P
erez and the Figueroas are sharing ideas about one neighborhood park, in one community, in one small corner of north-central Washing- ton. But their conversation takes place at a critical moment for conservation across the entire region.
Every two and a half minutes in the American West today, a football field’s worth of natural land is lost to develop- ment. That’s among a series of disheart- ening findings of The Disappearing West, a project that measures and maps human impact on land in 11 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. A collaboration between Conservation Sci- ence Partners and the Center for Ameri- can Progress, the report identifies urban sprawl and energy extraction as the two most powerful drivers in the depletion of open space across the region—which between 2001 and 2011 lost more than 4,000 square miles of natural land. As development consumes land that’s not protected, powerful political forces are posing new threats to land that is—or rather, has been. Bills before Congress propose the wholesale transfer of federal holdings to individual states, which could then lease or sell them to private interests. State legislators want to expand drilling, mining, and logging on public lands—closing them off to everyday Americans. In states where voters have gone to the polls to approve taxpayer dollars specifically for conser- vation, officials are diverting the money for other purposes. And politicians are moving to dismantle the nation’s most important source of conservation fund- ing, the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
If these efforts are successful, many conservationists contend, the impacts could be severe and irreversible—both for natural resources and for the quality of life in Western communities like Wenatchee.
“The Disappearing West findings paint a dark picture,” says Jason Cor- zine, Colorado-based director of com- munity conservation for The Trust for Public Land. “But the project also identi- fied a trend that we’ve been seeing for the past several years: a groundswell of conservation leadership emerging in the American West, especially in small-town America, where connections to the land run deep.
“In these communities, when we talk about The Trust for Public Land’s mis- sion to ensure that everyone has access to safe, green spaces for exercise and play, we’re finding that locals are ready to step up. They’re willing and eager to make their voices heard.”
Both these trends—the threat to the landscape and the grassroots response to it—are playing out in the Wenatchee Valley.
It’s a region with a long rural tradition. If you’ve eaten an apple recently, chances are it came from here. Wenatchee Valley growers have supplied the majority of the American apple market since the 1920s, thanks to plentiful sunshine and a ready
supply of water flowing down from the snowcapped Cascade Mountains. By the 1990s, the same conditions so ripe for agriculture had begun to attract an influx of newcomers: the Wenatchee Valley’s beauty, climate, and affordabil- ity is an enticing alternative to rainy Seattle, just two hours west. As old or- chards of apples, cherries, and pears fell to cookie-cutter housing developments, people saw the landscape they knew disappearing out from under them. But in a region that values autonomy,
many residents had met past conserva- tion efforts with skepticism. If there were a land-use solution to be had in Wenatchee, it would have to be home- grown. In 2007, local officials turned to The Trust for Public Land to host a series of neighborhood meetings designed to identify and map the community’s conservation priorities. The goal: a plan made by residents, rather than for them.
Out of that 2007 planning process, explains Jason Corzine, came a critical consensus: that preserving quality of life in Wenatchee meant thinking ahead, setting aside places where the grow- ing population would always be able to get outside. The Trust for Public Land moved quickly to conserve high-priority properties in the foothills. By 2013, the effort had doubled the community’s public open space to 6,000 acres.
ONCE PEOPLE GET OUT HERE, THEYCAN THELPAN’T’ HELP BUTCARE ABOUT IT.
GETOUT 56 · LAND&PEOPLE · FALL/WINTER 2016
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
