The West as a Developed Region

Question for Discussion: How has the pace
of our modern industrial civilization changed
life in the American West?

Reading:Abott, "The West as Developed Region";
Nash, "The Influence of the 20th Century West"

Video: Koyaanisqatsi (1983), Chapters 8, 9, 10,11

Growth and Sprawl in the West

Abbott, the Urban West and the 21st century
(in-class)
Nash, Impact of the Twentieth century West
(in-class)
Koyaanisqatsi (1983)
Statement on the Qatsi Triology (in-class)
The Qatsi Trilogy (in-class)
The Matrix 101: Understanding the Matrix
(in-class)
State Map of the 20th Century American West
Western Land owned by the Government (in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West
1940 West Metropolitan Areas (in-class)
1990 West Metropolitan Areas (in-class)
Western Growth Rate by County (in-class)
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night (in-class)
Urban Population in the West (2006) (in-class)
Urban Population in the East (2006) (in-class)
Growing Minority Populations in the
West (in-class)
U.S. Census: Percentage of
Foreign Born in U.S. by State (in-class)
Money Magazine: Best Places to Live in 2006
(in-class)
Money Magazine: Best Cities to Live
in the U.S. in 2006 (in-class)
USA Today: Census 2000 Map
2000 US Census Factfinder Map
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night
USA Today: Census 2000 Map
2000 US Census Factfinder Map

____________________________________________

The Qatsi Trilogy

Growth and Sprawl in the West

Immigrant Population gaining:
most newcomers Asian or Hispanic (in-class)
Whites are now a Minority in California (2001)
English Losing Ground (Nov. 2008) (in-class)
U.S. Population Clock (in-class)
U.S. Population Projection: 2005-2050 (in-class)
4 million illegal immigrant children
are native born (2009)
Historical National U.S. Population Estimates:
1900-1999 (in-class)
Abbott, The Urban West and the 21st century
(in-class)
Abbott, Tensions between the Urban and
Rural West (in-class)
Nash, Impact of the Twentieth century West
(in-class)
Nash, Western Regionalism and American
Culture (in-class)
1940 West Metropolitan Areas (in-class)
1990 West Metropolitan Areas (in-class)
Urban Population in the West (2006) (in-class)
Urban Population in the East (2006) (in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West in 1995
(in-class)
Western Growth Rate by County (in-class)
Rapid Population Growth in the Rockies (in-class)
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night (in-class)
Growing Minority Populations in the
West (in-class)
U.S. Census: Percentage of
Foreign Born in U.S. by State (in-class)
USA Today: Census 2000 Map:
See population growth by state (in-class)
2005 U.S. Population Fact Sheet
The Qatsi Trilogy (in-class)
Statement on the Qatsi Trilogy (in-class)
The Matrix: Synopsis (in-class)
Comparing the Qatsi Trilogy with the Matrix:
The Matrix 101: Understanding the Matrix:
(in-class)
Koyaanisqatsi (1983) (in-class)
M. Weil, Curing Techno-Stress and
Multitasking Madness (in-class)
L. Rosen, Multitasking Madness (in-class)
Weil and Rosen: TechnoStress
Coping with Technology at Work,
at Home, and at Play
Western Land owned by the Government
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West
Money Magazine: Best Places to Live in 2007
(in-class)
Money Magazine: Best Cities to Live
in the U.S. in 2007(in-class)

Ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi language),
n. 1. Crazy life. 2. Life in turmoil. 3. Life disintegrating. 4. Life out of balance. 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living.

THE HOPI PROPHECIES

"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.

Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.

A container of ashes might one day be thrown
from the sky, which could burn the land
and boil the oceans."

Translation of the Hopi Prophecies sung in the film.

Abbott, The Urban West and the 21st Century

"Western settlement and organization spread outward from the key cities of San Francisco and Denver and their ancillary centers of Portland, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Santa Fe between the 1840s and 1870s. As railroad builders added more links to the western transportation system in the 1880s and 1890s, isolated metropolitan regions merged into the national hierarchy of cities focused on New York and Chicago. At the climax of the industrial era in the I920s, economist N. S. B. Gras and sociologist Robert Park could both summarize the West as a collection of a dozen metropolitan regions that connected farming market centers and mining towns to the national capitals of commerce."

"In the United States, demographers usually measure the level of urbanization by the proportion of population living within the boundaries of metropolitan areas. The West as a whole (nineteen states) has shifted from 43 percent metropolitan in 1940 to 64 percent in 1960, 78 percent in 1980, and 80 percent in 1990."

"Absolute numbers of city and suburban residents, of course, can and will continue to grow, but the balance is unlikely to change. For every new resident of non-metropolitan areas, there will be seven or eight new city people. Since 1970, in fact, the metropolitan population of the eight far western states has increased by nearly 12 million, while the non-metropolitan population has increased by about 1.4 million for a ratio of 8.5 to 1."

"These advanced service cities will be increasingly detached from their region and tied into national and international networks. Examples of income sources that transcend or bypass the regional context are many---international tourism in Honolulu, overseas trade through Los Angeles and Long Beach, federal research grants to Seattle universities and think tanks, international contracts for Boise and Corvallis engineering firms, supervision of multinational corporate business from San Francisco office towers."

"Beyond Portland industrial parks and Spokane offices, the third urban revolution will continue to erode the isolation of the rural West. The western back-country of the nineteenth century has been embraced within urban recreation, commuting, and amenity zones in the later twentieth century. This extraordinary penetration of the "empty" West by the urban West involves the appropriation of natural resources for new purposes--grazing land for garbage disposal and nuclear waste, forests for scenic preservation, farming districts for sources of water. "

"Apart from obvious advantages of climate, setting, and prosperity, what underlies the high rankings for western cities is a shared commitment to the public interest. The health, education, and social components of Ben-Chieh Liu's most thorough quality-of-life study (1976) measured such items as per capita investment in education and medical facilities, school enrollment, newspaper circulation, and the ratio of public library books to population. Overall, twenty-four of twenty-six far western metropolitan areas rated good or better on the health, education, and social components."

"Women's participation in local politics has also drawn on their success in filling executive, professional, and managerial jobs. The relative hospitality of western cities can be measured by the high proportion of such jobs held by women. Among large metropolitan areas nationwide in 1980, the proportion ranged from 23 percent in Scranton to 38 percent in Washington, D.C. The West had only one metropolitan area under 30 percent, with especially strong opportunities in San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, and Honolulu. Statewide census data show that the West is also receptive to women entrepreneurs as measured by the ratio of women-owned businesses to population."

Tensions Between the Urban
and Rural West

"Tensions between urban realities and rural imagery are reflected in western literature. Regional novelists choose their contemporary protagonists from ranchers, farmers, loggers, rodeo riders, and river rafters. Their topics are Native Americans, nature, and life in the land of wind and storm. Indeed, the importance of cities as inspiration for western writers is obscured by the tendency to recognize as "western" only those artists who deal with small towns and open landscapes. Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig are "western" writers but Maxine Hong Kingston is an ethnic or feminist writer. Robert Stone, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon are "mainstream." Literary histories remember Walter Van Tilburg Clark's stories about nineteenth-century westerners far more often than his novel about twentieth-century Reno."

"As with literature, Americans prefer to neglect the urban West and to admire what they know to be comfortably western. As these examples suggest, the myth of open spaces has proved extraordinarily persistent. One of our jobs as historians will be to interpret not only the facts but the feel of the West as an urbanized region that is about to enter a new century. "

Nash, The Influence of the
20th-century West on American Civilization

"During the twentieth century--even more than in previous years--the American West has exercised a significant influence on many phases of American life. Indeed, during the twentieth century the West has been ahead of the rest of the nation by about one generation. In the twentieth century, as the West goes, so goes the Nation! The American West today is America tomorrow. " (290)

"For this particular western life-style of the twentieth century stressed informality and outdoor living. Whatever its sources, evidence is abundant that after 1945 the entire nation enthusiastically embraced the western style. This style includes informality of behavior, in dress, and also in food." (291)

"As a relatively young region, the twentieth-century West has shown itself hospitable to social dissent, setting precedents that were increasingly followed by the older regions. It is no accident that so many protest movements in America have started in the West. San Francisco was the home of the Beat movement in the 1950s that challenged the prevailing American concern for material wealth. Again, San Francisco--the end of the line--saw the birth of the Hippie movement during the 1960s, and Berkeley became the first home of student radicals. From the West these protest movements moved east to take on national dimensions." (291)

"The peculiar form of highly mechanized large-scale commercial agriculture that developed in the twentieth-century West set the pace for farmers everywhere in the United States if not, indeed, throughout the world. Perhaps this form of agribusiness, as it came to be known, was most highly developed in California and along the rest of the Pacific Coast, but it was also prominent in Colorado, parts of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and the Dakotas. Between 1900 and 1940 these states came to supply 90 per cent of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the entire nation."

"But they were designed mainly for the wealthy. The most significant boost in tourism came in the 1920s when the automobile revolution made the West a vacation center not only for the upper classes but for the masses as well. Almost every western state legislature seized on the opportunity to construct an excellent system of roads and highways and to encourage the construction of a vast net of service facilities such as gasoline stations, motor courts, restaurants, and hotels. Westerners also showed their innovativeness by inventing the convention center. The so-called tourist complex embracing hotels and motels, automobile service facilities, restaurants, and convention centers since 1945 has been widely copied by every other section of the country, for in an affluent society the new leisure has boosted tourism into a major industry."

"As we well know, despite myths and legends, the West was not solely a product of individual initiative and enterprise, but a prime example of mixed enterprise, of a partnership between private individuals and federal, state, and local governments. Theodore Roosevelt first aptly characterized this relationship early in the century when he dubbed it the New Nationalism. Between 1900 and 1970 the federal government alone spent more than $300 billion in the development of the trans-Mississippi region. These funds were distributed in the form of defense contracts; river, harbor, and highway improvements; aid to agriculture, mining, and livestock interests; and in many other ways. To this amount must be added another $50 billion expended by state governments for public works, social services, or for attracting new industries. Nor can the contributions of local governments be ignored, for they totalled at least another $25 billion. When added up, these expenditures total almost one-half of the capital investment that was needed to settle and develop the region west of the Mississippi River."

Western Regionalism and American Culture

"And the laborers in the vineyards of western culture -- writers, artists, musicians, folklorists, and others -- helped to enshrine the western cowboy in the mythology of American folklore by making him one of the authentic folk heroes of Americans in the twentieth century. Whether in books, magazines, moving pictures, television, or art, the image of the cowboy which they created made him a symbol of the traditional values embraced by the Protestant Ethic in America. Beset by rapid changes in their lives and values, successive generations of urbanized Americans in the twentieth century looked longingly back to a simpler-and supposedly golden-age which they often associated with the frontier West. Then man had triumphed over nature and seemed to have mastered his environment--in stark contrast to an industrial society...."

"Then Americans had shared many common values such as individualism, simplicity, adventure, morality, courage, self-reliance, personal freedom, and virtually unlimited opportunities, beliefs personified by the western cowboy. To many Americans western regionalism represented the ideals once personified by the United States, ideals which were rudely disrupted by technology and industrialism and which--despite wishful thinking--were perhaps no longer attainable. In the twentieth century, therefore, western regionalism came to constitute a significant part of the nation's culture."

"Western culture and society have always revealed a sense of anomie in many individuals, a feeling of rootlessness and alienation. Considering the enormous growth of the West during the last 70 years and the great mobility and diversity of a portion of its population, perhaps this was inevitable. Some westerners early felt a loss of that sense of community which in 1970 nagged Americans everywhere. Long before the rest of the country the West had its colonies of drop-outs, utopians, and non-conformists. That sense of spiritual insecurity, of loss of community which is one of the by-products of a culture in a condition of constant flux. was clearly reflected in the West several decades before it turned into a national malaise. In this sense, too, the West mirrored the America of the future."

"Western development has also resulted in serious physical problems. By the middle of the twentieth century the West had already become an almost classic example of environmental imbalance brought about by wanton and unplanned applications of science and technology. Smog and air pollution, contamination of rivers and streams and vegetation, and the destruction of wilderness areas and wildlife were more apparent in California in 1950 than elsewhere. The western predicament was not unique, however, but only served as a showcase for a problem that plagued the entire nation. But nowhere else were environmental problems brought about by a technological society so starkly revealed as in the West."

Statement on the Qatsi Triology by Godfrey Reggio

Technology, acceleration, do not affect our way of living -- they are, in effect, our new and comprehensive host of life, the environment of living itself. It is not the effect of technology on the environment, culture, economy, religion, etc., but rather that all these categories exist in technology. In this sense technology is new nature. The living environment, old nature, is replaced by a manufactured milieu, an engineered host - synthetic nature. In a real sense, we are off planet, dwelling on a lunar surface of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, steel and plastics, engulfed in the atmosphere of electromagnetic vibrations - the soothing lullaby of the machine. The common notion tells us that technology is neutral, that we can use it for either good or bad. From the p.o.v. of NAQOYQATSI, we do not use technology, we live technology; technology is our way of life. Being sensate entities, we become our environment -- we become what we see, what we hear, what we eat, what we smell, what we touch. Where doubt is prohibited, we become, without question, the environment we live in. With our origins based in the natural order, should this context radically change (as I am suggesting), the mysterious nature of the human being shall also radically change - a change that will reflect the transformation of nature itself, at a turning point or vanishing point. Natural diversity becomes a burnt offering, sacrificed to the infinite appetite of technological homogenization.

So forget science fiction. We now live the fiction of science. We are now, not in some remote future, cyborgs. We are at one with our environment - we are technology. In this wonderland, freedom becomes the pursuit of our technological happiness. Our standard of living is predicated on commodity consumption, as the shibboleth of the new religion is 'pray for more'. In vehicles of ecstasy, with cinematic engines of inertia at audiovisual speed, trans-port and tele-port blend into one. The beginning becomes the end. The port disappears in the speed of light. The nanosecond (one billionth of an 'old second'), technological speed, transforms reality as it creates an ecstatic phenomena of compelling and unparalleled intensity. By human measure, charismatic technique portends the miraculous, as it engenders the condition of 'exit velocity' - a condition that blurs human perceptions, shatters all meanings, drains all content and breaks our bonds to earth. All locations are subsumed into the startling terra firma of the image, a demonic conformity that is the genesis of mass man. In the shadow of the mass, all previous definitions crumble. The 'time' and 'space' of history exit to an homogenized zone of no return. In this supernatural implosion of g-force, human moorings give way, sending Homo sapiens out-of-orbit into the void of technological space. The accompanying loss of original habitat and our subsequent relocation into accelerated space, throws nature into catastrophe, as it engenders traumatic stress syndrome as the now normal condition of post-human existence. Technique, while promising comfort and happiness, means power, means control, means conformity, means destiny. Technology creates a condition of war that is at once universal and unseen. The explosive tempo of technology is war; the untellable violence of relocation in technology is war. All of us are refugees driven from our human state.

As the completion of the Qatsi trilogy, NAQOYQATSI offers a cinematic concert to experience the allurement, seduction and sanctioned terror of ordinary daily living - a world at war beyond the battlefield, a conflagration between old and new nature - total war. The vision of NAQOYQATSI is a world made in the image and likeness of the new divine, the computer - a world where unity is held in the vice of technological homogenization, the globalized world of techno-fascism, the age of civilized violence.

Rapid Population Growth in the Rockies

Between 2000 and 2005, the population of the Rocky Mountain region grew 9 percent, 4.5 times the national rate. Contrary to the perception of being mostly rural, the population of the Rockies actually is more urbanized than the U.S. as a whole. In 2005, 83 percent of Rockies residents lived in an urban area, compared to 79 percent nationally. In 1950, 55 percent of Rockies residents lived in an urban area, and in 1900, only 32 percent did.

Rapid population growth coincides with an increase in urban construction. A Brookings Institution report finds that six of the top states in the U.S. for predicted growth in residential housing units over the next 25 years are in the Rocky Mountain West, with Nevada, Arizona and Utah being the top three. A closer look at metropolitan statistical areas in the Rockies yields similar growth trends. Predicted growth of housing units places Las Vegas first, followed by Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Tucson and Denver. One important component of growth in the Rockies is the increase in those aged 65 and older, a boom within a boom. Between 2000 and 2005, the elderly population in the West grew by 45 percent, a higher rate than in any other region. Many cities in the region have experienced double-digit growth of their elderly population, including St. George, Utah, 27 percent; Las Vegas-Paradise, Nev., 22 percent; Santa Fe, N.M., 17 percent; and Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, both 11 percent.

As more people move into urban and suburban areas, opportunities and challenges arise. Urban growth manifests itself not just in the familiar sprawl pattern, but also in planned and thematic developments. Trends toward new urbanism result in different approaches toward combining housing, recreation, basic health care, and employment in one location. Such trends will help define - and perhaps maintain the region's quality of life - in the 21st century.