At our ski hill I recently overheard one of my friends, Duke Brown, tell a refugee couple from Denver that “this is the perfect place to live.” Mr. Brown holds a good position, lives the good life, skis, mountain bikes, and guides fly-fishing clients.

My friend is an excellent ambassador-in-residence. I’m glad he is here -- but the message of perfection erodes our quality of life. This popularity problem afflicts the “best of the West,” i.e., those places with a conjunction of natural amenities, culture, education, and good transportation.

Over the long run, not all good things go together. When considering consequences of in-migration, the attributes of perfection are harbingers of doom. Here’s why.

An attractive place acts like a magnet. It draws people until the impact of aggregation diminishes its attractiveness. The logic is straightforward. People crowd in; land conversion and congestion ultimately reduce the quality of life.

Can we do anything to reduce the negative consequences of this process? I know there are no easy, cost-free answers. We can, however, cope better if we understand the roots of the problem.

We have the immense good fortune to live in America, the most successful large-scale social, political, and economic experiment in history. We are free to move at will. We do -- but not randomly. We locate in those places where we can best experience and express our desires. Basically, folks with many options seek all the attributes of the good life, e.g., security, beauty, civility, and amenities. And there are only a few places that have this conjunction.

Yes, there are trade-offs. Folks in the professions, for example academics, architects, and attorneys, sacrifice income for other qualities of life when they move to small towns. On this scale, and assuming they are good in their field, they could do better in Boston than Bozeman, Milwaukee than Missoula. But here they come. And increasingly, here they stay. This is the tide we can’t hold back.

The results are compellingly obvious in the form of sprawl spreading from cities and towns. This diminishes the features that originally brought the urban refugees, especially vast expanses of open space surrounding towns.

Why should this be a problem? Half of the West is owned by the federal government, primarily range, forests, and lands above timberline. Nearly all of this is open space. But as range scientist Rick Knight of Colorado State University notes, the federal lands are mostly “rock and ice or desert and thorn.” The private lands are at lower elevations, better watered, and have richer soils. Our ancestors didn’t select their homesteads by accident.

According to Knight, as a result of these features the private lands are “probably an order of magnitude more important to the maintenance of the region’s biodiversity than are the public lands.” And these, quite naturally, are precisely the lands being broken into large lots and ranchettes. The resultant fragmentation has significant negative social and ecological consequences.

Clearly, the changes flowing from conversion of farms and ranches depreciates the natural heritage that contributes to the attractiveness of our region. And the pressures to convert are huge. In the Gallatin Valley, for example, the yearly cash flow from non-irrigated land is about $30 per acre. This implies a financial value of $400 to $600 per acre. Yet, in housing tracts the land fetches roughly ten or more times that. Especially for the aging farmer or rancher, the incentives to subdivide are huge. And so are the results of conversion.

Knight notes: “Rather than lark buntings and bobcats, we will have starlings and striped skunks.” He then asks: “Is that the West we want? It will be the West we get if we do not slow down and get to know the human and natural histories of our region better, and then act to conserve them.”

I suspect that most of us will agree with this line of reasoning and its conclusions. There is however, no emerging consensus on how to confront the problems of sprawl. If the problem were easy, by now we’d have satisfying answers. We’re in need of idea entrepreneurs and a host of experiments if we are to conserve the natural environment that makes this such a great place.