As you veteran Chronicle readers know, preserving wildlife and places for us to ride and keep our horses has been a passionate issue for me for as long as I can remember. So for the last decade I’ve followed the progress of the Equestrian Land Conservation Resource and tried to support their efforts in the magazine.

I’ve now joined the Board of Directors and I’m honestly excited to be a part of the ELCR because it’s their 10th anniversary and I think it’s a harbinger of accomplishments to come for all of us who own horses and, especially, those of us who keep them at home.

In June, the Chronicle’s weekly online survey asked, “Where does your horse live?” Some 36 percent kept their horses at home, compared to 40 percent who kept them at a full-service boarding stable. Since 12 percent said they keep their horses at a self-care barn, and another 4 percent explained other self-care arrangements, that means that more than half the respondents care for their own horses. To be honest, that’s a much higher number than I’d have expected.

You know, it’s up to every one of us who rides, but especially those who keep their horses at home, to do something–today, this year–to make sure that in 30 or 40 years there will still be farms where we can keep our horses, trails where we can ride, venues where we can compete, and (most importantly) farmers who can still grow hay and grain (and charge less than $20 a bale).

A challenge we have at the ELCR is convincing a wide swath of riders to be a part of our program. Serious competitors often dismiss our mission as pointed at trail riders or even foxhunters. And trail riders (whose numbers dwarf those of us competing) think our mission is mostly about saving fancy competition sites.

Neither is right. Honestly, what we directors worry most about is being able to just keep horses in the future–and to afford it. And that’s an issue that should concern everyone.

Georgiana McCabe has been on the ELCR board ever since its founding in 1997 and is serving her second year as president.

She told me that the area of southern Fairfield County (Conn.) where she grew up (she lives near Charlottesville, Va., now) during the 1940s and ’50s was still undeveloped enough that she could get on her pony and ride all day on a network of trails through and around her town.

“This is now entirely lost,” Georgiana recounted. “When my own children were growing up and riding there, I was struck by how impoverished their opportunities were for the kind of independence and exhilaration I’d experienced in the very same place. I became committed to doing whatever I could so that my grandkids and their descendents could have the wonderful knowledge of riding in the open.”

Rand Wentworth, who’s impressively revitalized the Land Trust Alliance as its president, advised us all to read Richard Louv’s book Last Child In The Woods to understand how detached America’s children have become from the natural world.

Louv notes that in 1900, 40 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms. In 1990, only 1.9 percent lived on farms.

Louv observes, “Baby Boomers–Americans born between 1946 and 1964–may constitute the last generation of Americans who share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water.”

And he adds, “The shift in our relationship to the natural world is startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to nature.

Admittedly, some of us cherish riding on trails and through meadows more than others, but the true bottom-line issue for all of us is the availability of pasture and of hay and grain.

Already, a relationship with a reliable guy who makes good hay is as important to us as having a capable and reliable doctor. But the difference is that there will always be doctors, because the need for them only increases as the population grows.

But hay farmers are becoming a rarer and rarer breed, because the costs just aren’t worth the market price they can get for their hayfields. And that’s an issue that all of us need to address.

Here’s What I Don’t Get

We moved to California in June, to a farm that’s under a state law called the Williamson Act. It was in many ways a brilliant piece of conservation legislation enacted 40 years ago to protect agricultural land, by offering significant tax breaks, as the state’s population exploded.

One problem: It doesn’t say that horses do or do not count as agricultural animals, and it’s up to county staff to interpret that. In Sonoma County, staff members have decided horses aren’t agricultural, even though more than 18,000 equines live here (of the state’s 698,000, second only to Texas) and elected officials have signed off on a general plan that includes horse farms and facilities.

Plus, there’s a move afoot in the county to establish 300-foot fencing setbacks on all streams, which will significantly reduce the land horse owners and farmers can use for pasture and crops. Members of the California Farm Bureau and environmental groups, who should be partners, are squaring off.

I asked Georgiana McCabe, president of the Equestrian Land Conservation Resource, why she thought we horse owners are increasingly seen as “the enemy” to conservation.

“This reflects, I think, the vastly increased urbanization of the population,” she told me. “There is ignorance, and fear even, of horses, and all sorts of nonsense about the destructiveness, for example, of their hooves on the land and of the ‘M’ word [manure].”

Last spring, though, Georgiana visited Highland Township, Mich., which has designated itself “a horse-friendly community.” Its zoning encourages people to keep their horses there, and they’ve even put in hitching posts on Main Street.

“That was accomplished by a small group of determined horsepeople, who worked for two or three years to make it happen,” said Georgiana. “We face ignorance and misinformation. All there is to do is to work hard and to patiently dismantle both of these issues wherever and whenever we can–as individuals and as an organization.”