Towns are magnets and they suck people from the countryside, especially the young and talented. We noticed this happening when we returned to New Brunswick in 2012.We farmed there in the seventies and early eighties. Since our trip, what remained of the three churches in our old town disappeared. The community store closed. Yet the provincial capital, Fredericton, is thriving as the small towns wither. It is a story repeated time and again in Canada and the United States.
Yet I would argue that some of these are the very places that nourish and enable us to survive today's civilization. We actually retreated to the salt marshes of North Carolina after a punishing career at Apple. It was a place that allowed me to recover. Wilderness can bring you peace. My wife and I lived on the edge of the White Oak River for fifteen years. It is where I took the sunset picture above while I was paddling my kayak back to our dock from a late evening fishing trip.
There are few places more peaceful than a big coastal river at slack tide with no wind just as the sun is setting and the egrets, pelicans, and herons are flying to roost. It is that chance at peace that draws many people to the less populated areas of national parks and beaches. The Southern Outer Banks is one of those places.
I still worry that some of those wild places like the North Carolina coast will become too populated. I sometimes think that what we call the Northern Outer Banks from Corolla to Cape Hatteras will sink into the seas just from the weight of all those beach castles. I offer up my profound thanks for those who created the National Seashores. Beyond nourishing our souls places like coastal Carteret County and hilly Davie County where we now live grow a lot of food that North Carolina cities need.
Sometimes I wonder what is keeping us from reaching that tipping point for rural areas. The remaining wilderness on the edge of these important farming areas is important to us all. We live where small farming is still an active pursuit. Our area has wheat, corn, soybeans, cattle, pigs, large vegetable farms and everything in between including mountain top orchards. We don't want to lose the farms or the people on them to the cities like has happened in so many places. We also do not want to see the forests around the edge of farms disappear.
The question is how do we keep civilization and subdivisions like the one where we live from killing the very thing that is keeping all of us alive? Someone bought the two hundred plus acre farm across from us a couple of years ago. Everyone is happy that is not going to turn into another subdivision like ours. I was particularly happy to see them plant soybeans in what looked like a former pasture. Yet how do we structure things so that the incentive remains to keep those fields from turning to weeds or the forests to be pushed away. It is a complex question.
The first tiny step would be supporting farmers' markets. Then we need to build even better relationships between smaller farmers and the communities they sustain. We need to work to make farming an attractive life for young people. On top of it all, it is important to make wilderness a part of farming. That wilderness will help to sustain wildlife, farmers and citizens. Some of this unfortunately falls to our hopelessly partisan legislature.
As simple as making farms viable and keeping wilderness a part of farming sounds, it is obviously not. Consolidation of farms and conversion to housing tracks has been going on for a long time. We have also been chasing wilderness from our lives for a few hundred years. Huge commercial farms are not friends of wilderness or sustainable farming. They are designed to sustain businesses not people and certainly not the land.
If we keep wilderness, farms, and people in a connected circle, then we might have a chance but it is the slimmest of ones.
