One of the great pleasures of wandering in the undeveloped woodland in our area is finding cellar holes, barn foundations, and all kinds of old fences, and imagining what a particular place might have looked like 150 or 200 years ago. Sometimes I can almost see the small house in the midst of cleared fields, a mix of peacefully grazing animals, a little schoolhouse at the crossroad.
I don’t know just why this reverie is so enjoyable, but perhaps one reason is that it forestalls a less pleasurable exercise of the imagination, namely, what will this same hillside be like 150 or 200 years in the future? Those prospects typically are not so rosy: a paved road, a huge house on the top of the hill, randomly scattered dwellings in between, and – if I’m in a gloomy mood – much worse.
It might seem cranky to dwell on a happy image of farm houses and fields covering the hills while dreading the prospect of it happening again, but I’m confident that working to keep this newly reforested land intact and undeveloped does not have to be antisocial.
The world has changed immeasurably since those cellar holes were dug. Back then, the forest threatened a farmer’s survival. And though it’s ingrained in us to look on those farming days with nostalgia, in reality it was a slash-and-burn era, carried out with little appreciation of ecological processes or the lives of native plants and animals.
Region-wide, much of the forest that grew back after farms were abandoned is now suburbia, and a smaller and smaller percentage is owned by timber companies. But the part that interests me the most is the in between: rural areas where people live, where forest products are important to the local economy, and where large blocks of forest remain intact.
In several towns near ours, just in the last 30 years, hillsides like the one behind our house have been subdivided into 25-acre lots, each one with a house in the middle – a perfect setting on which to build a re-enactment of the pastoral era, but a practice that, if it continues, will leave the landscape with no big forests and be as ruinous to the ecological integrity of the land as the farms of old.
Typically, after the damage is already done, the carved-up towns institute zoning and strict controls on growth, the kinds of constraints that frequently turn neighbors against one another. Voluntary conservation easements do prevent development, but when landowners acting alone put large parcels off-limits for growth, it can seem antisocial and does not always help the community as a whole. Further, if the land conserved is in a place that’s most appropriate for development, well-intentioned conservation ends up contributing to sprawl.
It’s now understood that housing and conservation are inextricably linked. But this has only happened recently. When the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board was established and funded by an act of the Vermont legislature in 1987, I was baffled, and I know I was not alone in this. So, which is it – housing or conservation? Sure, I was in favor of both, but like many people, I thought they were antithetical goals that needed to be fought over and then balanced. I pictured the advocates for each leaving the negotiating table wearing false smiles and heading home to lick their wounds.
Now I think that the people who thought up this idea 20 years ago and then brought it to fruition were brilliant. When housing advocates and land conservationists work together and with the whole community, collaboration can replace conflict. “Smart Growth” now is a term heard nationwide in urban and suburban places, and it encompasses many new ways of envisioning the future.
Will people in small rural towns, where open land now is plentiful, look at the towns carved into 25-acre lots and do something to keep that from happening to them? What will it take to make a house in the village or in an already populated valley as appealing as that veritable kingdom high on a hillside?
Those of us who wish to maintain large stretches of forestland and also want people to be able to live in pleasant, affordable houses will need to work to show that the future will be brighter for everyone if these goals are not treated as though they compete with one another. Open land and desirable housing, considered together, can strengthen rural communities.