The West as Home: Living in the West

Question for Discussion: How should we live
in the Modern West of fact, myth, legend, and
story?

Reading: Worster, "The Legacy of John Wesley
Powell"; Leopold, "Thinking like a Mountain";
Kittredge, "Owning it All"

Video: Cadillac Desert: Conserve Water ;
The Greatest Good: Leopold and Wolves

Quiz: What does Aldo Leoplold mean by
learning to "think like a mountain"?

Response Paper: How does the Indian's mythic story
of the West contrast with the "Mythic American West"?
Do these Indians intentionally tell their story of the West in order to challenge every point of the Anglo-American story? Is the Indian's Mythic West a counter-myth to the Anglo-American Mythic West? (1-2 page paper due on Monday, Feb. 23.)
( See Anglo-American vs. Indian Stories on
the American West )

Living in the 21st Century West

The Challenge of the Arid West (in-class)
California faces third year of drought
and water shortages
California's Water Crisis
Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
NOAA map of annual rainfall in the West (in-class)
Weather Cycles in the Northern Rockies,
1900-1998 (in-class)
Topographic Map of the American West (in-class)
The West from Space at Night (in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West (in-class)
Western Land owned by the Government (in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Kittredge on Re-imagining the West as our
Home
Stegner on Making the West Home (in-class)
Quotes from A Society to Match the Scenery
(in-class)
Leopold: Thinking Like a Mountain (in-class)
Kittredge: Owning It All (in-class)
Kittredge, Owning the Birds (in-class)
Worster: Public Ownership & Control
of the West (in-class)
Drought, Fire, and Weeds challenge the West
Ten Water Laws of the West (in-class)
Robert Athearn's West (in-class)
State Map of the 20th Century American West
(in-class)
Paving Paradise
Agricultural Water use in the West (in-class)
Damming the West (in-class)
Basic Elements of the Colorado River Compact
(in-class)
Bureau of Reclamation Dams in the West (in-class)

The Challenge of the 21st Century West

“When the West fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the pattern that most characterizes and preserves it, then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”
Wallace Stegner, "The Sound of Mountain Water"

The larger challenge is: "Can we create a society to match the scenery." Can we learn to settle and live in the real West and finally face the challenge of making the West home?"
....................from A Society to Match the Scenery

William Kittredge, Owning It All

Imagining a New Western Myth

"In the American West we are struggling to revise our dominant mythology, and to find a new story to inhabit. Laws control our lives, and they are designed to preserve a model of society based on values learned from mythology. Only after re-imagining our myths can we coherently remodel our laws, and hope to keep our society in a realistic relationship to what is actual."

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Wrestling with the Old Western Myth

". . . A MYTHOLOGY can be understood as a story that contains a set of implicit instructions from a society to its members, telling them what is valuable and how to conduct themselves if they are to preserve the things they value."

"Lately, more and more of us are coming to understand our society in the American West as an exploited colony, threatened by greedy outsiders who want to take our sacred place away from us, or at least to strip and degrade it. "

"And our mythology tells us we own the West, absolutely and morally—we own it because of our history. Our people brought law to this difficult place, they suffered and they shed blood and they survived, and they earned this land for us. Our efforts have surely earned us the right to absolute control over the thing we created. The myth tells us this place is ours, and will always be ours, to do with as we see fit. "

"The truth is, we never owned all the land and water. We don’t even own very much of them, privately. And we don’t own anything absolutely or forever. As our society grows more and more complex and interwoven, our entitlement becomes less and less absolute, more and more likely to be legally diminished. Our rights to property will never take precedence over the needs of society. Nor should they, we all must agree in our grudging hearts. Ownership of property has always been a privilege granted by society, and revokable."

"Most of us who grew up owning land in the West believed that any impairment of our right to absolute control of that property was a taking, forbidden by the so-called “taking clause” of the Constitution. We believed regulation of our property rights could never legally reduce the value of our property. After all, what was the point of ownership if it was not profitable? Any infringement on the control of private property was a communist perversion.

But all over the West, as in all of America, the old folkway of property as an absolute right is dying. Our mythology doesn’t work anymore."

"The liberties our people came seeking are more and more constrained, and here in the West, as everywhere, we hate it.

Simple as that. And we have to live with it. There is no more running away to territory. This is it, for most of us. We have no choice but to live in community. If we’re lucky we may discover a story that teaches us to abhor our old romance with conquest and possession."

"My grandfather died in 1958, toppling out of his chair at the pinochle table, soon after I came back to Warner, but his vision dominated our lives until we sold the ranch in 1967. An ideal of absolute ownership that defines family as property is the perfect device for driving people away from one another. There was a rule in our family. “What’s good for the property is good for you.”

Owning the Birds

"The old man would sit there a while in his Cadillac and gaze at the magpies with his merciless blue eyes, and the birds would stare back with their hard black eyes. The summer dust would settle around the Cadillac, and the silent confrontation would continue. It would last several minutes. ...

"He would lift the shotgun, and from no more than twelve feet, sighting down that barrel where the bluing was mostly worn off, through the chicken wire into the eyes of those trapped magpies, he would kill them one by one, taking his time, maybe so as to prove that this was no accident."

"I cannot grieve for my grandfather. It is hard to imagine, these days, that any man could ever again think he owns the birds."

Leopold, Thinking Like A Mountain

Excepts from Leopold's Writings

Excepts from "A Sand County Almanac" (1949)

"Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt, in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land. "

"In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead
into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing."

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes---something known only to her and to the mountain."

"I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades."

"So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range
of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea."

"Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise."

"A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men."

Worster, The Legacy of John Weselly Powell

"The western lands were not only big, brown, bare, and imposing; they also confronted the traveler with a time scale that was older than anyone had once supposed possible."

"But his most significant legacy remains obscure and even forgotten. That Legacy was a set of ideas pertaining to the American people's relationship to the western lands, ideas that were more radical, more sweeping than we have appreciated or ever tried to apply. I want to retrieve them from neglect and ask what they still might offer us at this late date in the region's history."

"To a greater extent than any of his predecessors in western exploration, Powell tried to ask comprehensive questions about the whole of the place, about how it came to be what it was and how it was still taking form before his eyes."

"In struggling to the rim of the canyons, he was trying to overcome his own cultural bias, his own limitations, in order to see the land in and for itself. He then tried to show others who came into the place--Northerners, Southerners, Europeans, all kinds of immigrants---what that objective physical reality was. They needed, he thought, to know where they had arrived, and science would be their best guide."

"Above all, he wanted them to see that all the natural resources of the West were connected into a single integrated whole, so that what was done to the mountain forests affected the lowland streams, and the lands without water were intricately related to those with water."

"Outside of government, however, other Westerners besides Webb had begun to rediscover Powell and honor him for having clearly seen the environmental realities of the region. The Montana newspaperman Joseph Kinsey Howard, for instance, referred to the 1878 report as "one of the most remarkable studies of social and economic forces ever written in America ." Had it been followed,
he thought, it would have prevented the inevitable ruin of the northern plains by greed and prevented the blasting of so many naive hopes; "

"Though neither DeVoto nor Stegner put the argument so boldly, what they were clearly calling for was a new understanding of the significance of the West, one that made Powell central: the West as a battleground between the global economic system of capitalism, which was amenable neither to environmental adaptation, conservation, nor democracy, and an alternative social ideal of public planning, communal ownership of resources, and community decision-making about their development. In Stegner's own words, "within the bureaucrat dwelt a democratic idealist with a peculiarly unselfish and devoted notion of public service. And both the bureaucrat and the idealist knew that private interests, whether they dealt in cattle or sheep, oil, minerals, coal, timber, water, or land itself, could not be trusted or expected to take care of the land or conserve its resources for the use of future generations."

"Westerners of many stripes want to lay claim to Powell, because they sense that he shared their interest in, their loyalty toward, the West. He was, in a sense, the father of their country. But today he would be a most bewildered old fellow if he came back to look at the West we have been making: "

"What those 77 million still have in common, despite demographic and cultural changes, is the land itself . Even today questions about how that land ought to be used, exploited, or preserved continue to dominate western conversations and public-policy debates. Much of that land is still in public tide, despite all the access that has been allowed to private users. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the West, after aridity, is the
de facto extensive public ownership of that land: hundreds of millions of acres in all, a feature that ties the past to the present."

"The Western public lands are simply not going to pass into a private ownership ever . Slowly but irreversibly, the nation and the region are moving in a direction that other nations took a long while back, toward placing more and more rules and restrictions on the rights of individuals to develop any land, public or private. We are moving toward communalizing land in America , though slowly and with much litigation, more slowly often than the developers are moving to turn it into shopping malls and housing estates."

"Despite its several weaknesses, its inability to anticipate all the conditions and issues that characterize the American West of the late twentieth century,
Powell 's alternative model for governing the region is still capable of being made relevant. It is still possible, though getting more difficult all the time, to bring all citizens into the process of decision-making for the public lands and the natural environment as a whole. The issue, as before, is whether we have the desire to do so. "

"Nearly a century after Powell's death, we are still discovering the West, still exploring its hidden country and mapping its physical realities. We have not yet invented all the institutions we will ever need in order to live in the place. That is why Powell is still worth heeding. He is somewhere behind us in the canyons of the past, yet we can still catch the echo of his vision: Learn where you are. Learn about this place and its history. Learn not only the history of its people but the history of the land itself, its deep history. Learn to adapt your ideas and institutions to that land. Learn to work together if you mean to endure."

From A Society to Match the Scenery

"The West is a place distinctive for its aridity,
its open spaces, its rich natural resources,
and its instructive mix of cultures, human skills,
and perspectives" (p. 4)

"But in the West, a combination of aridity and
remoteness has forced humans to leave greater
chunks of the scenery alone." (p. 5)

"If most people in the West live in cities, then to
keep the West liveable, we have to see that
cities are liveable." (p. 7)

"We have been unwilling to imagine the
possibility of a good city...and we believed--
we still believe--that we can somehow escape
ourselves by slipping into the mountains,
avoiding the hard task of facing up to ourselves
in cities." (p. 7)
......Daniel Kemmis

"How do we live with the physical limits of
the land? What kind of stewards of the land will
we be?" (p. 9)

"Can we, in the late twentieth century, become
genuine settlers, and not unsettlers, of this
region?" (p. 9)

"Westerners need to take the opportunity
presented by this moment in history: the
opportunity to 'dream other dreams, and better.'
" (p. 10) Wallace Stegner

"When parts of Western America, from the air,
seem to say, clearly and directly, that humanity
is an infection of the earth, and this region has
come down with a bad case of it." (p. 46)

"White Americans who entered the West... had
a clear idea that they were agents of progress."
(p. 48)

[In the West]...up to this point, the scenery has
considerably outscored the society. The
scenery, by and large, looks better than the
society." (p. 49)

"And when the last Red man shall have
perished, and the memory of my tribe shall
have become a myth among the White Men,
these shores will swarm with the invisible
dead of my tribe....The White Man will never
be alone." (p. 64)

"The 'vanishing red man' theory of the last
century was erroneous. We never did vanish.
The tribes are still here and have have no
intention of leaving the American West." (p. 62)

"What do you mean, is it real?"

"Is your town real?"

It hit me like a ton of bricks. We had created an
artificial Santa Fe to maintain what some people
thought Santa Fe should be.... We're doing this all over the West. Why? Commercialism. We need the tourist dollar. But how do we solve this problem? I don't have any answers..." (p. 76)

The larger challenge is: "Can we create a society to match the scenery." Can we learn to settle and live in the real West and finally face the challenge of making the West home?'