Please Don’t Move to Our Beautiful Mountain Town
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: Politics, Life, Climate Change, World, Environment

Lock the Doors, Zip Up the State Lines, and Throw Away the Key

Not long after I made my move to Colorado, I began hearing people talk about not “Californicating Colorado.” While insulting to those from that gorgeous state, I know precisely what they meant. Because it’s happened. The I-25 is now one long conga line of malls, and cheaply made rubber-stamp tract housing, and more tract housing, and more malls, and and and. Just like the I-5. The intense pressure on our limited water supply is horrendous — especially given our lengthy droughts, increasingly less snow, and the need to water all those lawns in what is effectively plains desert.

City folks bring the city with them, along with their aggressive driving habits that kill cyclists, lack of mountain manners, and tendency to start wildfires.

People from greener states don’t understand. Colorado is slowly becoming Arizona. Water rationing is real, and it will never go away. Snow is becoming increasingly rare. It’s making skiers unhappy, but far worse, it’s making water scarce for our booming population. The once-overflowing Colorado River, a lifeblood for so many, is no longer fed by huge annual snows. Colorado can no longer afford to keep desert golf courses green in Palm Springs. Massive fires — not just from lightning — are a way of life now, which has driven up home insurances rates by an unprecedented percentage ($577, the third-highest jump in the nation). A lot of that is because of human error — meaning wildfires — as well as climate change, affecting the number of tornadoes. We never used to get tornadoes in our cities nestled against the front range. Now, they are more common. A huge chunk of Colorado is plains, just like Kansas’ “Tornado Alley.” Not right along the front range.

That, along with far more machine-produced snow to keep the skiers coming, is just the beginning.

Years ago, there was a spate of license plates that identified people as Natives. Soon, copycats made Semi-Natives, Transplants, and the rest to mock the trend. Native-born Coloradans wanted to state their superiority over those who had just moved here. Then, as now, those who moved to the area settled in and they most certainly didn’t want anyone else to, which would make it too crowded. Lock ’em out. I have mine, but you can’t come share it with me. This is our paradise, stay out.

In other words, we want the idea of a gated community applied to our state, our great little town. And of course, our nation. Hence, the wall.

Asheville is just one more charming mountain town experiencing an historical boom. Americans, with good reason, want to escape big city life and capture something closer to nature. They want a better community, places with old-growth forests to play in that haven’t been paved over for yet another Walmart or TJ Maxx.

You can’t blame them. Right now, I’m contemplating the same thing, for the same reasons. After nearly fifty years in Denver, I don’t want to live here anymore. It’s too busy, too crowded. While some folks love the sophistication that comes with a happening urban scene, that’s not why I came here. I’m tired of struggling to find a single place to ride a horse that isn’t overwhelmed with cyclists, runners, and hikers. I’m tired of riding a horse where people in the nearby park fly illegal drones over my head, terrifying my animal (and those with four-year-old girls on them), because they just want to see what happens.

We Bring Our Baggage With Us

The ranches were here hundreds of years before the suburbanites. That’s the fundamental problem. City folks bring the city with them, along with their aggressive driving habits that kill cyclists, lack of mountain manners, and tendency to start wildfires.

This is the case with every lovely hamlet that has an established way of life, be it an isolated fishing town or a Maine village in the deep woods. When folks come in from elsewhere, they bring “elsewhere” with them. Suddenly, the town is nothing like it used to be. Those of us who liked it the way it was either get angry or move.

Many of us have moved to Panama City or Ecuador. We’ve fundamentally changed those places for the locals — who often resent us — in precisely the same way.

Territorial Imperative

People have every right to move where they want. Neither the Asheville woman nor I have any right to tell anyone not to move to “our” state. We all believe we have the right to live where we hope to have a better life.

There are lots of places in the world that do not want to be taken over. But that’s what we do: We tend to want to take over.

The territorial imperative is universal. We all feel it when, suddenly, a place we love is fundamentally and irrevocably changed. How do you think the Native Americans felt when we marched them off their lands? How do you think folks in San Francisco feel now that prices there (and sinking properties) have changed what was once the “City of Love” to the City of How Are We Going to Afford Rent?

There are lots of places in the world that do not want to be taken over. But that’s what we do: We tend to want to take over. We have a hard time acclimatizing, learning a new language, becoming a part of the existing community. This is true all over the world.

It’s Not Just Here

The 2015 Paris Agreement saw leaders from all over the world gather to discuss efforts to reduce global warming. The gathering included many heads of state of island nations, who are affected the most by these environmental changes. For example, the Solomon Islands are losing land steadily due to rising seas from melting glacial ice. The tiny nation of Kiribati will also soon be underwater. In the not-too-distant future, rising sea levels will force the wholesale relocation of millions.