Collapse

by Diamond, Jared

  “As for the long-term effects of growth, there will be cycles here in the future, as there have been in the past, and in one of the cycles the newcomers will go back home. Montana will never overdevelop, but Ravalli County will continue to develop. There is a huge amount of publicly owned land here in the county. The price of land here will rise until it gets too high, at which point prospective buyers will start a land boom somewhere else with cheaper land. Ultimately, all of the farmland in the valley will be developed.”

  Now, this is Chip Pigman’s story: “My mother’s grandfather moved here from Oklahoma around 1925 and had an apple orchard. My mother grew up here on a dairy and sheep farm, and she now owns a real estate agency in town. My father moved here as a child, was in mining and sugarbeets, and held a second job in construction; that’s how I got into construction. I was born and went to school here, and I got my B.A. in accounting at the University of Montana nearby in Missoula.

  “For three years I moved to Denver, but I disliked city living and I was determined to move back here, in part because the Bitterroot is a great place to raise children. My bicycle was stolen within my first two weeks in Denver. I didn’t like the city’s traffic and large groups of people. My needs are satisfied here. I was raised without ‘culture’ and I don’t need it. I waited just until my stock in the Denver company that employed me was vested, and then I moved back here. That meant leaving a Denver job paying $35,000 a year plus fringe benefits, and coming back here to earn $17,000 per year without any benefits. I was willing to give up the secure Denver job in order to be able to live in the valley, where I can hike. My wife had never experienced that insecurity, but I had always lived with that insecurity in the Bitterroot. Here in the Bitterroot, you have to be a two-income household in order to survive, and my parents always had to hold multiple odd jobs. I was prepared if necessary to take a nighttime job stocking groceries to earn money for my family. After we returned here, it took five years before I again had an income at my Denver level, and it was another year or two after that until I had health insurance.

  “My business is mainly house construction, plus development of the less expensive parcels of raw land—I can’t afford to buy and develop high-end parcels. Originally, the lots that I developed used to be ranches, but most of them are no longer operating ranches by the time that I acquire them; they have already been sold, resold, and possibly subdivided several times since they were last farmed. They’re already out of production, and they carry knapweed rather than pasture.

  “An exception is my current Hamilton Heights project, a 40-acre former ranch that I acquired and that I’m now trying to subdivide for the first time. I submitted to the county a detailed development plan requiring three sets of approvals, of which I succeeded in getting the first two. But the third and last step was a public hearing, at which 80 people living nearby appeared and protested on the grounds that subdivision would mean a loss of agricultural land. Yes, the lot has good soil and used to be good agricultural land, but it was no longer in agricultural production when I bought it. I paid $225,000 for those 40 acres; it would be impossible to support that high cost by agriculture. But public opinion doesn’t look at the economics. Instead, neighbors say, ‘We like to see open space of farmland or forest around us.’ But how is one to maintain that open space if the lot’s seller is someone in their sixties who needs the money to retire? If the neighbors had wanted to preserve that lot as open land, they should have bought it themselves. They could have bought it, but they didn’t. They want still to control it, even though they don’t own it.

  “I was turned down at that public hearing because the county planners didn’t want to oppose 80 voters shortly before an election. I hadn’t negotiated with the neighbors before submitting my plan, because I am bull-headed, I want to do what I think I have the right to do, and I don’t like being told what to do. Also, people don’t realize that, on a small project like this one, negotiations are very expensive of my time and money. On a similar project next time, I would talk first with the neighbors, but I would also bring 50 of my own workers to the hearing, so that the county commissioners would see that there’s also public demand in favor of the project. I’ve been stuck with the carrying cost of the land during this fight. The neighbors would like the land to sit with nothing done to it!

  “People talk about there being too much development here and the valley eventually becoming overpopulated, and they try to blame me. My answer is: there’s demand for my product, the demand isn’t something that I’m creating. Every year there are more buildings and traffic in the valley. But I like to hike, and when you hike or fly over the valley, you see lots of open space here. The media say that there was 44% growth in the valley in the last 10 years, but that just meant a population increase from 25,000 to still only 35,000 people. Young people are leaving the valley. I have 30 employees, to whom my company gives employment and provides a pension plan, health insurance, paid vacation, and a profit-sharing plan. No competitor offers that package, so I have only low turnover of my workforce. I’m frequently seen by environmentalists as a cause of the problems in the valley, but I can’t create demand; someone else will put up the buildings if I don’t.

  “I intend to stay here in the valley for the rest of my life. I belong to this community, and I support many community projects: for example, I support the local baseball, swim, and football teams. Because I’m from here and I want to stay here, I don’t have a get-rich-and-get-out mentality. I expect still to be here in 20 years, driving by my old projects. I don’t want to look out then and have to admit to myself, ‘That was a bad project that I did!’ ”

  Tim Huls is a dairy farmer from an old-timer family: “My great-grandparents were the first ones in our family to come here in 1912. They bought forty acres when land was still very cheap, and they kept a dozen dairy cows which they milked by hand for two hours every morning and then again for two hours every evening. My grandparents bought 110 more acres for just pennies per acre, sold cream from their cows’ milk to make cheese, and raised apples and hay. However, it was a struggle. There were difficult times, and they hung on by their fingernails, while some other farmers weren’t able to. My father considered going to college but decided instead to stay on the farm. He was the innovative visionary who made the crucial business decision to commit himself to specialized dairy farming and to build a 150-cow milking barn, as a way to increase the value obtained from the land.

  “My brothers and I bought the farm from our parents. They didn’t give it to us. Instead, they sold it to us, because they wanted us to decide who really wanted badly enough to do farming to be willing to pay for the farm. Each brother and spouse own their own land and lease it to our family corporation. Most of the work of running the farm is done by us brothers, our wives, and our children; we have only a small number of non-family employees. There are very few family farm corporations like ours. One thing that lets us succeed is that we all share a common religious faith; most of us go to the same community church in Corvallis. Sure, we do have family conflicts. But we can have a good fight and still be best friends at night; our parents fought too, but they always talked about it before sundown. We have figured out which hills are worth dying on, and which are not.

  “Somehow, that family spirit got passed on to my two sons. The two of them learned cooperation as children: when the youngest was still only seven years old, they began shifting 40-foot sections of aluminum sprinkler pipe, 16 sections in a line, one boy at each end of a 40-foot section. After leaving home, they became roommates, and now they are best friends and neighbors. Other families try to raise their children to maintain family ties as did our children, but the children of those other families didn’t stay together, even though they seemed to be doing the same things that our family did.

  “Farm economics are tough, because the highest value to which land can be put here in the Bitterroot is for homes and development. Farmers in our area face the decision: should we continue far
ming, or should we sell our land for home sites and retire? There’s no legal crop that would let us compete with the house development value of our land, so we can’t afford to buy more land. Instead, what determines our survival is whether we can be as efficient as possible on the 760 acres that we already own or lease. Our costs, like the price of pickup trucks, have increased, but we still get the same money today for 100 pounds of milk as we did 20 years ago. How can we make a profit on a tighter profit margin? We have to adopt new technology, which takes capital, and we have to continue to educate ourselves on applying the technology to our circumstances. We have to be willing to abandon old ways.

  “For instance, this year we spent substantial capital to build a new computerized 200-cow dairy parlor. It will have automatic manure collection, and a moving fence to push cows towards an automatic milking machine through which they’ll be moved automatically. Each cow is recognized by computer, is milked with a computer at her stall, the conductivity of her milk is measured at once to detect an infection early, each milking is weighed to track her health and nutritional needs, and the computer’s sorting criteria let us group cows together into different pens. Our farm is now serving as a model for the whole state of Montana. Other farmers are watching us to see if this will work.

  “We have some doubts ourselves whether it will work, because of two risks beyond our control. But if we’re to have any hope of staying in agriculture, we had to do this modernization, or else we would have no alternative to becoming developers: here one either has to grow cows or to grow houses on one’s land. One of the two risks beyond our control is price fluctuations in the farm machinery and services that we have to buy, and in the price we get for our milk. Dairy farmers have no control over the price of milk. Our milk is perishable; once the cow is milked, we have only two days to get that milk off the ranch to market, so we have no bargaining power. We sell the milk, and buyers tell us what price it will fetch.

  “The other risk beyond our control is the public’s environmental concerns, which include our treatment of animals, their wastes, and associated odor. We try to control these impacts to the best of our ability, but our efforts will probably not please everyone. The newcomers to the Bitterroot come for the view. At first, they like to see the cows and hayfields in the distance, but sometimes they don’t comprehend all that comes with agricultural operations, especially dairies. In other areas where dairies and development coexist, the objections to dairies are associated with their odor, the sound of running equipment too late at night, truck traffic on ‘our quiet rural road,’ and more. We even had a complaint once when a neighbor got cow manure on her white jogging shoes. One of our concerns is that people unsympathetic with animal agriculture could propose an initiative to restrict or ban dairy farming in our area. For example, two years ago an initiative banning hunting on game farms put a Bitterroot elk ranch out of business. We never thought that that would happen, and we can’t help but feel that there is a possibility that, if we are not vigilant, it could happen to us. In a society that espouses tolerance, it’s amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.”

  The last of these four life stories that I’ll quote is that of John Cook, the fishing guide who with infinite patience introduced my then-10-year-old sons to fly-fishing and has been taking them out on the Bitterroot River for the last seven summers: “I grew up on an apple orchard in Washington’s Wenatchee Valley. At the end of high school I had a wild hippie phase and set off for India on a motorcycle. I only got as far as the U.S. East Coast, but by then I had traveled all over the U.S. After I met my wife Pat, we moved to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and then to Kodiak Island in Alaska, where I worked for 16 years as a wildlife and fisheries ranger. We next moved down to Portland, so that Pat could take care of her sick grandmother and grandfather. The grandmother died soon, and then one week after the grandfather’s death we got out of Portland and came to Montana.

  “I had first visited Montana in the 1970s, when Pat’s father was a wilderness outfitter working in Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness just over the Montana border. Pat and I used to work for him part-time, with Pat doing the cooking and me doing the guiding. Already then, Pat loved the Bitterroot River and wanted to live on it, but land there already cost a thousand dollars per acre, much too expensive to support the cost of a mortgage by farming. Then in 1994, when we were looking to leave Portland, the opportunity arose to buy a 10-acre farm near the Bitterroot River at an affordable price. The farmhouse needed some attention, so we spent a few years fixing it up, and I took out a license as an outfitter and fishing guide.

  “There are only two places in the world to which I feel a deep spiritual bond: one of them is the Oregon coast, and the other is here in the Bitterroot Valley. When we bought this farm, we thought of it as ‘dying property’: that is, a house where we wanted to live for the rest of our lives. Right here, on our property, we have great horned owls, pheasants, quail, wood ducks, and a pasture big enough for our two horses.

  “People may be born into a time in which they feel that they can live, and they may not want to live in another time. We love this valley as it was 30 years ago. Since then, it has been filling up with people. I wouldn’t want to be living here if the valley became a strip mall, with a million people living on the valley floor between Missoula and Darby. A view of open space is important to me. The land across the road from my house is an old farm two miles long and half a mile wide, consisting entirely of pastureland, with a couple of barns as the only buildings. It’s owned by an out-of-state rock singer and actor called Huey Lewis, who comes here for just a month or so each year to hunt and fish, and for the rest of the year has a caretaker who runs cows, grows hay, and leases some of the land to farmers. If Huey Lewis’s land across the street got subdivided into house lots, I couldn’t stand the sight facing me every day, and I would move.

  “I often think about how I would want to die. My own father recently died a slow death of lung disease. He lost control over his own life, and his last year was painful. I don’t want to die that way. It may seem cold-blooded, but here is my fantasy of how I would die if I had my choice. In my fantasy, Pat would die before me. That’s because, when we got married, I promised to love, honor, and take care of her, and if she died first, I would know that I had fulfilled my promise. Also, I have no life insurance to support her, so it would be hard if she outlived me. After Pat died—my fantasy continues—I would turn over the deed of the house to my son Cody, then I would go trout-fishing every day as long as I was physically in condition to do it. When I became no longer capable of fishing, I would get hold of a large supply of morphine and go off a long way into the woods. I would pick some remote place where nobody would ever find my body, and from which I could enjoy an especially beautiful view. I’d lie down facing that view and—take my morphine. That would be the best way to die: dying in the way that I chose, with the last sight I see being a view of Montana as I want to remember it.”

  In short, the life stories of these four Montanans, and my own comments preceding them, illustrate that Montanans differ among themselves in their values and goals. They want more or less population growth, more or less government regulation, more or less development and subdivision of agricultural land, more or less retention of agricultural uses of land, more or less mining, and more or less outdoor-based tourism. Some of these goals are obviously incompatible with others of them.

  We have previously seen in this chapter how Montana is experiencing many environmental problems that translate into economic problems. Application of these different values and goals that we have just seen illustrated would result in different approaches to these environmental problems, presumably associated with different probabilities of succeeding or failing at solving them. At present, there is honest and wide difference of opinion about the best approaches. We don’t know which approaches the citizens of Montana will ultimately choose, and we don’t know whether Mo
ntana’s environmental and economic problems will get better or worse.

  It may initially have seemed absurd to select Montana as the subject of this first chapter of a book on societal collapses. Neither Montana in particular, nor the U.S. in general, is in imminent danger of collapse. But: please reflect that half of the income of Montana residents doesn’t come from their work within Montana, but instead consists of money flowing into Montana from other U.S. states: federal government transfer payments (such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and poverty programs) and private out-of-state funds (out-of-state pensions, earnings on real estate equity, and business income). That is, Montana’s own economy already falls far short of supporting the Montana lifestyle, which is instead supported by and dependent on the rest of the U.S. If Montana were an isolated island, as Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean was in Polynesian times before European arrival, its present First World economy would already have collapsed, nor could it have developed that economy in the first place.

  Then reflect that Montana’s environmental problems that we have been discussing, although serious, are still much less severe than those in most of the rest of the U.S., almost all of which has much denser human populations and heavier human impacts, and much of which is environmentally more fragile than Montana. The U.S. in turn depends for essential resources on, and is economically, politically, and militarily involved with, other parts of the world, some of which have even more severe environmental problems and are in much steeper decline than is the U.S.