April 2007, The Country Today
Conversations across the Landscape
By Dena Wortzel
An acquaintance in Madison stopped me with a question the other day. She wanted to know what the plants were that she had seen harvested from farm fields last summer, growing low to the ground with yellowing leaves. The question set me back on my heels for a moment. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t know. Then I remembered that when I moved to Wisconsin from an East coast city, I would not have recognized soy beans either. Somehow I assumed that because she was a native of Wisconsin she would know more about agriculture than I, coming from out East. After all, until the last few years of sprawl really got going, you didn’t have to go farther than the Madison city limits to see cropland. But what mattered in this case, apparently, was that she lived in a city, not that she lived in a state whose rural character is still largely defined by farming. The experience was a reminder that much of what rural and urban folks take for granted as common knowledge about the places that they live is, in fact, not shared.
The divide between urban and rural is a major concern for Wisconsin writer and conservation biologist Curt Meine. And what concerns him is a lot more than beans. In his view, the histories and fates of decaying inner cities, expansively growing suburbs, hard-to-sustain working lands, and fragmented wilderness habitats are all related. Conservation-minded folks need to be concerned about all of them together, especially when, “economic subsidies, jurisdictional jealousies, and wedge-driving politics pit one part of the landscape against another.” To think that the supposed gains and losses from battles over land use are strictly limited within mapped boundaries is to miss seeing the closely woven web of relationships that spans the continuum of urban, suburban, exurban, rural, and wildlands, he believes.
As is so often the case, the same economic, social and geographic connections that can give rise to conflict are the very ones around which consensus can be built. But which way we go as communities and a larger society depends, ultimately, on our ability to see connections and find common ground.
First we need to see that the landscape and our communities are, in fact dependent upon one and another. In his latest article, “Crossing the Great Divide” (in The Quivira Coalition Journal, No. 30, March 2007; http://www.quiviracoalition.org/), Meine notes that urban folks cannot escape being rural because they depend upon rural lands for everything from food to outdoor recreation. And similarly, rural folks’ connections to cities through economics, politics, and technology make them, in that sense, urban. And then there are the suburbs. Neither rural nor urban, this is where, since 1994, the majority of Americans live, forming their own particular understandings of land and community, depending both upon urban and rural places.
In the tradition of Aldo Leopold, of whom Meine is a noted biographer, Meine defines the challenge facing all parts of the land spectrum in terms of the values we share, not simply the specific ways we do or don’t farm, do or don’t develop the urban fringe, do or don’t preserve wild places. His call is for conversations across the entire landscape and a re-claiming of common ground around common concerns—like our need for good food, clean air and water, and working ecologies, whether we dwell in city centers or on farms. That conversation needs to address “shared goals and values: human health, economic vitality, responsibility to future generations,” Meine believes. “It embraces the intangible things that are harder to articulate: beauty, memory, identity, spirit, hope, citizenship, community, meaning, trust, mystery, wonder.”
One of the many challenges facing all of us is to find the times and places to have those conversations with our families and neighbors. An even bigger challenge is to take the time and have the patience to have that conversation with people who think a bit differently than us. But when the future is at stake, can we truly afford not to? The connections that bind all of us—rural, suburban and urban—are only getting more powerful, not less so. Luckily for us, we live in a society where citizens are free to gather and think together about what we want our future to look like. As individuals, we can either choose to engage in that conversation, or remain silent and let others decide our future for us.
Dena Wortzel is co-director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council and makes her home on Birch Run Farm in Iowa County. 608-265-5593, dwortzel@wisc.edu.