#cronon

Around here as in many rural locales the word zoning  can inflame emotions.  "Property Rights" and "Land Taking" are often thrown in the mix to beat back the idea that a community can and should regulate what is done on the land.

Z-zoning picture from the PlannersWeb website

My fellow editor JConlon pointed out to me that his house is zoned.  Never knowing what to make of his comments I allowed myself to be led down a metaphorical lane that really makes sense.  I too have zoning in my house and property.  My kitchen is a zone, and I have a bathroom zone--I don't do bathroom things in the kitchen.  John's garage is zoned for his car and he maintains that zone, while I currently have my garage a construction zone and life feels a bit out of whack. When house projects interfere with our personal zoning it is unpleasant, although usually temporary.

So by this personal example it seems clear that some zoning is good.  Our homes and businesses would be chaos without it.  Why the difficulty in applying these principles to the land?

And if you think the founders had an aversion to zoning, you would be mistaken--very early in the colonial period the colonist (even with such great spaces in which to spread) zoned their communities and by doing so, improved the quality of life.

The story of colonial zoning is told by William Cronon (a professor at UW Madison) in his book, "Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England." The regulations started as there became greater numbers of domesticated animals that grazed freely and would disturb crop lands.

The solution in 1600s New England was to require fences around the crop land. They even had an inspection system to certify that the fences were in good order and maintained. Indians in the area were provided fences that they then had to maintain or they would have no legal claim should damage occur.

These early regulations became unworkable when the swine populations began to get out of control. The communities (at community expense) constructed pens for wild swine that were deemed too close to town and a nuisance. Later they required the hogs to be yoked (to limit their ability to get through fences) and a ring in the nose (so they would not root up crops.) The towns required the swine to be driven several miles out of town, but this often led to conflicts with neighboring towns that then had to deal with the damages. At this point regulations emerged that read, "If any damage bee done by any swine, the whole towne shalbee lyable to the parties action to make full satisfaction." Now a whole town was liable for damages, not just the owner of the swine. In the end the solution was to require all swine confined to fenced farmyard.

Cronon then states, "What became true of swine also became true of horses, sheep, and cattle: each was allocated its separate section of a settlement's lands.[...].this had the effect not only of bounding the land with relatively permanent fences but of segregating the uses to which that land was put. Even the earliest colonial towns had divided their territories according to intended function, and colonists had been granted land accordingly. Fences thus marked off, not only the map of a settlement's property rights, but its economic activities and ecological relationships as well." (pages 137-138)

This balance of rights and relationships is historically tipped in favor of the "rights" position only when land speculators demand greater profits. It is not the people who use the land that have a problem with zoning, it is those who wish a short term profit from it.

(William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90; links to printer-friendly texts available at bottom of this page)

The time has come to rethink wilderness.

This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” (1)

But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.