Producer's Journal: Conversation between a city planner and a radio documentary producer

Posted by Catherine Stifter

April 22, 2008

I received an extensive email from a city planner who'd listened to Saving The Sierra's documentary. He took the time to communicate his points of view about our production and about the issues we raised. He gave me permission to share his comments on the Blog. I'm interested to open this conversation to a wider audience and hear what you think:

From Nathan Landau, Berkeley:
"As a city planner, I was interested to hear the Saving the Sierra radio program. It is always positive when land use, planning, and resource issues are presented to a wider public. The Sierra is a region of California that is changing faster than most people realize, without any conscious, coordinated planning. The stories about Truckee and Mono Lake captured some of the difficulties and complexities of these processes.

I was disappointed, however, in the frequently simpleminded presentation that surrounded these stories and pervaded the Sierraville story. The Sierra is of course beautiful, but is it, in any meaningful sense, “natural”? The landscape of the Sierra has been transformed by people since the Native Americans, who, far from being simple, idyllic users of nature, actively managed landscapes through fire and other means. Agriculture wrought a profound transformation of California landscapes, to the point where many California native grasses are essentially extinct. Then of course there has been logging, mining, water transport (as the Mono Lake story discussed), and other changes. Is the “natural” landscape simply the one that the observer experienced when he/she was young?

The program’s treatment of “development” was, for the most part, equally unsophisticated. The story about the community benefits agreement in Truckee was a partial exception. But the program made no effort to discuss why development is happening in the Sierra. Given California’s ongoing population and economic growth, it would be surprising if the population of the Sierra wasn’t growing. Rural California is economically sustained by urban incomes (as it has always been in California—a heavily urbanized state right from the beginning), so as urban California grows, so grows rural California.

Indeed, the very idealization of rural life that your radio program exemplifies is a significant element in attracting more people there (a dynamic which has happened over and over in the suburbanization of California). Who wouldn’t want to live, or at least vacation, in such a beautiful, indeed moral place? If there’s no effort to define the appropriate population level for the Sierra, then why shouldn’t more people live and/or vacation there?

Or maybe the current population level in the Sierra is already too high, and some of the people who live there now should leave! After all, the rural lifestyle, which relies on long distance travel by private car or truck, is much more energy intensive than an urban lifestyle. It is also more water intensive, given the large homesites many rural people live on.

The program also begs the question of whether any distinction can be made between good and bad development. Are there good and bad places within the large Sierra for development? Are there good and bad places for and forms of development in and around the towns of the Sierra? Does the current system—where each city and county decides on its own channel development to the right places, or not? If development is significantly reduced in one town, what happens? Does it just flow to another town or does it really not occur in the Sierra? There’s plenty of bad development occurring all around California, but the story is more complicated that the NIMBY formulation of “Current residents good, Developers bad.”

Perhaps future projects can tackle some of these issues."

Reply from jesikah maria ross (documentary co-producer), Davis:
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response to our program. It means a lot to have someone share this level of feedback. Really appreciate your time and hearing your take as a planner.

Reply from Catherine Stifter (documentary co-producer), Nevada City:
Thanks for your comments, Nathan.

Glad you had a chance to listen to the program. Some of the points you make come right from our script! (Indians managed the land long before white settlement). I'm disappointed to hear that you felt our approach was simple-minded. Our goal was not to suggest population policy, nor to define what is natural, or nor even to idealize rural life.

Instead we tried to produce a program that for once(!) features the voices of folks who have dug in here (either lately or long ago) and have determined to make something of the place for themselves and their families. Steve Frisch, President of the Sierra Business Council says rural people should stick around and take responsibility for our places rather than leave! And that definitely means coming to terms with growth and development.

Have you read the book "Imperial San Francisco" by Gray Brechin? That author suggests another perspective to your claim that rural CA is sustained by urban incomes: that rural CA has been colonized by urban CA and our wealth flows downhill to build CA's cities historically and still today (Hetch Hetchy water to SF is a current example).

Surely there is balance that must be struck. But it won't necessarily be only left to urban voters to determine the future of rural CA. Not if rural Californians can find their voices, make good local decisions about growth, development, and resource transfer.

Our program actually does not say that development is bad. We look at ways that 3 communities are working collaboratively to make it work for their specific locality.

It's always interesting to hear the urban perspective on these issues. And I'm glad you took the time to listen to another story than the one that you might have already heard before.

I hope there will be more stories about all these issues. Perhaps our piece will provide a starting place for continued discussions.

May we post your comments on our Blog? We'd love to get your ideas into the wider conversation? Let me know if that's OK.

Reply from Nathan Landau:
Good to hear from you. It’s fine to put my comments on the blog, thank you.

Let me respond to what you say in this e-mail. Of course rural voices need to be heard, and aren’t heard much in this heavily urban state. The voices that really need to be heard in this country, the voices that almost always go unheard, are the voices of poor and working class people—rural and urban.

My criticism of the radio program is that you were selective about the rural voices you aired. You aired anti-development but not pro-development voices. You didn’t air any libertarian “you can’t tell me what to do with my property” voices. You didn’t air the voices of recent arrivals, who presumably make up a big percentage of the Sierra population, given the population growth that you pointed out. You aired the rural voices that fit your message. That’s advocacy, which has its place, but it’s not balanced journalism.

I think it’s kind of disingenuous to say that you didn’t say “development is bad.” You didn’t say those words, but that was the entire point of the introduction and the Sierraville story. When you repeatedly talk about development as threatening, that’s pretty much the same statement. In the Truckee story, you went through a whole discussion of how the community painstakingly negotiated this agreement, and how it hoped to reap benefits from development they expected to occur. But the story ended with omigod, that’s a lot of development, oh no. It didn’t quite ruin the story for me, but it cast a bit of a pall on it.

Gray Brechin is an entertaining, if city-hating, guy. I’ve heard him speak, I’ve read part of Imperial San Francisco. I would agree that part of San Francisco’s “primitive accumulation” of wealth was gained from the hydraulic mines of the Sierra. It’s hard to argue that hydraulic mining wasn’t an exploitive system. But even then San Francisco’s economy was also based on trading products it manufactured around the world, and benefiting from its status as by far the West’s pre-eminent port, as well as receiving silver.

That was the economic system of the late 19th Century. California’s economy now is based on things like computers, computer software, movies and entertainment products, tourism, and mass Central Valley agriculture. The key economic relationships of these industries don’t involve exploiting the Sierra. Extractive industries like mining still exist, but they’re not the main drivers of the California economy. At the same time, there’s been a lot of investment in the Sierra—especially in highways and parks—that the whole state paid for. Indeed, there’s been investment from the whole country in national parks and national forests. My interest isn’t really in toting up the score, but in better understanding and being realistic about how the system works. The modern rural economy is overwhelmingly dependent on urban funds. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s just a reality.

Ironically, population growth would probably increase the relative economic weight of the Sierra. If self-employed people—working off their computer or whatever—move there, they’ll generate Sierra-based economic activity. That’s not to say that this would be a good thing, but it’s a twist worth noting.

No argument, much of the water used in the state originates in the Sierra. Hetch Hetchy was the first great battle of the modern environmental movement (and the environment lost). I think Bay Area residents in particular are a little hazy on this point, they think it’s Southern California that’s stealing “our” water. Getting water from the mountains was not pioneered in California—New York City has really good water because it pipes the water in from the Catskills.

I have trouble seeing how anybody can “own” water—own a flowing river? Now, for better or for worse, the state is one giant, interconnected plumbing system and has to be managed as such. An awful lot of California water is wasted on craziness like growing cotton. But I agree with you, water is a critical resource where there’s insufficient acknowledgement of the role of the Sierra.

It’s certainly good to raise issues from the Sierra. For example, when I look at serious, scholarly books about California, there seem to be an awful lot more about Los Angeles or the Bay Area or even the Central Valley than the Sierra. Maybe you two can write “Community Politics in the Sierra.” So keep at it.