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| The
Miami Herald It's subtle, at best. What you see is not just architecture or agriculture but a vanishing way of living, a way of building and an attitude toward the land. It is still one that we all can share, at historic berry farms, bakeries, at farmers markets, tea rooms, on a long weekend drive. On a recent sunny-breezy Friday, I spent an idyllic few hours at Bee Heaven Farm, one of less than a dozen certified organic farms in Miami-Dade County. Bee Heaven was founded in 1996 by Margie Pikarsky and her husband Nick who moved from the suburbs to a modest, handsome 1920s farmhouse on five acres to pursue a dream. DIVERSE OPERATION Bee Heaven's residents include the Pikarsky family, one horse, three dogs, a passel of chickens and a rotating group of young people who spend time helping out as part of a program that lets students and others volunteer on organic farms around the world. Like many organic farms where a singular intention is not to deplete the soil, this one is diverse, with an array of winter and summer crops, and of course, the honey bees of the name. The principles applied to this farm could provide an object lesson in the principles we apply when zoning our farmland. ''Only connect,'' said the novelist E.M. Forster in Howard's End, and that is what we must do at a scale both personal and political. Connect the soil to the crops, the crops to the fields, the fields to the farm, the farm to market, the market to our tables. Connect the past to the present and the present to the future. The farms of the Redland are not large farms but they are treasures, our local agricultural resource prized by chefs and careful home cooks, beloved by so many of us urban-dwellers whose hectic and cacophonic lives are in such sharp contrast to the quiet world out beyond what the bureaucrats have termed the Urban Development Boundary. Once again this week, the Miami-Dade Commission will consider moving parts of this boundary, the line that affords some (not complete) protection to our fast-disappearing rural landscape. Annually, the pressures mount when yet more developers look at rows of beans and corn, eggplant and tomatoes, and see subdivisions. It's not a fight that ends. There are numerous reasons to hold the line as sacrosanct. It is in some ways a boundary not just between city and country but between reason and insanity. Many people innately understand the need for farms, for the rural landscape, for keeping density where it belongs (in urban areas). That is the reactive approach, containing sprawl. The proactive approach calls for protecting the historic architecture of the Redland -- the farmhouses and packing houses, among them, buildings that are among the very few here that date back a century, that have withstood the many violent storms of this last 100 years but stand to lose to politics. As suburbia sprawls farther out past the suburbs, more than just the earth is turned, and as it happens here, it is also happening all across the country. For many farmers, the last cash crop is sticks and mortar, a subdivision rising where once seeds were sowed. Where once there were modest, elegant farmhouses now rise giant McMansions sitting on far too much concrete. There is much at stake here, from the food grown with care by families rather than corporate entities to the loss of the land and the landscape, of a way of living, a way of being, a way of seeing. And in the doing, we are destroying irreplaceable ecosystem and demolishing some of the most picturesque (and environmentally important) of our rural and natural landscapes -- those very landscapes that propelled us from being a country of small colonial settlements to a nation of pioneers and explorers, a nation that stretched in reality as well as in verse and song, from sea to sea. Where the land is beautiful or desirable, the situation is at its most acute. From 1960 to 1990, development consumed one million acres of farmland a year. In the 1990s, that pace accelerated to 1.4 million acres a year. In the five years between 1992 and 1997, the American Farmland Trust reports that the total loss was more than six million acres. FUTURE OF WATER First, and foremost, there is water. The more we build out into our source of water, the less likelihood there is that we will have enough of it -- to drink, to cook with, to bathe, to grow our gardens -- in the future. Not long ago, I saw a 1984 documentary on Miami that featured Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the journalist turned environmentalist who first told us what the Everglades were and was the driving force for the creation of the national park. She was 94 years old at the time of this particular film (Calling Miami Home by Corky Irick and Mel Kiser) and was seeing the future: She looked straight into the camera and repeated more than once, ''We're going to run out of water.'' It was in 1947 that her book, Everglades: River of Grass, led us to the full understanding that our water, our lifeblood, came from this vast, slow-moving, almost imperceptible river flowing to our west. But water only begins to tell the story of the ways in which encroaching development will alter our landscape irrevocably. Frightening statistics portend a much-diminished natural environment in the future. In the last three decades of the 20th century, the United States lost 40 percent of its songbird population, the very birds that let us know we were awake and alive on so many a morning. That's a simple equation -- no trees, no birds. (The eerie stillness after a hurricane such as Wilma, with so many trees knocked over or stripped bare, portended this future.) Worldwide, we have eradicated 18 percent of all known plant species. Each year, development devours some 80,000 acres of wetlands, taking with it plant and amphibious and marine life all at once. And yet the bulldozers roll on. The issue is not just new construction; it is establishing what the Quakers call the ''right relationship'' -- of building to land, of architecture to history, the idea that we are all stewards of the land, and that we must live accordingly. It is a notion that many early Americans (especially as the first settlers included quite a number of Quakers fleeing England in the sometimes-vain hope of finding freedom from religious persecution in the United States) fully embraced. Out at Bee Heaven Farm, where I helped sort spring onions for the weekly winter and spring delivery of fresh organic vegetables to subscribers of the Community Supported Agriculture Program (and I am one, with pleasure), it was easy to understand that concept of right relationship, of the connection of people to the land, of the link between past and future. SACRED TRUST The Urban Development Boundary may seem, to some, to be a line on a piece of paper, but it is much more than that. It is a sacred trust that our politicians hold for us now and our children and their children who need to be able to see and know where it all began and still begins. You can put a sales tag on a new salmon-pink stucco mega-mansion on rows of look-alike houses, but you can't put a price on a culture, on a philosophy. And so comes the philosophical question, the one with no exact answer: What value can we place on our heritage, architecture, landscape, ecology? The cost of that has not yet been calculated. And once it's gone, it is gone forever. ''Nowadays,'' wrote the great observer
and philosopher Henry David Thoreau in an 1862 essay, "almost
all of man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses
and the cutting down of the forest and all of the large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.'' |