Ever since the days of old
Men would search for wealth untold
They’d dig for silver and for gold
And leave the empty holes

–John Anderson

The United States is gifted with more public lands, open spaces, wilderness, and clear waters than most developed nations. Our decisions regarding this gift comprise a long history and varied are the people who made them. We could consider the early Michigan homesteader clearing land of his choosing, never believing he could impact his vast surroundings. Conversely, we could consider the conscious draining of the entire Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio over the space of decades.

These decisions are still being made today, but something has changed. At one time, concern for the environment was at odds with development, progress, and money to be made. Now, the people making money off of our natural resources are the ones who claim to care the most about it. The seeming reconciliation between economic incentives and environmental well-being is not necessarily a bad thing. My main problem, however, is with the word “seeming.”

At one time, when our land was trampled under foot there were those who stood up and dissented. The Native Americans, conservationists, environmentalists, sportsman, birders, hikers, government agencies, non-profits, the list is long of people who raised their voice to conserve and preserve our natural world. They have long debated the balance between their many uses and perspectives. Now I wonder who will stand up and speak and, even if they do, I wonder if they will have a platform to stand on. Or has that platform been usurped by their mutual enemy? Are the goals of conservation and sustainability really as aligned with progress as some claim or even they themselves believe? Has the human nature John Anderson sings about evaporated with the modern age?

Growing up, we watched reruns of the popular 70’s television show “The Waltons.” In this show, the oldest son, John Boy, narrates the life of a rural family in Depression era Virginia. This show touches on many of the issues facing rural America to this day. I’d like to describe two episodes. In the first, John boy sells his inherited land to a developer only to find this developer was stripping land bare with invasive mining practices. The developer then tries to buy up land around John Boy making the community vague promises about economic growth and prosperity. Finally, John Boy uses the help of the local pastor to hold service on an overlook of the mountain and asks the community to fully consider their decision.

On a second episode, a resort developer hopes to buy the Walton land for a significant amount of money. The grandparents bow out of the decision and make clear that John Boy’s father should make the best choice for the family. Then, the father and mother discover that the developers want their house as well and the father organizes his teenage children to weigh in on the decision. But then John Boy takes this move a step further. He says that it’s not the grandparents, the parents, or even the teenagers who should decide, but rather the family’s young children who might never get the chance to be raised in their home.

I’m not suggesting that our decisions should be made by children, if for no other reason than this would open them up to exploitation by the powers that be. But these decisions were not new for rural America in the 1930s and are not going way. Time and time again, people in rural areas have been sold often exaggerated promises of prosperity with minimized claims of damage and change. Countless rural Americans facing poverty or general lack of opportunity have made the hard decision to sell land into development.

Now today, we face our land covered over with wind mills and solar farms providing power for urban centers. Developments of a tiny fraction of the scale, frequency, and intensity of these renewable energy projects would generally push environmentalists into a fit of pique. Oil or gas drilling might cause environmentalist to analyze for years every real or imagined impact to the area wildlife. Yet, mum is the word on these. What about the environmental benefits, you ask? Michigan is famous for lake effect weather. We see more cloudy days than not. We’re not exactly the wind capital of the world either, except for maybe hot air blowing in from certain human sources. The main “benefit” of renewable energy in rural Michigan appears to be that we are out of sight and mind of those benefiting from the decisions.

While rural Americans face this new threat to our way of life and wonder what decision should be made, they find in Michigan it might not be theirs to make at all. Based on legislation passed in Lansing, local governments and communities now have little to no say in the matter. Accross the country, large swaths of rural land are now owned by corporations, absentee billionaires, and investors and even locals face incentives to lease or sell without any offsetting incentive to consider impact to their community.

I’ll admit that I don’t know what every decision should be or who should make it. But when those who serve to benefit the most make the decisions of those quite unlike them and claim to be the caretakers of the lands and people they exploit, I do believe it is time to raise my hand and question them. I write this watching fire blazing in my wood stove as it heats my small cabin. I graduated from a school with a soybean field between the high school and elementary. I didn’t read about these things in a book or first learn about them from my Twitter feed. I’m in the woods often, far more than your typical “sustainable developer.” Let me put it this way: my time outdoors far exceeds my cell phone pictures of it. Unlike most so-called “sustainable developers,” my interaction with wild spaces goes deeper than virtue signaling on social media.

But I don’t claim to know who should make the decisions. I only claim to know who should not make them.