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February 3, 2006
Bucolic life, too much so
What happens in America when your desire for country living brings you to, well, the country? Where I live in Southern California it seems to mean that sprawling suburbs that encroach on the few remaining farms in places like Chino and Ontario have no trouble shutting them down as nuisances: the dust, the smells, the noice, the horror!
Not all land use conflicts are clear-cut cases of big developers and rich landowners pitted against small family farms. In lots of cases, the "public nuisance" concept has been used to shut down highly polluting operations.
But some cases do point right at the hypocrisy at the core desires feeding sprawl.
Charles Wolff, a friend of mine in upstate New York, has been representing a guy who moved to Stuyvesant, NY, a couple years ago and started raising some sheep and chickens in small, neat, well-run farm. His chickens would occasionally get loose and enter the yards of adjacent multi-million-dollar homes in this rural Hudson River area north of Manhattan. He met the complaints with an attempt to erect a better fence, which was blocked some confused and illegal moves by town zoning officials, at which point he just let his chickens wander where they would. The bumbling town backed down under threat of lawsuit, and he built his fence. Apparently his chickens have not escaped since.
The town government, however, pushed by a handful of residents who want the bucolic without worry of sighting a chicken on their estates, has now enacted a Dracononian (Drake-onian? argh) ordinance with rapidly escalating fines: up to $500 and fifteen days in jail for wandering livestock. Other area farmers expressed alarm and were calmed with the publicly given assurance that the law would only be applied to this "one chicken farmer on Eichybush Rd." Charles calls this a bill of attainder and has threatened a federal suit. Meanwhile, the farmer's supporters, apparently a majority in the town according to an online poll, have banded together to ridicule the town board's actions.:
The local newspaper has covered the controversy, and apparently outfits like the New York Times and NPR may soon do stories, based on interviews Charles has given recently.
(I've met this chicken farmer, by the way, and he has the most beautiful chickens I've ever seen.)
(Also a propos of nearly nothing, but maybe something, Charles is a former anthropology colleague of mine and earned an M.A. from Cornell.)
Posted by johnn at February 3, 2006 11:28 AM
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