Daily Class OutlineDaily Class QuestionsDaily Class Web LinksDaily Class Notes



Question for Discussion: According to Limerick
and Wilkinson, what should the balance be between
wilderness protection and economic growth and
development in the West?

Reading: Limerick, "The Shadow of Heaven Itself";
Wilkinson, "Wild Lands and Fundamental Values";
Travis, Growth and Development Zones in the West;
Herrick, The Rich Are Buying Land ; Jenkins, Land Turner Owns ; Ted Turner Land Purchases Questioned ; Johnson, Rich Carve Up Open Land in the West

Video: CNN: Sprawl in Atlanta ; Subdivide and
Conquer DVD--Sprawl's Harm to Cities

Daily Class Web Links
The West as Memory

Western Defenders

Daily Class Outline

  1. Megapolitan Areas: Urban Growth Zones in
    the West     (in-class)

  2. Map of West Growth Zones at Night (in-class)

  3. Travis, Growth Zones in the West (in-class)

  4. Sierra Club: Stop Sprawl (in-class)

  5. Atlanta Sprawl:Social Equity Dimensions
    of Uneven Growth and Development     (in-class)

  6. DiCarlo, Why Sprawl is Good (in-class)

  7. See Western Futures: 2000-2040
    for discussion of the problems of Growth

  8. Limerick, The Shadow of Heaven Itself (in-class)

  9. Wilkinson, Wild lands and Fundamental Values

  10. The Rich Are Buying Land (in-class)

  11. Ted Turner Land Purchases Questioned (in-class)

  12. Ted Turner: U.S. Land Baron (in-class)

  13. Land Report: The 100 Largest Land Owners
    in America     (in-class)

  14. The Land Report: The Magazine of the
    American Landowner     (in-class)

  15. West, Stegner, Storytelling, and Western identity

  16. Western Land Defenders (in-class)

  17. Wilderness Protection in the West (in-class)

  18. Why Should we protect Wilderness, Recreation,
    and Open Space lands in the West?     (in-class)

  19. Tourism brings in between 300 and 400 billion
    dollars a year to the West. This is much more than
    mining, logging, and ranching bring in to the rural
    West.

  20. Forest Service Works to Preserve Open Space
    (in-class)

  21. More than Half of Colorado is Protected
    as Open Space     (in-class)

  22. GOCO: Great Outdoors Colorado

  23. 2007 Inventory of Open Space Land Colorado

  24. 2007 Map of Protected Land in Colorado (in-class)

  25. 2007 More Detailed Map of Protected
    Land In Colorado     (in-class)

  26. See Annotated Version of this Protected
    Land Map

  27. Colorado Uses Tax Easements to Preserve Land
    (in-class)

  28. Saving Colorado's Scenic Landscapes

  29. The Challenge of Smart Growth (in-class)

  30. Organizations working on Smart Growth



Daily Class Questions

 

 



Daily Class Notes

"...the American West has defaulted as often as it has delivered on its promise to cure. And yet the belief in the West as remedy persists."
Limerick

Contradictions facing the present and future American West:

1. The West is the most urbanized region of the United States.

2. Westerners tend to move more often, and live in places a shorter period of time, than people in other regions of the United States.

3. The West holds firmly to a "mythic west"
that often undermines its understanding of its past, present, and future.

4. The myth of the West insists that it is a place of individual freedom and opportunity that the government, environmentalists, and any one else has no right to threaten.

5. The West contains large expanses of arid, desert land that will never be productive.

6. Aridity and lack of a reliable water supply is a major factor that limits Western growth and
development.

7. The West tends to be a Republican region, insisting on the individual's right to get rich and
to use their property as they please.

8. Large chunks of the West are controlled by the Federal government, and Federal laws tend to restrict development and growth on this land.

9. There is an increasing conflict between Western resource extractors, environmentalists, recreational users, second-home Westerners and tourists, and developers.

10. There is increasing population density in large, spread-out urban areas such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle, ....

11. Because good jobs often are located in crowded urban areas, Westerners feel compelled, often against their wishes, to settle in these crowded urban areas.

12. Faced with increasing crowding, pollution, crime, and a declining quality of life in larger urban areas, many Westerners try to escape to the suburbs and even the exurbs.

13. Commute times for Westerners going to and from work have been increasing as more and more Westerners flee to the suburbs.

14. Faced with living in crowded urban areas, increasing numbers of Westerners seek escape through outdoor recreation and wilderness experiences.

15. As more and more Westerners seek relief in the Western backcountry, the Western wilderness feels increasingly crowded and endangered.

16. The West is increasingly a multicultural, multinational, and global region whose future depends on the growth of a global economy.

17. Despite the West's continued dependence on theFederal government, Westerners tend to resent and resist Federal government efforts
to shape the region's future.

18. The West is an increasing magnet for immigration from Latin America and Asia.

19. Faced with increasing cultural diversity, the West still wants to see itself as an Anglo-American culture and society.

20. Faced with all the above contradictions, the West still clings to it mythic past as the last frontier of American freedom, individualism, and rights.

The West is a place that can be characterized by certain common characterists:

1. The West is prone to aridity and semi-aridity.

2. The West contains many Indian reservations
and many visible, unvanished Indian people.

3. The West shares a border with Mexico, and
has been the entry point for Mexican immigrants.

4. The West provides a gateway to Asia and the
Asian-Pacific rim.

5. The West contains the bulk of the land still
under federal control.

6. The West to this day still demonstrates and
displays the ongoing legacy of conquest in
everyday American life.

7. The West has a long history of boom/bust
economies of extractive industries such as mining, logging, ranching, oil drilling, and commercial farming.

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8. The West has a long history of "commercial,
intentional mythologizing" of the West as a place of romantic escape and adventure.

9. The West has been the United States' dumping ground for difficult peoples, toxic wastes, and nuclear materials.

10. Despite the myth of its rural roots and traditions, 70 to 80 percent of Westerners live
in large urban areas.

Travis, Growth and Development Zones in the West

Travis argues there are four development zones in the West today:

1. Metro-zones
2. Exurb-zones
3. Resort-zones
4. Gentrified-zones

The West hosts the fastest-growing cities in the United States. In night­time satellite photographs, some, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, stand out as circles of light against a black background of open spaces (fig. 2.1). Others sprout multiple tendrils that connect peripheral blobs of light in lopsided constellations, such as those across Southern and Northern California and northwestern Washington .

Rather, the West is marked by sprawling metro-zones, made up of multiple cities, suburban development in the unincorporated interstices among the cities, and open spaces now subsumed into the metropolitan landscape.

Western analysts like to point out that the region is markedly "urban" despite its agrarian varnish. The vast majority of' westerners, including most of those who
arrived in the recent surges of population growth, live in suburban settings (fig. 2.2) (some 82 percent in 2000, compared with a national average of 78 percent).

What does the West's urban character mean geographically? Most westerners are not technically urbanites, but suburbanites, and the suburbs, not the central cities, have seen most of the region ' s growth since World War II and have gained most of the new jobs and businesses. Indeed, the cities are dominated by the suburbs geographically, visually, and more and more, politically and economically. Suburbs will absorb the majority of the 28 million additional people expected to live in the eleven western states by 2030. Although you may hear that Phoenix and Las Vegas are booming, their newer suburban cities, with less famous names, are actually growing the most rapidly.

The development footprint of western cities grows faster than their population; that is, they sprawl. There is little geographic reason to expect this pattern to he reversed. Most western cities appear to have practicable plans for land and water resources that will support decades of continued growth, at decreasing overall population densities, even as their citizens complain about traffic, lost views, and crowded schools. Local barriers to urban growth a mountain range here, an arc of public land there are just that, local barriers, soon to be flanked or leapfrogged. Residents of interior places such as Denver and Phoenix complain that they do not want their cities to become like Los Angeles. But what sociologist Harvey Molotch called the "growth machine " and historian Hal Rothman more gently calls the
"growth coalition" -- the convergence of residential preferences, household finances, government boosterism, and corporate strategy that keeps cities and suburbs growing -- has those cities headed precisely down Los Angeles's path to megalopolis.

The exurbs now cover as large an area of the western landscape as do the cities, and are spreading faster, albeit with a less solid footprint (with residential densities of one dwelling unit per 5--40 acres). The exurban landscape is the scene of the West ' s greatest tensions between people and nature. Here wildfires, wildlife, and people uneasily, sometimes dangerously, coexist. The effort to suppress wildfires in the exurbs incurs large ecological and monetary costs (and risk to fire fighters), and those elk touted by the real estate ads damage landscaping, frighten residents, and attract predators. This new residential frontier, the exurhan tension zone, demands close examination.

Another, especially conspicuous development landscape type, the resort zone, perforates the West in places such as Aspen, Jackson, Palm Springs, and Sedona. This kind of development, driven by recreation and tourism, brings extravagant new commercial and residential investment to mountain and desert environs, creating landscapes that journalist Rave Ringholz called "paradise paved " and author Ed Abbey disparaged as industrial tourism.' Ringholz wrote of small ranching and mining towns discovered and transformed into resorts, their residents overwhelmed by an "influx of new and often wealthy residents" that drives up property values and " threatens to eliminate the qualities that made these places attractive in the first place." She wrote: "What was to become the cliche of "Aspenization" reached into emerging villages like Moab, Utah, and Ketchum, Idaho, where the pinch was just starting to be felt.” My own travels to these towns and others found many overwhelmed by the spreading geography of resorts (fig. 2.4).

Beyond the exurbs and resorts lies the gentrified range, a fundamentally rural landscape, but one now dotted with hobby ranches and other New West homesteads. The gentrified range is something of a terra incognita, which makes it hard to analyze as a discrete landscape type. Some of it is akin to the exurbs of small to medium-sized western towns (however, I distinguish it from the exurbs because it is not within commuting distance of the city), and nearby resort zones certainly add to the interest in and growth of amenity ranches and ranchettes (fig. 2.5).

One recent study suggested that roughly half of the West's ranches are now "hobby" operations, owned mainly for their landscape amenities and investment value rather than for livestock production. Besides isolated homes, new horse arenas, and maybe even an airstrip and hangar, the transition in ranchland ownership brings far-reaching changes in land use as the new owners implement their own ideas on grazing, wildlife, water use, and access. This rural gentrification what some geographers studying rural change in Britain call "greentrification" -- as newcomers seek to preserve natural landscapes -- also changes the politics, economics, and culture of western rural areas in quite profound, but poorly studied, ways. 17 Although traditional ranchers will disagree, it may be that the new interest in ranchland amenities brings more support for wildlife and habitat preservation to rural places.

Limerick, The Shadow of Heaven Itself

"Dreams drove the New West of the nineteenth century, and though they have taken a beating, dreams persist--even thrive--in our New West, familiar dreams of a new beginning in a new place, new dreams of humane vacuums for prairie dogs or of open ranges of ostriches. Human nature has met and matched nature in wildness and novelty. William Thayer's phrase of I890 has new resonance: "This book does not contain all the marvels of the New West, by any means."'

"In the late twentieth century, the West is very popular indeed: popular as a remedy for social and personal discontent; popular as a setting for movies, documentaries, novels, essays, and memoirs; popular as a source of imagery for commercially appealing clothing, jewelry, furniture, buildings, and interiors; popular as a place of inspiration for seekers after spiritual connection in a disconnected world; and, per­ haps most consequentially, popular as a residential sanctuary for prosperous emigrants from the East and West Coasts."

"White flight has also been a powerful factor in this story. Along with traffic, congestion, pollution, an uneven economy, and high real estate taxes, the racial and ethnic complexity of the West Coast and the East Coast was one of the principal "push" factors recruiting new arrivals to the interior; in much of the Rocky Mountain West, whites were an undisputed majority."

"The West of the 1990s is, more than ever, a Turnerian West, but "Ted" has replaced "Frederick Jackson." As one of the bellwether moments in the coming of the New West, media mogul Ted Turner bought a ranch in Montana and then flummoxed local ranchers by announcing that he was going to sell off the cattle on his range and replace them with buffalo."

"The struggle to claim legitimacy is, of course, the oldest story in the region: one group of people gets settled in, then another group of people appears on the scene and challenges the standing and power of the group who arrived earlier, and then everyone struggles and pushes and shoves to try to get possession of the title "Legitimate and
Authentic Resident of the West." Sometimes the locals, who are defending themselves ardently against the newest wave of emigrants and settlers, are people who only established their own standing as locals in the very recent past. Thus, the movement among writers to claim the West as home and to stake their claims to the status of Western insiders, natives, and indigenes becomes the most recent episode in a long-running contest to claim legitimacy, a contest for which there have never been any agreed-on ground rules."

"The 1990s , the idea of the West as the remedy for individual and national ills was running head on into a visible and unmistakable fact: the West was badly in need of remedies itself. The social conflicts over growth, the wounds inflicted by the decline of rural enterprises, the overstretched infrastructure of roads and water systems, and the very familiar American dilemmas of inequality by race and class all served as reminders that the West's shelf life as a remedy was reaching its expiration date."

"In the most memorable warning in the pastoral letter, Archbishop Stafford spoke to the biggest social, economic, moral, and cultural problem of the New West: "What we risk creating, then, is a theme­park 'alternative reality' for those who have the money to purchase entrance. Around this Rocky Mountain theme park will sprawl a growing buffer zone of the working poor. "The dreams of people of privilege would design the theme park, and the hopes of the poor would recruit the work force to build and maintain it."

The dream is unending, even if it changes its shape like Proteus. Through sagebrush smoke or affordable real estate, through novel workplaces or novel vacations, through every variation on the theme of newness , the West will make us whole. It will separate us from the familiar and the wearying; it will return us to bedrock; it will reassure us that we are people who matter. In a region so dominated by mountains ­ , the West lies, as the archbishop's pastoral letter said, in the "shadows of heaven itself." Heaven's shade both shelters and darkens our lives. "

Wilkinson, Wild Lands and Fundamental Values

The 1964 Wilderness act declared 9.1 million acres of Forest Service administrative wilderness "instant wilderness," the first units in the congressionally designated system. The Forest Service had also set aside 5.4 million acres as primitive areas. Congress directed the Forest Service to study those areas to determine whether Congress should include them in the wilderness system. Similarly, the Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service were directed to study all roadless areas under their jurisdiction to determine whether they should be designated as wilderness. The three agencies were given ten years to report back to Congress with their recommendations. "

" Leaving lands in a pristine state can further scientific objectives by promoting species diversity and by preserving gene pools that may prove valuable for medical advances or other scientific research. Further, wilderness is a key element of the recreational economy that is reshaping the West."

"Congress then, has declared that 4.6 percent of the entire country will be protected as wilderness. About 16 percent of the public lands have been set aside for that purpose. The wilderness acres, however, are allocated disproportionately to Alaska , with the result that the figures are substantially lower if wilderness areas in Alaska are excluded."

"Wilderness is manifested in physical places but it also has to do with the mind, with expression, with self....All of this is especially true in the American West. Wilderness is a peculiarly western institution. The existence of the wilderness system is an elemental statement by this region of how it differs from other parts of the country, and the world. Rough and open country matters here. Further, wilderness has a historical dimension. Just as Monticello and Old North Church are revered as historical monuments, so too is the wilderness system among the West's prime historical monuments, a stark reminder of the joys and barriers of a region that has been the terminus."

"The long tomorrows of our wild lands, then, will be marked by a struggle to keep the wilderness ideal intact. The underpinnings for wilderness must be explained by those people who can speak best of beauty and solitude and good science and deep time and the fundamental values of a society: poets, artists, photographers, historians, novelists, philosophers, biologists, ecologists, geologists, and others like them. The pressures tearing at wilderness will persist, and the context is especially poignant because development interests need to win a dispute over wilderness just once--conservationists must win always."

West, Stegner, Storytelling, and Western Identity

"Above all, there was the distinction between a heroized past of natural beauty and
"horseback virtues " and a contemporary West that blights the eye and stifles the spirit. As long as western writing was continually pulled between these opposites, Stegner argued, it would be like a car high-centered between ruts: It was going nowhere."

"Stegner was writing about a crisis of western identity, a shifty term that can be taken--that has to be taken, in fact--in two ways. It refers both to what the West is and to who westerners are. Its common meaning has something to do with how the place and its inhabitants have made one another. Its story must include that mutual shaping and how it has unfolded through time."

"We have to tell better stories, Stegner said, if we are going to have "a personal and possessed past," and however our new history is written, I think it must include not only those outward, visible events and transformations but also that inward narrative, familial and sensuous, that plays such a prominent part in Stegner's writing. By its nature, that story weaves together the generations and pulls us across those decades between the frontier and today. It is an environment in which simple dichotomies cannot thrive. It makes possible a layered, complicated sense of place "

Stegner came to understand his own connection to the West: "That is essentially the whole story. I grew up western, and the very first time I moved out of the West I realized what it meant to me. The rest is documentation, detail. " Those details, of course, concern many aspects of western life, but much of Stegner's writing both demonstrates and calls for more attention to the personal, emotional dimension of the region's history, the exchanges among individuals and the human and physical worlds from which they grow. If we want to define the West, he seemed to say, we need to work that meeting ground of autobiography, familial chronicle, geography, fiction, and history. It will be in those sorts of stories--like that of his own life--that westerners will find what they need for a "possessed past. "

"The accretion of experience, the accumulation of perceptions and response, including wind on the face and willows smelt, the weathering of memories--all that is part of the making of a place. Knowing a place, and telling intelligent and true stories about it, must take that process into account."

"Ward speaks for a lot of us who are trying to connect "now" to "then" so that we might, quite literally, know where we stand. More than anyone, Wallace Stegner showed us how that work can be done, and as we get on with the job of telling better stories, he is the one who deserves our first and deepest thanks."

Why Should We Protect Lands in
the West

  1. Because it is part of the West's heritage
    of wilderness and wild lands.

  2. Because it protects critical environmental
    habitat and endangered species.

  3. Because it adds to our quality of life to have
    access to these undeveloped lands.

  4. Because it supports the tourist and recreation
    industry.

  5. Because tourist visits to Western states depend
    on having access to this wild, undeveloped land.

  6. Because wild land and open space is part of
    our cultural heritage as Westerners.

  7. Because these lands provide an escape from
    our crowded cities and suburbs.

  8. Because once these lands are settled and
    developed they cannot be reclaimed, and
    they are lost to future generations.

  9. Because these lands provide important
    psychological, cultural, and spiritural benefits
    to modern day Westerners.

  10. Because if we lose these lands we lost that
    part of America that helps makes Americans
    a unique and different culture and people.