Leave the hills alone

There can be no doubt that of all the land sub-dividers in Humboldt County Bob McKee is king and is single-handedly responsible for bringing into Humboldt County thousands of people seeking to realize their “back-to-the-land” dreams.

I would have been one of these people had I not fairly early on discovered the “other side” homesteading in Humboldt County, the side that homesteaders rarely want to talk about which is the ecological destruction to wildlife communities that accompanies rural homestead subdivision development.

Like a great many people Bob has helped in purchasing homestead land Bob gave me a terrific deal when I organized a Salmon Creek Land Trust land partnership in one of Bob's then new subdivision developments. A $1000 down held some 281 acres for we land partners to come up with the rest of money through the now well-established pattern of growing pot to pay for the land.

Only law enforcement had a different idea the next year and our Land Trust group was the target of a prototype C.A.M.P. S style large-scale bust. The pot bust and foreclosure crisis created major conflicts within our land partnership, problems so bitter and ugly that I and my family sold our shares in the land and moved off the hill.

I realized my heart wasn't in it from the beginning because my dreams of an alternative lifestyle “off the grid” and out of the commercial exploitation world revolved around creating ecologically friendly cooperative communities and individual homesteading just did not fit the bill.

Why? Because homesteading is not an ecological lifestyle. I think most of you have read my letters and op-eds over the years about homestead eco-damage that E.P.A. Studies of the So. Fork of the Eel River and Mattole rivers confirmed in 1998.

There is no question these days for people who have researched the issue that homestead subdivisions with their hundreds of miles of dirt roads servicing individual parcels are main source of over-sedimentation of Humboldt creeks and rivers. Not logging operations of a comparatively few but the daily in-and-out traffic of thousands going up and down all those homestead subdivision dirt roads are the major culprits filling up the creeks with sediment.

And then there's the over-consumption of dry season water from the hillside springs and creeks due to packing the hills with too many homesteads. With water sources taken for human usage, wildlife goes dry and species disappear. They disappear even faster with the introduction of dogs and cats.

Homesteaders do not want to think about these things because they have convinced themselves that they, and not the city and town dwellers, are models of environmental purity and wisdom. And armed with this self-righteous mindset they support what amounts to a counterculture war against mainstream Humboldt citizens, a social and economic war that has divided our community into warring camps for the last two decades.

Enter Bob McKee and his legal subdivision problems with Humboldt County. Enter now great support for Bob McKee by those he has helped buy his products--land, building materials, community parks, and water tanks, this last item paraded by Bob's company men and his customers as sure sign of Bob's commitment to environmental protection.

I'm sorry but I don't buy into making Bob into some sort of developer saint. When homesteaders do so, what they are really doing is patting themselves on the back, saying isn't it great that Bob allowed us environmentally conscious counterculture people means to get into Humboldt County to save it from eco-destruction at the hands of corporate America.

But it's not true. The homestead lifestyle means our children and their children will likely never see the wildlife species that were in the hills of Humboldt before sub-dividers came in and cut their habitat to pieces for resale at profit. For the sake of future generations the very best thing homesteaders could do is move off the hills and into village and town cluster living that doesn't impact wildlife communities which needs to be free of human activity as much as possible.