wuerthner is an
environmentalist, photographer and
writer.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Condos, not cows.
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