Where Have All the Forests Gone?

      In the spring of 1970, a national television crew traveled to Fairfax County to record the public’s involvement in a dramatic environmental movement. Just a month earlier, millions of Americans had participated in the first Earth Day, raising awareness and learning about environmental issues locally and globally.¹ Earth Day was a headline event in a banner year for modern envisronmentalism, but so too was the news story the television crew covered.

      The event in question was a public hearing on a proposal to preserve a forested landscape along the Potomac from being converted into a luxury housing project. More than two hundred people attended and more than fifty testified, including a number of teenagers.² The highlight of the meeting was a stirring rendition of a folk song written by high school student Susan Daniel. Modeled after Woody Guthrie’s iconic “This Land Is Your Land,” Daniel’s song offered a reflective, youth-centered perspective on the environmental impact of postwar suburbanization as she called for preserving the hills, plans, wildlife, and Potomac waterfront that the Burling tract offered.³

      The year 1970 is often remembered for national events like Earth Day and the creation of the EPA. Indeed, the decade more broadly represented a golden era of environmental policy making reinforced by the rise of national environmental organizations as a potent force in American politics. Even as environmental politics was scaling up, the Burling case testified to the enduring importance of grassroots activism. Indeed, local environmentalists in Fairfax defined the contours of “smart growth” two decades before the term came into official use.

      After a quarter century of rampant suburbanization, residents, officials, and organized interests in Fairfax spent 1970 debating whether the Burling tract should be developed for upscale housing or protected as a park and nature preserve. A year earlier, a local development firm acquired the 336-acre parcel in the mostly white and affluent community of McLean. The firm proposed unusually significant measures to control runoff into the nearby Potomac associated with developing the site’s steep slopes and to preserve half the land as open space. A small group of nearby homeowners, however, had strong misgivings about the potential loss of one of the few wild, forested landscapes left in the county. As they organized for a battle in their backyard, they were joined by hundreds of high school and college students who wanted a nature preserve in the midst of suburbia. A new generation of local elected officials committed to reining in runaway growth joined an intense community struggle to convince the Burling tract’s developer to preserve the landscape for future generations.

      The Burling controversy showed how environmental consciousness among the white middle and upper classes grew as suburbanization intensified. The leisure time that came with the material abundance of postwar America fostered public interest in protecting nearby nature not for its productive capacity, as was the case with traditional conservation, but for its scenic, recreational, and open space amenities.⁴ But suburbanization did not just encroach on open space; it also degraded ecologically sensitive areas such as wetlands and hilly terrain and polluted the water, air, and soil.⁵ As residents in more affluent communities became frustrated with the environmental impact of rapid growth and higher property taxes to support development further out, they embraced land preservation as a way to improve their own quality of life.⁶ The idea that growth could be too expensive—environmentally and financially—was a cornerstone of the smart growth movement in the mid-1990s. This concept was manifest in the Burling case, in which a county that supported rampant postwar suburbanization saw an unprecedented constituency mobilize in favor of environmental protection instead.

      While the Burling case represented a certain triumph of an early smart growth movement, it also highlighted the biases among the mostly white, middle-class environmentalists in suburbia. Postwar housing policies and practices had not only created exclusive communities but also differentiated access to opportunities that improved people’s lives, including good schools, public services, well-paying jobs, transportation, and low incidence of crime.⁷ Even as historically marginalized peoples gained political influence during the 1960s, social segregation reinforced the voices of affluent whites over other groups.⁸ At the time of the Burling case, conversations about inclusive housing had shifted from racial discrimination, which had been outlawed with passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, to affordability.⁹ In affluent, white-dominated communities, however, many residents downplayed the need for affordable housing to focus on protecting environmental resources for their own enjoyment, even in cases where land preservation could be expensive.¹⁰ Thus, environmental activists did not challenge the systems underlying community formation, which benefited them, but instead sought to block specific projects that impaired their access to natural amenities.¹¹

       Postwar Suburbanization and Open Space

      Fairfax County was the epicenter of postwar suburbanization in Greater Washington. The county developed its first zoning code and subdivision regulations in the 1940s, but these proved inadequate to manage the growth ignited by the postwar baby boom and the pent-up demand for housing. By the mid-1950s, its transformation from a quiet rural county to a bustling suburb was well under way.

      Late in the decade, officials reduced the density of development in the western two-thirds of the county in order to maintain its rural character. The Virginia Supreme Court, however, rejected the move, concluding in a case brought by a developer that the policy unfairly restricted housing to those who could afford large lots.¹² The court went even further in doubling the allowable density of the area from one house per two acres to one house per acre. The case reflected the unusual control that the state legislature and judiciary exerted over Virginia localities in land use planning, and the tendency of the state to elevate interests in revenue-generating development over local efforts to manage growth.¹³

      Residential suburbanization and the decentralization of employment and commerce continued to flood Fairfax with development during the 1960s. By 1970, the county had 455,000 residents, a tenfold increase from 1940. Local elected officials and planners, however, had little interest and fewer tools for managing growth than Maryland counties like Montgomery, which developed its own wedges and corridors plan to promote compact development that was based on the regional plans of the