After hearing me rant about the proliferation of 5- acre "ranchette" subdivisions surrounding Magdalena, Mary Zeiss Stange sent me a wonderful essay she had published on the subject (in USA Today!).
"Call it Homesteading 2004: You move to the country to escape the urban rat race, and a coyote eats your cat. On days when your neighbor's Angus cattle aren't grazing in your front yard, they're milling around the road blocking access to town and kicking up enough dust to make a Bedouin wheeze.
(Snip)
"According to the University of Colorado's Center of the American West, the population in the Rocky Mountain/High Plains states has been growing steadily, thanks primarily to retirees and urban refugees. This trend is expected to continue at least through 2050."
(Snip)
"In the 19th century, the original settlers fought to preserve the open range, where their cattle could roam as freely as wildlife. A hundred years later, many of their descendants were selling off that open land for subdivisions for a variety of reasons: They could get more for it from developers; they had no
choice in the face of mounting farm debt; their children had moved away and didn't want it. Those ranchers who have hung on, many by a thread, are living with an increasingly dim set of expectations and harboring their own nostalgia for a West that no longer exists."
(Snip)
"The environmental stakes are high. Those ranches that newcomers resent for being dirty, smelly and inconvenient represent the only sizable tracts of largely unfenced land in private hands and, as such, are of massive ecological importance. Yet too few ranchers are adopting environmentally friendly practices. Meanwhile, their new neighbors are accelerating the drain on limited water resources, disrupting wildlife migration corridors and increasing the costs and inefficiency of fire control."
What she said-- RTWT!
And yes, I am a "newcomer", 26 years ago. I never tried to change a thing, which is why my friends tend to be "old- timers". As my friends from the South might say, best to "hide & watch" for a while rather than make an IMMEDIATE fool of yourself.
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"According to the University of Colorado's Center of the American West, the population in the Rocky Mountain/High Plains states has been growing steadily, thanks primarily to retirees and urban refugees. This trend is expected to continue at least through 2050."
Yes, What they said. Our first hint came at least 17 years ago in the gravel parking lot of a *real* grocery store in the Colorado back range in a valley now billed as "Colorado's Best Kept Secret."
Developer's were busily buying parcels of panoramic vista, and promptly building McMansions on the not quite perpendicular, or stable, sides of the panorama.
Obviously, they'd never been in that part of "the best kept secret in Colorado" during Mud Month. Everything turns liquid, the result being that "gravity" trumps inertia nearly every time mud moves toward the Colorado River.
Oh yes. The parking lot hint! Ancient, even then, 1970s gas guzzling station wagon - white with the sentiment, "Carpetbaggers go home," scrawled on the side. It sat there for years, and each time I saw it the developers had gobbled up more panorama.
This Flatlander is definitely out of sorts with what passes these days for progress.
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