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Who
Are the Woods For?
Recently,
my wife went to visit some friends in New Hampshire who had
just finished building their own house, from scratch, on the
hundred acres of woodland they share with some other family.
The house sounds marvelous, in a rustic, connected-with-nature
kind of way: Large, but energy efficient. A central fireplace
that also opens into the kitchen to be used as an oven. Wide-plank
boards cut exactly how they wanted them, from trees on their
land, which is big enough that they could harvest all the
trees they needed for the house, and some to pay the lumberjacks,
without damaging the forest.
She was clearly envious of the house, and as I listened, I
was too. A house built just right, a yard not contaminated
with goodness knows what, a whole forest of resources outside
my back door, communion with nature every day. It is, of course,
one of the American dreams, the Thoreauvian ideal.
I have my frequent bouts of this whenever I head for hills
for a while. See, here’s a little secret: The world is not
really cleanly divided into city people and country people.
It’s true that I am a big, vocal fan of urban living—the walkability,
the diversity, the regular interactions with other people,
etc. But I’m no diehard City Girl either. I prefer quiet.
I don’t really care about keeping up with the cutting edge.
I love the great outdoors—gardening, camping, birdwatching.
I prefer to swim in lakes over pools.
All of this comes up from time to time when I hear about someone
whose kid has three tree forts or someone who had room on
their land to build the root cellar I’m trying to figure out
how to concoct in my basement. But then, as I catch myself,
I start to feel a little queasy, like I do when I realize
I’ve been envying someone for having more money, when they
got it by means of choices I would feel wrong making.
On balance, I think I’m happier living in the city. But a
large part of that is that if I were to settle out in the
woods, even homesteading in as self-reliant a way as I could,
I would always feel like I’d taken something that I didn’t
deserve.
I just looked up the numbers and they confirm my gut feeling:
It’s neither practical nor sustainable for everyone to go
back to the land. The United States has 2.3 billion acres
of land. Divided by our 305.2 million people (which is only
growing for the foreseeable future), that comes out to 7.5
acres per person. (For comparison, Albany’s Washington Park
is 99 acres.)
Of course that 2.3 billion includes 257 million acres set
aside for roads, airports, parks, wildlife areas, national
defense, and industry and 60 million acres already urbanized,
bringing us down to 6.5 acres per person. And that still includes
plenty of areas not readily available for what would effectively
be high-density homesteading: deserts, swamps, the frozen
tundra of Alaska, the highest mountaintops of the Rockies,
and the barren lava flows of Hawaii. It also includes land—urban
and rural—already devoted to schools, churches, government
buildings, sports fields, stores, offices, and dozens of other
non-residential uses.
Most of the rest of what might be available is currently cropland
and grazing land, meaning if we actually divvied it all evenly
so everyone could live closer to nature, we would all basically
have to be entirely self-sufficient on what would end up being
pretty tiny allotments. Not exactly the vision of bucolic
bliss that most people who want to “get out of the city” are
imagining. More like our familiar friend suburbia.
Nor would it be an environmental improvement. Even in a modest
version of this scenario, the losses to the very natural world
we claim to love and want to be immersed in are incredible:
added roads, fragmented or lost habitats, increased driving.
Perhaps in the long run the world should have fewer people
overall, so that those who want to could spread out without
taking over. Given all the creativity, productivity, and social
benefits researchers keep finding about urban living, I think
not. (Suicide rates in New York state are inversely proportional
to the density of the county. Interesting, huh?)
But even if it really were the ideal, I can’t make a particular
claim that I should get to be one of the few who lives out
in nature just because I like it, or just because it’s more
of a pain to live sustainably when you have to work together
with your neighbors to do it. More selfishly, I want there
to be large tracts of land left for me to go hiking in, even
if I only can go once a year.
So I would rather leave rural living to those for whom it
makes sense: farmers and ranchers, park rangers, foresters
and wildlife researchers, and the people whose businesses
serve them (think tractor mechanics or farm vets); the people
who provide the infrastructure of rural life, like teachers,
doctors, etc.; and those in the hospitality industry who give
the rest of us the chance to visit, appreciate, and recharge
our batteries, whether they run a B&B or a campground,
a canoe rental service or a restaurant. We can probably even
spare some space for the true hermits.
As for me, I can work anywhere with an Internet connection.
So I’ll swallow my passing longings for a barn and a stream
and put my energy into helping our urban areas transform themselves
into the dense but green, relocalized, self-reliant, humane
places I know they can be.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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