Chapter Fourteen

Preservation and Freedom

ON MY ROAD in Ashland County there are eight working family farms, but only two of them have no second income. Seven of the eight farms and much of the equipment were inherited, and the one that was purchased supplies only a small part of the owner’s income. It is said that farmers live poor and die rich, for they sell wholesale and buy retail and are entirely subject to both weather and markets, but when they retire they sell their land at great profit for housing developments. No one wanting to begin farming for a living can afford to buy land because the subdivision of fields for housing, designed to attract high-income buyers, leads to inflated prices. The breaking up of farms, in turn, destroys the character of the countryside; thus realtors who promise their clients quiet and rural landscape annihilate the very thing they are selling. In his essay “Nature,” Emerson rejoiced that although the land was owned by individual farmers, no one owned the landscape in his native Concord: “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.” In his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau, however, sounded the warning that before long the landscape itself would be owned and the land no longer worth traversing. His prophecy is fulfilled in our time when all value is measured in monetary terms, when the notion of “economy” includes only immediate fiscal concerns. He also wrote in Walden that a town is preserved not by its institutions but by the woods and swamps that surround it, but today I would reverse this tenet and declare that farmland and woods must be preserved by city dwellers who possess greater electoral clout than those in rural areas.

In the late 1990s, the Ashland County Planning Commission sponsored a series of talks on development. After presentations by a private company from Bowling Green, people divided into groups to discuss quality of life, transportation, and farmland preservation. At one large meeting, a wealthy realtor complained that planning would deprive people in his profession of their livelihood. I responded that our long-term quality of life was at stake: the county had almost nothing in the way of culture, but we had farmland, woods, and a landscape worth preserving. Realtors might be better off developing areas around existing villages.

We studied the experiences of communities like Yellow Springs, Ohio, where the Tecumseh Land Trust and other grassroots organizations have created the two-thousand-acre Jacoby Greenbelt in Miami Township targeted for preservation and where in 1999 a husband and wife who owned the historic Whitehall Farmhouse purchased, with help from nonprofit organizations, the rest of the 940-acre farm in order to prevent its being developed. More recently, in 2017, several residents and nonprofits have purchased the 267-acre Arnovitz Farm for the same reason. We also studied cities like Columbus with endemic urban sprawl, where, instead of renovating blocks of boarded-up houses, contractors built new housing developments that swallowed up open space, and new shopping centers meant that older ones turned into acres of crumbling concrete. The farmland preservation committee worked for a year to create a lengthy proposal calling for a trust that would allow landowners to place their farms voluntarily into a program that would prevent future development. Years after we presented our requests to the county commissioners, I met one of them on the street and asked whether anything had come of our proposal. He replied that perhaps farmland preservation should be the sphere of the Amish. Indeed, the commissioners rejected the proposals from all the planning committees.

What the county refused to do, however, the state accomplished in part, creating an easement program in which farmers who wanted to preserve their land could apply for 75 percent of the development rights and either donate the remaining 25 percent or apply for it from the county. Farmers could sell their land but not the development rights, and new owners could farm in any way they wished but could not subdivide the land or sell it for housing. At first the allocations went to the largest farmers, many of whom were already wealthy, but more recently some smaller farmers have been able to take advantage of the program.

Our township has the most varied landscape in the county and is the only one that still designates the best farmland as “prime.” Some years ago a neighbor living across the road from us requested that the zoning of the entire township be changed to allow light industrial uses on land designated “general farm,” the second most sensitive land use after “prime farm.” He wanted to build a warehouse on his property, a reasonable plan in view of the fact that two warehouses already existed on our county road, one having been constructed before any of the land had been zoned, the other because an earlier commissioner neglected to follow the rules. The current, more responsible zoning commissioner, however, had refused the man’s request for a variance, and hence the owner initiated this proposal to change the law itself. The commissioner congratulated the man on following the law (which others had not) but warned that any change could result in a plethora of warehouses going up all over the township. While this man’s house and grounds always looked immaculate, if the law were to be changed, anyone who wanted to could apply for a permit to build a warehouse, and subsequent proposals might not come from such conscientious people.

The man’s immediate neighbor alerted every property owner around him and many others, and all of us formed a committee called Keep Green Township Green. Farmers, nursery owners, small businesspeople, factory workers, lawyers, teachers, and one professor met to plan a strategy to prevent the change. We took our concerns to the township zoning commission and trustees in several meetings attended by county and township residents, with the extended family of the would-be warehouseman occupying one side of the room and the extended families of the neighbors on the other. The committee encouraged me to state the case for not changing the zoning laws. “You get up and talk,” they’d say. “You’re used to it.”

At one of our task force meetings we learned that the would-be warehouseman had complained of someone shooting over his head to warn him not to pursue his venture. One man who lives just north of us, and the son of our place’s previous owners, remarked, “It wasn’t me. I know better than to shoot in the direction of a person.” “It wasn’t me,” I replied. “I don’t own a gun.” “It wasn’t me,” retorted the salty, curmudgeonly farmer who had originally alerted us to the warehouseman’s plan. “If it had of been me, I wouldn’t’ve missed.”

The county planning commission voted heavily in favor of the variance, and four of five township zoning board members voted in favor. Finally, the Green Township trustees voted unanimously for it, after one of them declared that the concerns of the rest of us were “hot air.” The township trustees, all longtime residents of the area, favored development, not preservation.

The members of Keep Green Township Green raised the necessary signatures and put the issue on the ballot, where the rezoning request was defeated two to one. The story does not end there, however; a year after this incident, someone else approached the commissioners with yet another request to change the allowable uses of general farm land, and still another landowner, a member of an old Green Township family and winner of the local county soil and water conservation award, requested to rezone his prime farm land in order to sell off a large parcel in housing lots. The argument that he should sell the best land and buy general farm acreage to develop met with hostility: he argued that the land was his to do with as he wished. The first of these requests was denied by the zoning board; the second was soundly defeated at the ballot box.

These victories seem miniscule, however, in view of the much greater threat presented by horizontal hydraulic fracturing. Gas wells drilled into the Utica Shale in 2012 by Devon Energy Corporation of Texas in Ashland and Knox Counties failed to produce the expected resources; environmentalists celebrated, thinking they were safe, especially when Devon and rival Chesapeake pulled their equipment out of the area. Celebrations were shortlived, however. In October 2017, massive, slow-moving vehicles spotted on the county and township roads turned out to be vibroseis trucks, also called “thumpers,” that use sonar waves to detect the presence of mineral resources. While the companies that conduct these seismic surveys claim that sonar does not harm land or animals, people report feeling their houses shake; no reliable data exist concerning the effect on animals, and the waves have been known to crack the grout casing around well pipes. At the same time, Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation contacted local landowners about buying leases to fracture horizontally the Clinton Shale—a layer drilled vertically decades ago and much closer to the surface than either the Utica or Marcellus—and the Knox Dolomite Shale, which is much deeper (eight thousand feet in Ashland County). Poor well construction by Cabot in 2008–9 caused contamination of water wells in Dimock Township, Pennsylvania, one of the most notorious incidences of environmental damage caused by fracking. Recent innovations in the drilling process allow companies to extend their operations far beyond their 2012 capability: whereas the horizontal pipes in those days reached a mile, now they can travel four miles. When the process was first invented, each “frack” took about three million gallons of fresh water; now, each one requires about forty million, with the resultant increase in toxic flowback, and a well can be fracked multiple times. Residents have expressed alarm at the millions of gallons from the Black Fork River sold to Cabot by the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District, the agency created to oversee water supplies and flood control. In addition to transmission pipelines, companies must construct “gathering lines,” or shallow conduits that transport the resources locally; presently, no regulations exist in their construction or operation. Landowners who do not own the mineral rights to their property have no say in whether oil companies can drill beneath their land; local municipalities, furthermore, are prevented from banning, restricting, or regulating fracking by the Ohio Supreme Court ruling of 2015 upholding the state’s exclusive right to regulate oil and gas exploration. Played-out gas wells may be sold to domestic or foreign companies for disposal of toxic fracking waste, creating increased risks of residential water-well contamination.

Although we believe that we live in a free society, we need to ask what we mean by freedom and whether progress (defined as industry and efficiency) and materialism should always be the defining goals. Realtors, developers, and industrialists argue that without “growth” the economy will collapse, but growth may be defined in ways other than increased development. Prosperity and freedom should mean more than ever-increasing income; they should also include the chance to engage in fulfilling work, the opportunity to pursue self-sufficiency, and the preservation of farmland and wilderness. Many countries with vibrant economies still preserve much that is valuable: Ireland protects farmland and subsidizes the rural way of life for which it is famous; public footpaths in Britain allow people to walk into the country where zoning prevents urban sprawl, and laws enable villages to maintain their local character; travelers on dusty roads in Italy pass vineyards nearly as old as their civilization.

In his essay “The Phenomenon of Placelessness,” William Vaughan questions our willingness to consider values solely in economic terms, in which no relationship is forged between people and the natural world, and in which possession is a mere legality and not a living bond. He writes, “The claim to possess cannot grow out of a lived experience; it is an abstract legal claim, a construct established by social convention to order the life of the world or the world of artifacts.” America is all about escaping the past and overcoming the circumstances of birth; land that has no value other than its price contains no meaning in personal history. This country, however, also claims to value independence that the yeoman farmer achieved and that is denied when “market forces” allow large growers and realtors to drive small producers out of business. No one is truly free who is dependent on others for food, clothing, shelter, water, or air; no one is truly free in a culture in which lawmakers do the bidding solely of their wealthy benefactors and in which the oldest and most important profession of civilized society, farming, can be practiced only by those who are independently wealthy or who inherit their land.

If preservation and desire for true freedom rather than merely personal profit helped to guide our policies—if we had the political will—we might adopt a “green” economy, including serious investment in sustainable energy such as solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal technologies, which would eliminate our dependence on extractive industries that produce huge amounts of hazardous waste, the worst being horizontal hydraulic fracturing and mountaintop coal mining. Commitment to public transportation, ordinances against excessive noise, expanded creation of parkland, downtown pedestrian areas, and regulations that prohibit development of open space until all available urban land is in use would make cities and towns desirable places to live and thus eliminate the need to “escape” to the suburbs. Architectural, sartorial, and horticultural compatibility with place; control of pollution by severely charging industry for its waste; and adoption of local, regional, and national policies that actively promote recycling and conservation would enable us to return to some measure of independence.

Like careless children who waste their inheritance, we do not deserve the planet we have been given. Instead of using water and land carelessly, we should consider them gifts given to us by the ice ages. We need to redefine “economy” and “freedom” to include the long-term ramifications of our actions. Our national goals should include more than addiction to ill-defined “progress,” efficiency, and increasing materialism; they should include not only preserving but also revering our soil, air, and water, without which we cannot survive, much less prosper.