by Kevin Essington, The Nature Conservancy
When you hear “The Borderlands,” the twenty towns along the CT/RI border, what do you think of? Forests? Farms? Villages? Rural homesites? Dark skies? Quiet roads? Easy trips to cities? Families? Jobs? Recreation? Open roads?
Of course. You probably think of all of these things. Sometimes contradictory things, all at once. Because like many rural places in America, it is a complicated and dynamic place, where people and “nature” meet. Each on their own terms. The rugged landscape of the Borderlands tells us where we can and can’t build or farm. The demands of our modern society in turn set prices for the use of land and water that dictate how we build and where.
Indeed, for thousands of years, people have lived in the Borderlands. Sometimes permanently, sometimes just passing through. As Europeans “settled” the area, the axe and plow were put to work to make way for farms and later, villages. But the Borderlands was one of the last places in Connecticut and Rhode Island to be “settled” and then one of the first to be “un-settled” as the tough, unforgiving rock, sand, and muck finally wore down the areas farmers.And while the people who settled these places have moved on, their names and the places they lived remain. Tillinghast, Tefft, Dawley, Campbell, Brown: the list is too long and could never be comprehensive. As farming faded as a way of life in the Borderlands, the forests reclaimed the fields but roads, hills, and ponds kept their names.
Like the farm and forest economy, the villages in the Borderlands faded, to varying degrees, too. Places like Escoheag, Ashwillet, Pachaug, and West Greenwich Center are hardly recognizable today, if they’re there at all. But other villages like North Stonington, Rockville, Greene, Oneco, Voluntown are there, with businesses, libraries, homes, town halls, stores, restaurants, and most of all, people. These places are alive with people and history and, I daresay, with a future.
To me, it seems that these villages will be here for generations to come. Conversely, who believes that the rural housing pattern that we see unfolding before us on an almost daily basis will be here when our grand-children are grown? When gasoline is $9 per gallon will we still want to live by ourselves in our two-acre enclaves? When the large lot development pattern has used up all the remaining spaces in our towns will we still have the “country” at our doorstep?
Could there be a better approach? Could we use our villages as the nodes for future commercial and residential growth? Can we create new villages? Can we create (pardon the euphemism) “village of tomorrow” that will provide economic and housing opportunities while also retaining the rural landscape in which the village is nested?
In working for and with The Nature Conservancy since 1995, I have been fortunate to visit many beautiful natural places all over the country and (somewhat) the world. But even as a conservationist and a naturalist, my memories of these places are seen through the windows of the built environment in which I traveled. As human beings, we need both a quality built environment and a rural place to grow food and fiber. As Americans in particular, we need to know that a “wild” place exists – is a proven part of our national psyche. Villages can get us there.
I propose that the Borderlands collaborative use the deep experience of the people living and working here to guide the region towards a vision that achieves both goals: creating a living, working, built environment that is nested within a much broader undeveloped landscape. Give our grand-children the flexibility they will need to live in a world that we can only vaguely predict. Make our villages the center of our civic and working lives…and leave the farms and forests for the future.