Holiday on the farm

Posted by Genevieve Marsh

January 2, 2008

I just returned from spending the holidays at my grandfather's place, a little gentleman's farm in Maryland. He is selling his place to a developer, another 30 plus acres of rich Maryland soil and history covered over by badly planned sprawl. It is a tale of many a place here in the Sierra. But there's more to it than the typical sprawl tale. When my grandfather first started taking bids from developers, my mother started looking into alternative builders, ones who might at least plan parks and low impact development, allowing for community gardens or at least open space. She found one with the help of the Nature Conservancy, and they ended up buying the property.

The developers wanted to make this a innovative project, a development with lots of parks, compact homes like row houses, parking on the street and under houses, and so on.

But then the neighborhood got involved, and organized to stop the development. I was conflicted: a long time supporter of organizing, especially to fight sprawl. This was a grassroots group. Yet the group was actually causing the developers to have to change their environmentally friendly plans. The controversy has been going on for a long while, and the neighborhood seems to finally have found a compromise. The developers had to change their plans multiple times, and though there will be a few less families to stress the schools, or the sewer systems, the homes will be larger, the driveways will be in front of the house rather than parking underneath the townhouse or on the street at the expense of the open spaces and the old trees.

Here's the thing. I think that what these neighbors were reacting to was two fold. One, it was that they would have more cars, traffic, and people to support in their community. And two, that they would be losing a place that they were emotionally attached to, a place that somehow connected them to a larger past and to nature. It was good just knowing that a place like my grandfather's farm existed nearby. While they did accomplish reducing a few of the number of homes in the development, they lost a great deal of their tie to the more emotional connection drastically.

I started to think about the different grassroots fights I have observed or taken part in, started to think about what gets lost in that fight, in that compromise. Is it easier to forget the thing you can't really quantify the connection to place and to historical roots than it is to the numbers? This community has lost the natural place that connected to their back yard, yet they express contentment in the fact that they have met their goals, goals like 15 fewer homes and having caused the developer to lose money. In the end, the land is lost.

Coming home to the Sierra this story of my grandfather's farm has been on my mind. Here in the Sierra, many of our movements are grassroots. I hope that it might help us think through our grassroots work, how we approach and structure it and what can we compromise on in the end.