I grew up in Telluride, CO. A very small ski town, in the southwestern part of the state. It'a essentially one, small box canyon, with a town located at the very end of it. I live about 4mi outside, and every time I wanted to go to town, I would take the one road leading in, and drive past miles of pristine valley. This valley (rightly named "the valley floor") is essential to what makes Telluride, Telluride. It's 4 miles of absolutely no development.
The land was owned by a developer who wanted to turn the space into golf courses, and mega mansions with man-made lakes etc... Luckily, most all the locals were not ok with this. The Valley Floor was bought from the developer for $50 million: donations came from 1,600 people in 45 states and seven countries (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-07-telluride_N.htm).
Now, the Valley Floor will never be developed. It will stay pristine for generations and generations to come. This story, from my little bitty town and Colorado, to me, is a great instant of environmental solidarity. As a town, we came together to save something of immense natural worth, and it was incredibly worth the fight.
I agree that solidarity is important, but possibly a little too ambitious on a global scale. I liked how you used this story to make your point that people can be strong when they work together, and I think it's great that this worked for Telluride. I think global solidarity is important and can be achieved on a shallow level, but a deep level of global solidarity is somewhat unrealistic, as I'm sure you have thought of. Of course, it would be nice, but it would be hard to achieve without a strong visible driving factor. So, maybe its not unrealistic forever, I just think that the world needs a huge visible factor, such as global widespread flooding due to global warming, to make the effort to work together and establish a global policy to combat global climate change.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar experience in Marblehead with communal solidarity involving environmental issues. Obviously, my town and yours are about as opposite as towns can be - one is a coastal, New England town and the other is a ski town in Colorado. And, of course, my town of 4 square miles is very, very developed. One of the open areas of land that remains, known as Lead Mills, was contaminated with lead for a very long time and was only recently cleaned up. Keep in mind, this is ocean-front property, which sells for millions and millions of dollars in my small town. There are certainly people interested in developing the land or moving there, but the town has come together in an attempt to buy this land and keep it as an open space with a sense of unity and agreement that I have not seen in Marblehead many other times.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Julia, I absolutely agree that many of the reasons this worked/is working for Telluride and Marblehead is because of their small size, but it gives me hope that solidarity can occur on a larger scale to protect resources and areas that are seen by much of the world to be valuable.