There's a lot you can do to stop the strip-mall sprawl aside from writing your local congressman. Of course you can vote smart and lobby, but you may have never realized that you control the development rights to your land, and you can give up those rights to conservation or in some cases sell them to guarantee conservation. In any case, you need not be the defenseless victim of suburban encroachment.

America has lost more than 40 million acres of farmland to development since the first Earth Day in 1970, according to statistics compiled by the American Farmland Trust, the nation's largest farmland conservation organization. Naturally, it's not just farmland that gets developed, but wilderness, forests, and wetlands as well. Lots of "open land" programs have been born in Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, the three Western states experiencing the fastest growth in recent years. Some areas have taken strict measures, like Boulder County's no-growth policies, to preserve quality of life. However, increasing regulations and restrictions in high-growth areas inevitably increases the exclusive nature of living there, making them protected refuges for the chosen. This is one of the dangers and probably the greatest source of people's resistance, especially farmers's, to government- or agency-regulated programs for protecting open space. The Western state with the largest program for protection of open space, after California and Utah, is Montana, possibly because Montana has become the fashionable spot for the rich and famous to spend their leisure time. Private land preservation programs as they currently exist are more feasible to implement if you're wealthy.

When it comes to preservation of open space, farmland has taken a backseat to wilderness. Land trusts devote most attention to protecting wildlife habitat, open space, wetlands, and green ways. Forests and watersheds follow closely behind. Recreational areas are also a high priority. According to an October survey done by the Land Trust Alliance, 54 percent of land trusts participate in farmland protection, while 80 percent work to protect wildlife habitats. Ideally, the preservation of farmland should not be in competition with the preservation of other types of open space. However, policy makers are in the delicate position of balancing finance and space in the quality-of-life equation. Who can blame them if they want to bring money into an area? That's their job. But conservationists are having some success convincing politicians and business people, who tend to think bigger is better and that growth is a sign of progress, that preserving farmland can be as economically beneficial to a community as development. All that sweet productive land daily being paved over at alarming rates has been sold out by rural landowners who, like the politicians and developers, want to take the money off the hands of those rich Californians fleeing Silicon Valley. And why not? But there are a lot of us who just want to keep our rural lifestyle, and keep our land for our kids, and keep the ticky-tacky houses and Burger Kings and parking lots at bay. There's so many of us who feel this way that local governments have begun to offer us more and more incentives to keep our land the way it is. The developers may come calling with lots of cash, but you have options. And I have hope that these options will become more and more attractive as the rural lifestyle becomes more and more threatened by the urban sprawl.