Individualism and Community in the Modern Sierra

Posted by Bill Pieper

December 6, 2006

It's no longer news that the Sierra foothills and the Sierra itself have experienced significant waves of in-migration since the 1970s. At first the newcomers were mainly retirees taking advantage of low real estate values and year-round good weather, especially at the lower elevations.

But as the area's traditional resource economy based on logging, mining and ranching faded, then largely disappeared, new residents arrived to work in or found businesses related to tourism and outdoor recreation. Kayaking, snowmobile treks, hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing and whitewater rafting, along with motels and restaurants, became economic lynchpins. Already developed areas like the Tahoe Basin drew this population initially, then similar demographic influences began to be felt throughout the range.

Other newcomers braved long commutes to jobs in Reno, Carson City and California's Central Valley cities. More recently, as the Internet has allowed workers to settle anywhere and telecommute, the appeal of mountain living increased. By far the majority of these commuters, telecommuters and service economy entrepreneurs, however, come from urban areas and bring with them urban sensibilities and attitudes.

But urban attitudes are often quite individualistic, particularly regarding questions of lifestyle, culture and schools, and conflict with the community norms of established Sierra population centers. One the other hand, those community norms typically favor a greater individualism than the former urbanites are comfortable with concerning property rights and environmental issues. In many places this has led to resentment and a fracturing of community.

The bonds holding communities together has been an interest of mine for quite a while, especially since reading a 1985 sociological study Habits of the Heart – Individualism and Communitarianism in American Life by Robert N. Bellah, which I rank among the handful of books that have most influenced me.

Additional thinking and reading about the concept of community led me to the essays of Wallace Stegner, who famously said, "I hate cowboys." By which he meant the cowboy myth that unbridled individualism has been the foundation of our national experience. It was cooperation, he insists, in the form of communal water projects, shared labor, shared equipment, and neighbor looking after neighbor that shaped the westward expansion and won the American west.

After Stegner my next stop was Isaiah Berlin, whose work centered on understanding civilization and totalitarianism. This quote from his work is an example: "One of the fundamental human needs, as basic as those for food or shelter… is to belong to identifiable communal groups, each possessing its own… traditions, historical memories, style and outlook. Only if we truly belong to such a community, naturally and unselfconsciously, can we… lead full, creative, spontaneous lives…"

Or, back to Stegner: "… American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has often developed without its corrective, which is belonging." Yet both Berlin and Stegner recognized that belonging has multiple dimensions: there is the community of the barn raising and the threshing bee as well as the community of the lynch mob or the Hitler Youth.

What came to fascinate me, though, was the natural, day-to-day tension between individualism and community, and the tradeoffs necessary to reconcile the two in some lasting way. How much of one must people cede in order to gain the other? Yet all cultures, whether communitarian like Japan's or nominally individualistic like our own, have ways of downplaying this tension, of pretending that it doesn't exist. My goal here, and in my 2006 novel Belonging is to acknowledge it and see it more clearly.

The story is set in Downieville, the seat of Sierra County government, where I once lived and still have many friends. The timeframe is the mid-1970s, chosen to capture the beginning of the demographic wave discussed earlier. Moreover, I'm told that the conflicts I portrayed as fiction are now more pointed and more relevant in fact. Not only have newcomers driven property values up, creating housing pressure on local families, but newcomers have a great deal more disposable income these days, relatively speaking, so increasingly rely on imported urban pleasures enjoyed privately rather than on community activities.

While I know this decrease in community to be true of Downieville, Nevada City and Auburn, the places with which I am most familiar, and I suspect it applies more broadly throughout the Sierra, I'm not certain. Hence I especially invite comments and thoughts on this theme from readers elsewhere in the range. Does anyone but me find the inevitable tradeoffs between individualism and community in mountain California society now weighted more toward the former and less toward the latter than they were ten, twenty or thirty years ago?

Bill Pieper, Author of the novel Belonging  (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006)

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