Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University
Executive Director, Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust
July 2025
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
This phrase suggests that internal conflict and division will inevitably lead to failure or destruction. It emphasizes the importance of unity and cooperation for the success and survival of any group, whether it’s a family, an organization, or even a nation. Abraham Lincoln uttered these words in his 1858 “House Divided” speech, highlighting the deep divisions within the United States over the issue of slavery. A warning that is relevant for us today in America. We are realizing that it is a slippery slope from Democracy to authoritarianism and wondering what can be done to repair the cracks splintering our Nation.
Today, historians are saying the last time the U.S. was this fractured was on the eve of the Civil War. This needs to be said, now more than ever: America might be polarized but conservation is not. Indeed, urban people working with rural people across the rural-urban divide—in the Radical Center—might be how we find common ground and begin to heal these cracks. If food production and distribution become more distributed while open space is protected, both ecosystem services and equitable social and economic benefits will follow. Through this work, people may rediscover what has always been our common ground, the land we stand on.
Conservation has caught up with its antecedent roots. Over 70 years ago, the conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote, “Conservation means harmony between people and land. When land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by their land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. When one or the other grows poorer, we do not.“[1]
That is, for conservation to work, it has to work for people and for the land. Actions that benefit one at the expense of the other are not conservation, they are something else. If human communities grow weaker in order for natural communities to thrive, who will fill the role of steward on working lands in the years to come? On the other hand, if plants, animals, soil and water—collectively the land—are degraded, how long can humans thrive on failing landscapes?
Lastly, two critical, and often missing ingredients for durable conservation are its human and economic dimensions. By focusing just on the environmental dimension and leaving people and their livelihoods out of the equation you ensure resistance and lower the chance of success. The work needed to achieve lasting conservation must be intentional and built upon finding shared solutions across stakeholders. By going slow and taking the time to understand the various sides of an issue and then reaching out to the good intentions that are a part of all humans, we can find common ground and resolution to complex challenges. Perhaps, given time, we may rediscover that Democracy means focusing on what we have in common rather than dwelling on differences that can divide us.
Though this approach can be slow and filled with challenges, by choosing to build bridges rather than erecting barriers, we may rediscover ties that bind us to our shared future. The results are more difficult to achieve, but, in the end, they are longer lasting.
The Red and the Blue: The Answer Lies in the Middle
In confronting these challenges, we are compelled to look upon the now infamous maps of red-blue America. During recent presidential elections, America appears split into two camps: a red republican group and a blue democratic group. Although pundits have made much of the red-blue states, it is more interesting to look at red-blue counties. The five Western states that vote blue, when examined at the county level, quickly take on the color red. Most metropolitan counties in the West are true-blue democratic; the rural Western counties are republican. This rural-urban divide mirrors the division between rural populations in the West and the region’s majority population, anchored in urban and suburban centers. Red predominates when it comes to acreage; blue triumphs when it comes to votes.
A more careful look at the red-blue map reveals further subtleties. Demographers provide us with a third color when examining the rural-urban, liberal-conservative divide: purple. When you mix red and blue, you get purple. On a map showing the results of presidential elections, by county, purple demonstrates that the “urban” cores may be blue, but as you leave downtown and ease into the suburbs you come into increasingly republican neighborhoods.
We shine light on this only to ensure that the true complexities of our polarized country are not overly simplified. Though red-blue, rural-urban, conservative-liberal, democratic-republican dichotomies are orderly and understandable, the changing faces of the New West are not so neat. Interestingly, whether living in the city or country, the fundamental disconnect in the rural-urban divide is still between people who primarily make a living based on stewarding land and those who primarily make a living through other means not directly connected to land use.
City people want abundant wildlife, open space, clean air, clean water, and healthy food. Rural people not only want the same, but they also tie down open space for wildlife and for food production. Understanding this commonality creates opportunities to build connections across this ever-widening chasm.
For years, the common narrative is that rural people don’t care about the environment and city people take for granted the wildlife habitat, open space, and other resources that provide a multitude of societal benefits, without understanding that it is rural people who steward the lands that make these benefits possible. The rift between the West’s rural and urban societies can be overcome only when we recognize that we share common goals and appreciate what each produce and the inter-dependencies that bind us.
Along the way, might not Democracy thrive and renew itself with these types of commonalities?
Working in the Radical Center: How Food and Open Space Can Bridge the Rural-Urban Divide
Despite misguided attempts to create rural-urban dichotomies, these alleged differences are, at their core, false. All Americans prefer healthy food and prize open space. Farmers and ranchers produce both though they are only compensated for the first. That more and more of our food comes from offshore and that we are content to shop at box stores for the most expensive cut of meat for the lowest price, makes the job of agriculturists, who guard the West’s open spaces, increasingly tenuous.
Likewise, agriculturists need to acknowledge the importance of cities. This is where their customers are; where libraries, hospitals, universities and colleges, and county courthouses are; where retail businesses are; and where the factories that build trucks and tractors are. If there are true differences between rural and urban populations in the American West, they reside in a bubble that will soon burst. All of us would have to exist in a state of denial to believe that the fates of rural and urban communities are not inherently entwined.
The answer to this dilemma is to connect local food production to local open space and wildlife habitat, economically and ecologically. This will require, where possible, that we eat locally produced food that is well husbanded on land that is well stewarded. To dismiss this solution as nostalgic misses the point. To accept this model of agrarianism is to quicken the day when communities may once again realize their inter-relatedness.
Wendell Berry sunk the stake when he wrote, “The most tragic conflict in the history of conservation is that between environmentalists and farmers and ranchers. It is tragic because it is unnecessary. There is no irresolvable conflict here, but the conflict that exists can be resolved only on the basis of a common understanding of good practice. Here again we need to study and foster working models: farms and ranches that are knowledgeably striving to bring economic practice into line with ecological reality, and local food economies in which consumers conscientiously support the best land stewardship.”[2]
Good news abounds regarding this illusionary divide. There is plenty of evidence that urban and rural people are rediscovering their historic connections. Urban people line up in droves to approve ballot initiatives that protect rural spaces, thumbing their noses at our elected officials who fail to see the high esteem that urban people place on open lands. Since 1998 voters have passed 77 percent of 2,334 ballot measures which have generated over $92 billion for protection of conservation and open space work (www.landvote.org).
In 2024 alone, 54 of 62 ballot initiatives were approved, generating almost four billion dollars for land conservation. And these efforts pass in both red and blue states, ample evidence that food and open space successfully bridge the rural-urban, red-blue divide!
More evidence that the radical center concept works is the number of land trusts that hold conservation easements on private lands. In 1981 there were 370 land trusts in the U.S.; today, there are over 900 that work hand-in-hand with private landowners to keep more than 61 million acres in open space (www.lta.org)!
Ranchers and farmers are getting in on the act, proving beyond doubt that they also would rather continue to farm and ranch and steward the land’s resources than sell to a developer. In Colorado, the statewide cattlemen’s association created its own land trust, the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust (CCALT), the first land trust in the nation to be formed by a traditional agricultural trade group. Since CCALT’s creation in 1995, it has partnered with more than 400 families to conserve over 815,000 acres of private agricultural lands which contain some of the most important wildlife habitats, water resources, and scenic values in all of Colorado.
As a demonstration that this sentiment among Western ranchers and farmers is region-wide, since 1995, eight other agricultural land trusts have been established. These nine organizations serve 12 Midwestern and Western states under the umbrella of the Partnership of Rangeland Trusts (https://rangelandtrusts.org/). More than 2,000 agricultural families have placed easements on over three million acres of private land.
Ranch families have expressed the ultimate private property right, relinquishing forever the “right” to develop lands that are the most productive in the West. These ranch and farm families have drawn a line in the soil that speaks to their commitment to land, family, community, and the production of food. In choosing to forego the last cash crop of many Western farms and ranches—selling to developers—these families illustrate the differences between “takers” and “caretakers.” As ranchers Evan and Catherine Roberts from Colorado told us, they never felt like they owned the land; they felt like they belonged to it.
Agriculturists are taking their message to town as well, demonstrating that producing food for local communities is good for the bottom line, in addition to tying down open spaces. Agriculture can be culturally robust, economically viable, and ecologically sustainable. Concurrently with this, agriculture also has proven it can produce food for a hungry world. Scale matters and it’s gratifying to see those who produce food operating at different scales, from family farms that produce food for local markets, such as farmers markets (www.farmersmarket.net) to large-scale operations that produce food for mass consumption.
If you look anywhere in urban America, you will find evidence that urban people and agriculturists are meeting in the radical center and doing their share to forge a consumption-intelligent production partnership. It’s “radical” because working together in the U.S. is inspiring, particularly since politics at the national level appears to be missing this critical ingredient. It’s hard to deny that these types of cross-cultural interactions strengthen governance and may also enrich our Democracy.
These trends are all growing and point in the right direction. They capture the necessity that David Orr wrote about in The Last Refuge, “For agrarianism to work, it must have urban allies, urban farms, and urban restaurants patronized by people who love good food responsibly and artfully grown…. It must have farmers who regard themselves as trustees of the land that is to be passed on in health to future generations. It must have communities that value farms, farmland, and open spaces.“[3]
Home, Land, and Security
During the heat of recent political campaigns, Americans may have missed two pronouncements. First, the Department of Agriculture briefly mentioned that for the first time Americans imported more food than we exported. Second, a former Secretary of Health and Human Services warned that terrorists could easily reach across our oceans and hurt Americans through these imported foods.
That we now buy more food from offshore than we grow onshore is the inevitable consequence of our globalizing economy. But is all well in the American homeland? And what do these bits of old news have to do with Democracy that works?
David Orr wrote in The Last Refuge, “The resilience that once characterized a distributed network of millions of small farms serving local and regional markets made it invulnerable to almost any conceivable external threat, to say nothing of the other human and social benefits that come from communities organized around prosperous farms.”[4]
The political campaigns of recent years have been full of rhetoric over manufacturing jobs going offshore with nary a word over the loss of agricultural jobs to other countries. The covenant that once bound rural and urban Americans has been severed. Until recently, urban people knew where their food came from, and supported it. Rural people, in return, provided open space and places for city people to hunt, fish, and visit.
In this light our government’s concern over “Homeland Security” misses an important point. A secure homeland is not based solely on military might. Home, land, and security come together when urban people realize that ecologically sustainable food production is possible and that rural cultures matter; when urban people are prepared to compensate farmers and ranchers for a healthy food product as well as for protecting open space, wildlife habitat, and watersheds through husbandry and stewardship. Equally important to this winning equation are rural people who acknowledge the importance of urban areas and offer a friendly handshake to their urban neighbors.
To find evidence that this radical centrist position is tenable is to look at almost any watershed today. In the words of the Radical Center, “We have two choices before us. One is to continue the heated rhetoric of the far right and the far left, spending our time slinging insults and hardening polarization. Or we can join with the thousands of watershed and community-based programs around the country and move to the radical center. The point where people will respectfully listen, respectfully disagree, and in the end, find common ground to promote sound communities, viable economies, and healthy landscapes. By following this behavior, we will, over time, so marginalize the wingnuts on the right and left that our voices will be heard over theirs.“
To return to reality in America will require what Aldo Leopold warned us about in 1928: “Even the thinking citizen is too apt to assume that his only power as a conservationist lies in his vote. Such an assumption is wrong. At least an equal power lies in his daily thought, speech, and action…. But most problems of good citizenship these days seem to resolve themselves into just that. Good citizenship is the only effective patriotism, and patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.“[5]
For Democracy’s sake, it’s time to beat those red and blue swords into purple plowshares!
[1] Leopold, A. 1939. The farmer as a conservationist. Pp. 255-265 in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold. S. L. Flader and J. B. Callicott, eds. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
[2] Berry, W. 2003. The whole horse. Pp. 113-125 in Citizenship Papers. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard.
[3] Orr, D. W. 2004. The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
[4] Orr, D. W. 2004. The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
[5] Leopold, A. 1928. The home builder conserves. Pp. 143-147 in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold. S. L. Flader and J. B. Callicott, eds. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.