Paradise LOST.

IN THE RACE TO ESCAPE SPRAWL, CITY DWELLERS ARE FLEEING TO RURAL AREAS. IS THEIR PRESENCE DAMAGING THE GREEN SPACE THEY SOUGHT TO ENJOY?

Before Paul Carkeek, 51, settled in Preston, Washington, 11 years ago, he had only memories of the summers he and his family spent along the town's Raging River. Back then, he says, reaching Preston, 35 miles from Seattle, "was like driving through a tunnel of trees." The family hiked down to the river to collect drinking water in tin buckets.

Those days are gone.

First came the ski lodges in the late 1960s. Next arrived rich city folk, who built large homes, populated the forests with domestic animals, and brought urban values to this old logging community. Soon bears and other wildlife began to disappear. Developers felled trees to build industrial complexes.

Then one day Carkeek found a dirty diaper in the Raging River. That was one of the first times he got raging mad.

"In the 1960s people used to complain about the stench of fish in the river. I used to sit in my room and hear them thrashing in the water as they swam upstream," Carkeek says. "But all last season I didn't see one large chinook on this river. Not one."

Hundreds of rural communities like Preston are waging a battle against sprawl - a battle, they say, where economic and technological pressures threaten to rob the land of its ecological health and the only way of life they have ever known.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, a trend experts don't expect to see change any time soon. With city populations bursting at the seams, many see rural life as a haven from urban problems: diminishing green space, crime, overcrowded streets, shrinking social services.

That's led to urban flight on an unprecedented scale. The trend is toward owning forest land in ever-smaller parcels, according to a recent study by AMERICAN FORESTS' R. Neil Sampson and Lester DeCoster. Between 1978 and 1994 the number of purchasers increased by more than 2.75 million, most buying between 10 and 49 acres. These small parcels will protect scenic values and wildlife habitat, create recreational opportunities, and enrich their personal environment, the buyers say.

But such parcels contribute to forest fragmentation as well, Sampson says, encouraging the introduction of invasive or competitive species that drive out native plants and animals. Perhaps more important, these small, separated lands reduce forest management options. Landowners who wish to maintain a "working forest" with thinning or timber harvest may find it difficult because of the concerns of new owners.

And some rural landowners voice concerns about their new neighbors. They say city owners don't understand the ecological havoc they create by bringing "urban values" and expectations into the forest. Their need for grocery and clothing stores close to home, for neatly trimmed yards and two-lane highways, could undermine the very environmental benefits the newcomers sought in the first place.

In the early 1990s Carol Daly grew alarmed when she saw changes in her hometown of Kalispell, Montana. Like other western states, Montana is experiencing dramatic population growth as retirees and city-dwelling nature lovers move into the countryside. Between 1990 and 1998 alone, the Census Bureau estimates the population of Kalispell's Flathead County jumped 21 percent from 59,218 residents to 71,831.

With that growth, says Daly, came a mixed-bag of ecological problems: contaminated and clogged wells, wildfire in previously unsettled wild areas, domesticated dogs forming packs and scaring wildlife. Ironically, many new residents balked when the wilderness they sought showed up at their back door.

"Last year was poor for huckleberries, so there were grizzlies everywhere," Daly says. "But people don't want grizzlies in their backyards."

Wildlife problems also affect Carkeek's community, where residents have spotted cougar at schools and subdivisions. People move to rural areas to "escape the harshness" of the city but they don't acclimate, Carkeek says. Some new residents commute daily on I-90 to high-technology jobs in Seattle, and Carkeek says they bring urban expectations and sensibilities back in the evenings.

"What I'm afraid of is that this whole area is just going to look like one giant computer chip when [developers are] done," Carkeek says. "Thick, slick, and glossy."

'A Community Problem'

Despite growing concern, leaders in rural communities say they face an uphill battle. That's because strong social, economic, and psychological barriers conspire against them.

Rural communities "tend to have a more passive approach to change," says Nancy Keith, executive director of Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, a Seattle-based group that seeks to protect and enhance communities and ecology along I-90 through the creation of a multi-use greenway. Development, she says, takes many rural communities by surprise.

"We always thought [it] would be farming because it always had been," Mountains to Sound President Jim Ellis says of the Green River Valley. Developers bought small parcels over time until farms in this traditionally agricultural community became few and far between. "Soon the farms were isolated and people were having trouble making a living. There was no infrastructure anymore for farming to succeed."

And that makes it difficult for individual landowners to resist selling their property, Ellis says. For those already living at or beneath the poverty line, selling their land is a matter of simple mathematics.

"For a forest owner, it's pretty hard to break even if you pay more than $2,000 an acre, but [rezoned] industrial land can be sold for as high as $300,000 an acre. It's not hard to figure it out," Ellis says. "The result is that lifelong farmers find it impossible to resist conversion to residential, commercial, or industrial development."

Some activists criticize landowners for "giving in" to developers. But this blame game does little to eliminate the economic and institutional barriers that exist.

"It's a community problem, not an individual problem," Daly says. "The landowners don't have a whole lot of choices. If they won't sell their land but everyone else around them does, the individuals just can't do anything."

That can lead to poor planning. Daly witnessed that problem in Kalispell, which spent $100,000 and held hundreds of public meetings to revise its master development plan. But by then, she says, it was too late - the builders had arrived.

"After the threat is at their doorstep, everybody says, 'Oh my God! We have to stop this!'" Daly says. "It's not a good atmosphere for civil discourse."

The result? Anger, divisiveness, and resentment. Daly says some opponents of limitations to development attended public meetings "to intimidate and 'take names.' "Some attendees received bomb threats. What was once abstract, she says, quickly became personal.

"Land is something that people will defend to the death," Daly says. "Discussions over land use can be very divisive and threatening. Not everyone wants to take that on."

The Promised Land Some communities are staving off development with a combination of cooperative efforts, state and federal help, and old-fashioned shoe leather.

That's how Maryland's Long Green Valley Conservancy got its start four years ago. President Catherine Ebert says she grew concerned when developers began building one mile from the historic town center of Long Green, near Baltimore.

"We saw some of the land being used for huge homes with huge lots," says Ebert. "We saw the land getting encroached upon and realized if we didn't start doing something, we would lose - and all Maryland would lose."

Long Green plays a vital role in the region's water quality, Ebert adds, because that's where the Big Gunpowder and Little Gunpowder rivers meet and flow into the Chesapeake Bay, the nation's largest estuary. The river also supplies the Loch Raven Reservoir, which provides water for the city of Baltimore.

Ebert knew most local farming families couldn't afford to donate their property to land trusts, so, after consulting with some of the farmers, she and other community members formed their own. That way farmers could retain ownership but sell development rights to their land, allowing them to continue farming for future generations.

So far, Long Green Valley Conservancy has helped farmers preserve 1,000 acres in the valley. Several have benefited from Maryland's Rural Legacy Program, part of Governor Parris N. Glendening's Smart Growth initiative (see "How Progress Ate America," p. 24). Passed in 1997, the program provides funds to local governments and land trusts to help communities retain open space through the purchase of property or development rights.

Susan and John Yoder, whose family has owned a 125-acre dairy farm called "The Land of Promise" in Long Green for six generations, turned to the Conservancy when a grant from the federal Department of Agriculture to the state's Rural Legacy Program came up several thousand dollars short. The community raised enough money to purchase development rights, which allows the Yoders to continue to farm on their land but protects it permanently from development.

"John always says, 'my great-great grandfather helped build this farm.' His ancestors hammered those nails into the wood to build this barn," Susan Yoder says. "He could never let it go. We're proud to say we're going to keep it going and pass it along to our children."

Back in Preston, Carkeek works with Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust for a similar purpose. A "professional beggar and scrounger of money," as Ellis says, the Trust supports communities and agencies in their efforts to mend fences and raise funds to keep I-90 green. Carkeek, Mountains to Sound, and community members recently forged an agreement with Preston developers to design buildings with architectural elements that blend into the forest setting and to plant "significant vegetation" along the I-90 corridor, the nation's only federally designated National Scenic Byway.

Will such actions solve the problem? The jury remains out.

"If we don't take a stand and say we don't want [development] anymore, it's going to continue," Yoder says. "We have to cherish what we have because once it's gone, it's gone. It's not like we can recycle it."

Janine Guglielmino is associate editor of American Forests.