Idaho's Future Hangs On A Delicate Balance: Living The State Motto 'Esto Perpetua' (Be Eternal)
We're going to try and make a long story short. Idaho is known as the Gem State, who's motto proclaims, 'Esto Perpetua', which translates to Be Eternal. The true north of eternity is through sustainability and service. We believe one of the key ingredients towards achieving sustainability is prioritizing service. Being of service in our neighborhoods, in our communities, and to our country. That service is going to be put to the test, especially in the next 5 years or so, here and Idaho and across the world. We sat in on a presentation from the American Farmland Trust, '2040 Future Scenario: Idaho' and we'll be using the fact sheet to illustrate some food for thought:
The presenters gave three scenarios of development between 2016-2040 for Idaho's future; Business-as-Usual, Runaway Sprawl, & Better Built Cities. The latter, Better Built Cities, being the best option to mitigate unavoidable development of Idaho's productive Agricultural lands. Agricultural land in Idaho has contributed the most to the overall quality of life being as high as it is in the state. During the presentation one of the speakers acknowledged we are likely already in the 'Runaway Sprawl' category, particularly, here in the Treasure Valley. In this scenario, we can predict a net loss of productive, agricultural lands around 146,300 acres (a conservative estimate in our opinion). It is important to illustrate what losing 146,300 acres means to Idahoans. For comparison, the City of Chicago sits on 149,760 acres and Zion National Park in Utah is roughly 146,597 (https://www.americanprairie.org/news-blog/how-big-150000-acres).
Below we looked at the Hammond's World Atlas (copyright 1976) to look at population increases for Idaho. In 1976, Idaho's population was 713,008 and as of 2020 the states population is 1.754 million, nearly a 2.5x increase in 44 years. In the runaway sprawl scenario we are currently experiencing, Idaho faces an arduous uphill battle around aligning with the 'Better Built Cities' scenario and mitigating development to just under 65,000 acres. This gap between the worst and best case scenarios is big, complicated, and growing wider.
In all of the scenarios Idaho is going to lose valuable farm and ranch lands to development, this is a fact. The kind of developments those productive Ag lands are going to be converted to is going to be critically important if we're going to move into a sustainable future.
If you look at the illustration for the dominant land use of Idaho you will see a dramatically different Southern Idaho Natural Waterways than we have today. You can also see the snow pack from the picture of the Sun Valley Ski Patrol on the slopes of Baldy Mountain, where the snow pack seems to be less and less each year.
Us Energy has been working on bringing attention to issues like this over the past few years with events like the Carbon Summit and through podcasts on our youtube page. We'll be releasing some new content from the Regenerative Farming Think Tank in Eagle earlier this year discussing transitions like Regenerative Agriculture in Idaho. In order to stop, or at least slow down the runaway sprawl scenario we believe it's going to come down entirely to the commitment of what we call the 3 C's; collaboration, cooperation, and communication (intergenerational). It's going to take a multi-disciplinary approach with numerous stakeholders being engaged from state & local governments, corporations, NGO's, Academia, Entrepreneurs, to the Farmers & Ranchers working the land. This is truly an all hands on deck scenario, with little time for indecision, a scenario which is going to demand leadership at all levels.