Stress and change go hand in hand, even when that change is thoroughly positive and much to the advantage of the people who are involved. Physiological and psychological signals of stress show up, for example, when people are promoted at work, or move up and can afford the bigger house that they've wanted for some time. The course of evolution probably hard-wired that reflex into the human brain: managing risk is seemingly less daunting when we think that we know and can predict a constant environment.

A relatively constant environment and social fabric have been rare birds in Gardiner since the town was founded in 1853. For the first three-quarters of its existence, Gardiner's population was gradually but persistently shrinking to half its original level as America became the world's leader in farm productivity.

New kinds of machinery and new breeds of plants and animals meant that fewer and fewer people were needed to produce more and more food. Compared to most other towns in these parts, good farmland occupies a relatively high proportion of Gardiner's territory. Fewer people were required to work it profitably.

That situation changed dramatically during the great post-World War II economic boom, when Gardiner became, and still is, one of the fastest growing towns along the Shawangunk Ridge. Some of that growth can be attributed to its native landscape. Good farmland ranges from flat to gently rolling fields — exactly the kind of land that's an easier construction option for builders. A big chunk of the town is located right on the Shawangunk Ridge, which is an attractive option to many people. Plus, the people living on the plains get to look up at splendid scenery.

A second component is spillover from the fastest growing county in New York State, Orange County. A third is serving as a suburb to New Paltz, which expanded in pace with the transformation of its state teacher's college into a campus of the SUNY-school system.

Let's attach some concrete numbers to these demographic trends: the first national census after the end of the Civil War indicated that Gardiner counted 1,991 people in 1870. By 1920, Gardiner's population fell to 1,088 and dropped by another 100 people in 1930. The New Deal and the beginning of World War II brought some recovery, to roughly 1300 people, by 1940, and that's where things still stood when the great post-1950 American economic boom took off like a rocket.

By 1970, Gardiner's population doubled to 2,598. It doubled again to 5,238 by 2000. The last set of demographic estimates indicates that things continued to clip along rapidly as Gardiner's population hit 5,733 in 2007.

Grow like that, and your town's social and institutional fabric will be out of kilter with the new demography. Gardiner in its found years had, in fact, a deeper organizational structure than it has today with three times the population. The Gardiner of 1870 had more stores, more hotels, plenty of factories for a farm community, and nine schools.

Getting in kilter is not easy. It hasn't been easy in Gardiner. Getting in kilter can create a lot of strife and strong emotions. That has been the case in Gardiner.

But it can be done, and done at an impressive pace, as is the case in Gardiner.

The relative lack of central community institutions in Gardiner was striking when I first became acquainted with the town ten years ago. One of the job skills that one acquires in local development work is scouting out just this kind of thing. In fact, it's one of the most enjoyable parts of the job description.

Aside from the fact that the central hamlet's main street was downright scruffy and didn't even have sidewalks, many of the hallmarks of a typical American small town of more than 5,000 people just weren't there. No supermarket. No schools. No weekly paper. No drugstore. An empty and deteriorating old school house begging for renovation. A library that was way too small for a town of this size. No town hall.

Contrast that with some large and very fine farms; houses going up all over the place; and a reasonably busy light-industrial zone. Many individual households and businesses were doing quite okay for themselves. The social and institutional fabric that typically frames good small town life had a lot of holes.

I most certainly am not saying that Gardiner was a social void. Very active Dutch Reformed and Catholic churches respectively anchored the main street. The Jehovah's Witnesses' farms and offices are a major presence in the area: I have found them to be excellent and fascinating neighbors. Gardiner's hardware store, the general store, and restaurant, respectively, at Irelands Corner (the intersection of Routes 44/55 and 208), the post office, and a good Italian restaurant next to rented space for the town office provided nice gathering nodes. Not to mention a German restaurant near the Ridge that is justly a regional attraction (especially to people with last names like mine).

What I am saying is that the loose and relatively sparse community fabric that worked when the town had 1,660 in 1960 did not meet the needs of a booming town that had 5,733 people in 2007 — not if the place is going to avoid being a poster child for the excesses of urban sprawl in exurbia. Go through the town today, and the changes in community fabric that have been achieved since the beginning of this new century are striking and impressive. The deteriorating old school house has been renovated into a town hall with the help of good doses of volunteered expertise and labor. A new town office building backs the renovated old building. A model small town library and cultural center have seen the light of day thanks to the very hard work of creating widespread community support.

Gardiner's master plan has become a framework for real behavior thanks to new zoning laws that have done much to preserve the beauty of Gardiner's section of the Shawangunk Ridge, which is the fulcrum to the town's crucial tourist sector. An even tougher nut to crack was zoning for smarter growth in the lowlands where most people in Gardiner live, but it has been done. This includes streamlining overly complex licensing procedures for businesses wishing to establish or expand their operations in Gardiner.

Several of the people most involved in recent community initiatives have also voted with their feet and bank accounts to establish new businesses in town: a prize-winning architectural firm, a good wine shop, a bakery-restaurant which is a favored destination when my friends visit Gardiner, an important real estate office relocated from New Paltz to Gardiner…the list goes on. It includes newcomers who just like what they see, like an excellent bike shop near the improved Gardiner section of an old rail trail.

How and why did all of this happen? Paradoxically, by people arguing like crazy.

First out of the gate was a proposal to build a Stewart's shop in the hamlet. A citizens' group, GARD, was formed to oppose the project. Opposition was based on a combination of concerns about the environment (the shop and its gas pumps would have been located over an aquifer supplying drinking water) and having a chain store as opposed to locally-owned business in town.

GARD became the node for a network of citizens who questioned the rationality of 1) Gardiner's rather laissez-faire housing boom, and 2) a pretty reasonable master plan which, however, didn't have the complimentary legislation necessary to translate good thoughts into action. This culminated in a major petition drive to request a moratorium on development while the requisite legislation was discussed and enacted.

If you want to get most — though not all — people in the building sector really hot under the collar, propose a construction moratorium while new legislation is being debated. Then stir in a chink of people who don't like the idea on philosophic grounds.

This moratorium debate was well under way when the mega-project Awosting Reserve proposal was announced in the autumn of 2002. Using 'red-hot' as a term to describe the upped intensity of the debate is a considerable understatement.

What the 'red-hot' did for Gardiner was to take a gangly, shooting-up adolescent town and force it to ask itself what it wanted to be when it grew up. The reins of government changed hands in the 2003 elections, and a reform-oriented town board has done much to spark the changes that are now so physically evident. In this case, the new board is Democratic. In others, like Warwick, it's Republican. Party is not the paramount issue.

More important, in my eyes, is that many more citizens began focusing their attention and energies on what Gardiner should become as a community — pro or con, with respect to what's happened over the last five years. Indifference is the worst opponent to building the cultural capital that makes towns tick well. Add in two successive Gardiner supervisors inclined to govern from the center, trying to build a longer-lasting consensus around controversial issues like open space preservation, and the accomplishments may weather the winds of electoral politics.

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