Alice Waters, long-time champion of food as a tool for building community, has done something quite un-Alice Water-like: sold her name to promote a high-dollar gated development "community" in Montana.
Over on Ethicurean, there's a great post by the novelist Charlotte McQuinn Freeman, who lives in Livingston, Montana -- near the site of the quote-unquote "Ameya Preserve," the kind of high-end, "green" gated "community" that makes my blood boil.
In my area of western North Carolina, gated communities often cheekily take the names of the farms they have replaced. Driving around, you'll see an elaborate sign above a rustic gate proclaiming so-and-so "Farm" -- and peer up the road to see "no trespassing" signs and McMansions tarted up to look like log cabins or farmhouses. "Farm" in this context signifies not farm but the end of farming. I guess in Montana, the word "preserve" serves the same function.
There's an argument that occasionally emerges on Gristmill that goes like this: If rich folks are going to lay claim to huge tracts of land, gate them off, and plunk down massive houses on them, shouldn't they be encouraged to do so greenly? I say, the hell with 'em. I have no time to congratulate major polluters for their marginal improvements.
At the Ameya Preserve, they're peddling "pre-designed" houses that range from 2900 to 4400 square feet as well as 10-15 acre "estate lots" that promise "utmost privacy, premier views, and convenient access to all community amenities.
Check out Charlotte's post to get the goods on Waters' involvement in this thing. Bonnie Powell of Ethicurean is trying to reach Waters for comment; stay tuned.
For me, Waters has always represented commitment to food as a way to build community: between farmers and urbanites, within families and social circles, within localities. Here, "sustainable" food is being used as a tool to move literally exclusive real estate.
Just as "farms" sprouting McMansions signal the end of farming, gated "communities" mark the evisceration of real community. I'd love to see Alice Waters, a genuine hero of the movement to create a just and sustainable food system, renounce this project.
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Biodiversivist Posted 7:36 am
25 Oct 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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justlou Posted 11:13 pm
25 Oct 2007
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Pete Posted 12:38 am
26 Oct 2007
I wonder if Alice feels the same way?
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amc89 Posted 1:18 am
26 Oct 2007
In my community as well, Tom.
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PBrazelton Posted 2:15 am
26 Oct 2007
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caniscandida Posted 2:52 am
26 Oct 2007
Around 20 years ago, I visited Montana for the first time, to attend a summer course on paleontology at Montana State University. The bus had already stopped in Billings, at around 3 AM, for our "breakfast break"; but Livingston was our first walk-around stop after the sun had risen. I thought I was in Paradise, so lovely and sweet-smelling was the air on that summer morning. A few days later, a friend from Bozeman drove me down 89 to Yellowstone, which is a spectacularly beautiful road.
But I hear the area has indeed become cluttered lately with too many folks from outside coming to build new places and move into them. Some of the most notorious are the members of Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant, who bought a ranch near Gardiner, and have constructed numerous bomb shelters in the vicinity, designed to survive a nuclear war. They are believed to have the largest privately owned bomb shelter in the US. They certainly did not exhibit much good-neighborliness toward the locals by allowing some of their stockpiled gasoline to leak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Clare_Prophet
No doubt Alice Walker's new place is very nice, by some standards. But it does seem very unlike her, to be satisfied with a dwelling situation that will inevitably put a great deal of distance between herself and the people of the area. With what she spent, could she not have taken some of it and rented a rancher's unused house or cabin, and dedicated the rest to repairing houses on the nearby Crow Indian Reservation?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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