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14 THE RURAL VOICE
LAND USE AND GREED:
WHAT'S THE ANTIDOTE?
Keith Roulston, a newspaper publisher
and playwright who lives near Blyth,
is the originator and past publisher of
The Rural Voice.
Oh for the easy, black and white
solution. Our search for it has taken
us from the extreme of thinking the
government can solve all our problems
to the extreme of thinking the market-
place is rational and has the answers.
Rational? Take a look at the recent
controversy about that farm in Bruce
County. Businessmen wanted to strip
all the topsoil off and ship it to lawns
in Toronto. In terms of maximizing
profit, it made sense. The farmer
could probably make better money
selling the topsoil than growing crops.
The marketplace would also say
that if the suburbanites can pay for
that soil then the land is being used
efficiently. I wonder if people will
think it's so efficient if 50 years from
now we don't have enough land left to
grow the food we need.
Is so happens that a couple of days
before I heard about the hubbub in
Bruce I had been driving across the
north end of Toronto along Highway 9
between Orangeville and Newmarket.
It's an area that some of the saner (and
perhaps richer) people from Toronto
discovered years ago. They bought
small acreages to build houses on and
pasture a few horses. It was always
nice to see how the other half lived.
But lately the drive hasn't been as
enjoyable. The traffic is getting worse
as people commute from Orangeville
and beyond to try to beat the insane
cost of Toronto housing. And sudden-
ly you come around a scenic bend and
there, cluttering the hillside like kids'
building blocks left sprawled on the
rug, are hundreds of houses, stuffed in
side by side, transplanting a little bit
of surburbia into the countryside. A
few miles farther is another develop-
ment, only this time it's designed for
those with lots of money so there is a
golf course and much more space.
That same highway passes through
one of the wonders of Ontario: the
Holland Marsh. Watching the farmers
planting vegetables, I wondered what
will happen when development
reaches this area. How long can
common sense hold out against the
siren call of the marketplace?
It took millions of years to make
that precious resource, soil capable of
growing enough vegetables in a few
square miles of ancient swamp bottom
to feed the province. If the market-
place takes over, however, it will take
modern developers only a few months
to turn it into subdivisions. Yet how
can it be otherwise? How can you
expect those landowners to keep going
at the back -breaking work of market
gardening when they see the farmers
nearby living in luxury after selling
their stony hillsides for development?
For the individual, the sale of the
precious gift of good soil for good
money makes sense. For our future
generations, it's a horrible mistake.
Such is the battle between the rights
of the individual and the rights of
society, between short-term and long-
term gain. Such is the battle between
those who think the marketplace
should be left unshackled by regu-
lations and those who say that the
short-term thinking of businessman
will leave the earth an empty, dead
planet if they are allowed to continue
unhampered.
The only alternative to regulation
is self-restraint, the common sense
that says to a developer, "this has gone
far enough." Unfortunately, the
bottom line is the only commandment
that seems to matter in the 1980s. If
there is one businessman with a long-
term view, with common sense, there
will always be another who will take
advantage of the opportunity the first
one passed up.
The only way to impose common
sense is through legislation and that's
why government will continue to grow
even though few people want it to.
It's our only antidote to greed.°