Dear HCN,
If Susan Ewing’s soul is
at rest on her 20-acre ranchette outside of Bozeman, as she claims,
why did she feel the need to stage such an elaborate
Twinkie-defense of living there (-My Beautiful Ranchette,” HCN,
5/10/99)? Ewing’s justification is her craving for space, her
appreciation for wildlife, and her desire to “settle directly into
an ecosytem.” (I’d submit that her ranchette made a thudding, not a
settling, sound.) Don’t get me wrong – I’d trade places with Ewing
in a second, but I wouldn’t try to defend
myself.
Unfortunately, taking joy in knowing
where the mushrooms grow and the flickers nest isn’t going to keep
the West from becoming a big Tucson. At best there’ll be a dominant
species of guilt-ridden wilderness aesthetes spouting platitudes
like “the concept of clustering houses ‘ is good “” from the porch
swing. We need to do more than vacantly endorse managed growth and
give money to charities. (How about running for town council?) The
ultimate cop-out – blaming overpopulation – won’t do either, since
it doesn’t necessarily lead to sprawl, and most of the encroaching
hoard can’t afford ranchettes anyway.
If the West
is going to get off the sprawl highway, we’ll need to break away
from the misconception that to be part of “nature” you have to be
surrounded by furry animals.
Just as Wallace
Stegner told Easterners to forget about their green lawns and start
to appreciate shades of brown, we’ve got to learn that real
naturalists live in high-density communities. Maybe they can’t
commune with rigid definitions of nature out the back door, but
they represent a vastly more sustainable part of the ecosystem. And
the view? Beautiful ranchettes. To the
horizon.
Auden
Schendler
Carbondale,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Ranchettes got a Twinkie-defense.
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