The Environments of the West

Question for Discussion: According to Opie and
Worster, how does the environmental history of the
West help us better understand its cultural contradictions?

Reading: Opie, "Environmental History in the West";
Worster, "Freedom and Want" ; Kemmis, "The Lay of the Land" ; Wood , "Water Crisis Squeezes California's Economy"

Film: The Colorado River, Central Arizona Project

Response Paper : Do you agree with Limerick that studying the American West as a place undergoing conquest is a much stronger approach than studying
the West as a frontier that was settled? (See the
class outline on this debate)
(1-2 page paper due on Monday, February 9th.)

Maps of the New West

Environmental History of the West

Maps of the Old West

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1775
U.S. Territorial Growth, 1810
U.S. Territorial Growth, 1820
U.S. Territorial Growth, 1830
Republic of Texas, 1836
U.S. Territorial Growth, 1840
U.S. Territorial Growth, 1850
U.S. Territorial Growth, 1870
Boundaries of the Contiguous U.S.
American Indian Tribes, 1600
Native American Indian Tribes, 1783
European Possessions Bordering the U.S., 1783

Maps of the New West
World Map, 1997
Map of Indian Reservations today
State Map of the 20th Century American West
Population per Square Mile in the West
The West from Space at Night
Western Land owned by the Government
Government Agency Land in the West
Annual Rainfall in the West

Visions of the Frontier
American Progress by John Gast (1872)
University of Oregon American Progress image
Explanatory Text used to Market American Progress
Modern version of American Progress
Manifest Destiny Exhibit
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier (1893)

Western Futures: 2000-2050

Tourism in the West

The Geography of Water in the West

American Society for Environmental History
Environmental History of the West
State Map of the 20th Century American West
The West from Space at Night (in-class)
Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
Rain Shadow Effect in the West
Topographic Map of the American West (in-class)
Kemmis, The Lay of the Land (in-class)
Percent of Western Land by State
owned by the Government
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Opie, Environmental History in the West (in-class)
Wateruse in the USA per day in 2000 (in-class)
Agricultural Water use in the West (in-class)
Wood, Water Crisis Squeezes California Economy
(in-class)
Worster, Freedom and Want in the West (in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West (in-class)
Damming the West (in-class)
History of the Bureau of Reclamation (in-class)
Bureau of Reclamation: Dams in the West
by region (in-class)
Bureau of Reclamation: Dams in the West
by state (in-class)
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lakes
and Recreation Areas
Damn Nation: Western Dams
and the Future of Dams in the West
Cadillac Desert PBS Documentary Summary
The Geography of Development and Water
in the American West

Dividing up the Water in the West

Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
Water use for Agriculture and Towns
and Industry (in-class)
Damming the West (in-class)
Sharing the Colorado River
The Colorado River Compact
The Law of the Colorado River (in-class)
Basic Elements of the Colorado River Compact
(in-class)
The Central Arizona Project (in-class)
System Map of the Central Arizona Project
Colorado River Project: Central Arizona
Project (in-class)
Columbia River History

The Environmental History of the West

Opie, The Environmental History of the West
(in-class)
Books on the Environmental History of the West
Worster: The Challenge of the Arid West
Links: The Challenge of the Arid West
"The Great West" Advertisement (in-class)
Batchelder Promotes farming in the
Dakota Territory (in-class)
Solomon Butcher: Photographs of
Nebraska Homesteaders (in-class)
History of the American West 1860-1920: Photographs

Paul Starr's Images of the American West

Rain Shadow Effect:

The result of the process by which moist air on the windward side of a mountain rises and cools, causing precipitation and leaving the leeward side of the mountain dry. This is why there is a rain shadow--reduced rain--on the Eastern side of the major mountain ranges in the West.

Worster, Freedom and Want

"We Americans are supposed to be a practical, level-headed people with a firm grip on reality, but it is not quite true. We are also a nation of dreamers. Our imaginations are easily captured by a whiff of myth or romance, our feelings are quick to rush after a promise, and some of our dreams are more extravagant than those of any hallucinating jungle tribe. It takes all the disciplined effort we can muster simply to bring our tangled yearnings to the surface of discussion, never mind being able to identify their ambiguities and confront their contradictions."

"Nowhere is this tendency more pronounced than when we talk about one of our favorite dreams, the American West. Say the word "West" and, immediately, vistas of mustangs galloping across wide-open spaces under immense, unclouded skies fill our imaginations , and sober reason has to come panting after. Say the word and we are off living in a dream, experiencing its old powerful emotions but as ever finding it difficult to say how the dream ends. As a people, we are quick to invent fantasies but slower to find plausible, realistic endings for them."

"One side of the western paradox, I have suggested, is the dream of growing up happily in a state of nature. It is basically a dream of achieving unlimited personal freedom. An ancient dream, it was active long before there was an America and was brought to this continent in the heads of millions of immigrants. But the eastern part of the United States was not the ideal landscape, at least not to the degree the West was, for stirring up such hopes of a free life in nature."

"Come into the western country, however, and the reactions of travelers were unanimous: here at last was the true promise of American freedom. Here in a landscape generally free of trees, where no forests crowded in and impinged on the view, all physical restraint seemed to be removed. Among the earliest white men to experience that openness were the two explorers whom President Thomas Jefferson sent out in the summer of 1804, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark."

"So individual following individual, family following family, we white Americans have come into this land of scarcity, of natural deprivation, and gloried in it. We dispossessed the native race that was holding and using it, and ever since we have been taking great gulps of free air. We have found a vast space in which to be natural again, to be unencumbered except by the encumbrances we freely choose and then only as long as we choose them. But here is the rub: If this vision of liberation is to endure, this western space must stay open, which is to say, it must stay dry. Freedom in our western vision requires aridity. It depends on a brilliance of light, an openness of terrain, a clean spaciousness that gives us plenty of room to spread out and look around, to get some distance from the crowd, to deal with our private selves, to renew hope. It requires the West as it naturally was and is. A little more water might spoil it all."

"We must find more water, settlers would say to themselves; we must use every possible technology to extract as much of it as we can out of this place. We must not rest until we have achieved control over every molecule of moisture. Each river we come to must be turned into a commodity and consumed entirely. The West must be redeemed everywhere by hard work and unflagging dedication until it has lost all semblance of naturalness, until it is a luxuriant oasis of ease and delight."

"But the drive for technological control does not involve simply commanding every river to flow where we want
it to go. In dry farming, ranching, mining, and manufacturing, there have been manifestations of the same drive to conquer. And once again, the West is not alone in its quest for unlimited abundance; it is merely striving to stay abreast of a competitive world intent everywhere on intensifying production and consumption, with no end in sight."

"After several centuries of technological wizardry, including all the damming and siphoning and diverting of water that has been done here in the West, the old pinch of scarcity is felt as sharply as ever. Will we ever have enough water to slake our thirst? Will we ever have enough to sell? Will we ever be in paradise?"

"There is also the consequence that a nature intensely controlled is no longer a nature capable of offering a sense of freedom. Increasingly, we find ourselves trapped in the very technology we have devised to master the world around us. For example, the irrigating farmer learns, as he rushes about from headgate to headgate, turning so many acre feet a day into his beans or alfalfa, just how demanding his life has become. He has to regiment himself in order to regiment the river. And that may be only the first loss of freedom the individual experiences in such a situation. To get more water from farther away, he or she may be compelled to join a formal irrigation district, hire technical experts, and submit to the leadership of a privileged local elite."

"It is a plain fact that only the simplest kinds of scarcity can be overcome without some loss of personal freedom. You cannot maximize technological abundance without setting up powerful government agencies, corporations, and other chains of command, other hierarchies of authority, and these endanger democracy and independence as they grow. You cannot have it both ways. And thus we are once more in the realm of paradox."

"If I had to choose between the freedom of that dry, wild, open West of yesterday and some vision of a totally managed regime of advanced water engineering, I would take the freedom. But the problem with this paradox is that it won't let you choose so extreme a way out. We are forced to admit that both dreams have something attractive to offer, and therefore we must struggle with all the wisdom and intelligence we can muster to reconcile them."

"The best way to deal with any paradox is to find a way to transcend it. Find some new vision for this region that will, in a thoughtful way, incorporate what was most noble in its old visions, leaving out the base excesses. Achieving a greater degree of personal freedom is a noble dream, but only if it includes a sense of responsibility and discipline. Getting an easier living from the land is also a fine ideal, but only if that living is not wasteful, corrupt, or extravagant. An alternative vision ought to suggest how we might live free and live well for the longest period of time--all of us, men and women, white and nonwhite, natives and immigrants alike. It ought to suggest how we can occupy this place without consuming it or letting it consume us. That is going to take us a while to figure out."

"We continue to approach nature as isolated, almost anti-social, individuals, either seeking total release from all entanglements with others or insisting on an unlimited right to acquire as much private wealth as we can. Either way, we relate to the natural world as individuals far more readily than we do as communities. This has long been the American style. It has made us both ardent backpackers and stripmine operators, but it has not encouraged us to think about how we can live harmoniously with the land as social groups, as collectivities, over periods of time that far exceed any individual's lifetime. Until we learn to think in the latter way, I suspect we will never be more than transients passing through this place."

"One major reason why the West has created a paradox for itself is that it has not yet sought or developed a strategy of water use that will allow its communities to endure as permanent homes for the human spirit. The West has dreamed wonderful, colorful, extravagant dreams. It has tasted the dream of freedom from all restraint and, having done so, cannot forget what it was like. It has developed means for extracting immense wealth out of its rivers and lands, even to the point of compromising that freedom. Those have been the visions of the past. But the West has not yet succeeded in the hardest challenge of all: finding a relationship with aridity and water that will help Americans stay in this place. Successfully meeting that challenge requires developing a new kind of creative imagination for the
future. "

Opie, Environmental History in the West

"Regions like the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys have national roles; the interaction between mechanization, water, markets, migrant workers, federal incentives and regulations, and direct environmental impacts of soil erosion and chemical pollution deserve attention. The impacts of continued and expanding federal support, growth in the size of holdings, increasing irrigation, regional specialization, corporate farming, the decline in numbers of farmers, and vertical integration "from seedling to supermarket" need attention."

"ln addition, approximately 5 percent of America 's farmland has already been lost to urbanization and erosion, and the pace is quickening. A determined and cliometrically minded historian would find a wealth of largely untapped information in the annual USDA statistical reports. In addition, the controversial USDA National Agricultural Lands Study of 1980 has not been adequately placed in historical context. It emphasizes various programs of farmland protection and preservation through zoning, districting, easements, tax relief, and other legal controls in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii."

"Of the 612 million acres suitable for continuous cultivation in the U.S. , more than 10 percent is irrigated land, producing a third of the total crop value, mostly in the West. Eight million acres are under irrigation projects of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation. This amount compares to only 4 million total acres under irrigation in 1900."

"California water consumption, whether irrigation or urban, has received the lion's share of attention in the West, with important interpretations by Donald J. Pisani, Donald Worster, Abraham Hoffman, William L. Kahrl, and others.' Arizona's controversial Central Water Project, with new demands of Colorado River water for growing metropolitan Tucson and Phoenix, and the resulting denial of agricultural needs, requires re-interpretation." 2

"Urban water demands are far surpassed by agriculture's needs. Over 80 percent of the West's limited water resources historically go to farming. John Wesley Powell's 1878 Report on the Arid Region of the United States, despite its dated vision, offered to a disbelieving "humid East" public a realistic picture of the absolute limits water shortages placed on agriculture. Only after many settler failures, and the inability of private enterprise and individual states to improve farming opportunities, was federal intervention invited with the Reclamation Act of 1902. But reclamation did not always fulfill its promise."

"Nowhere has the adversary confrontation between growth and conservation been more visible than over energy projects, and nowhere more than in the American West. Nowhere have there been more contradictions. Western environmental organizations, far better organized than in the East, have often succeeded in stemming federal pork-barrel growth-for-growth's-sake projects, including dramatic cutbacks on extensive reclamation projects at Hell's Canyon on the Snake River and the Garrison Diversion Project on the Missouri River in North Dakota."

"American demands upon natural resources remain as changeable as David Potter claimed almost forty years ago. The environmental historian working with mineral resources needs to take into account technological change, including new, more efficient modes of exploration, including satellites, new modes of extraction, particularly of coal and oil, and new modes of processing and delivery, such as coal slurry. But technological "fixes" create as many problems as they solve."

"The West is America 's playground. The cash value of tourism in the West compares in scale to vast federal expenditures for the region. Seasonally, important and fragile regions of the American West are invaded by temporary visitors, who swell local populations by multiples of two, three, four or more. Environmentally vulnerable seashores, mountains, and deserts become, one might say, seasonal boomtowns. The historic western example is the extreme population pressure placed upon Yosemite Valley . But urbanized zones like Disneyland also risk overuse and collapse."

"But as the nation's population, leisure time, surplus money, and mobility expand, pressure upon fragile environments has become unbearable in some of the most desirable tourism targets. As a result, for example, the National Park Service and other federal and state agencies find themselves caught in the paradox between service to the nation's recreation expectations and their historic mandate for environmental preservation."

"West of the Rocky Mountains the federal government never relinquished control of the land as it had in the eastern 60 percent of the nation; half of all western lands, up to 65 percent in Utah and 87 percent in Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the military, and to a lesser extent the National Park Service hold in perpetuity vast tracts across the West. Public land sales ended in the 1930s. Instead, it is possible that public lands have actually increased through the eminent domain acquisitions for the interstate highway system and rationalization of private land enclosed by national parks, forests, and monuments. Serious questions of land management, taxation, and jurisdiction remain moot in the West."

"In 1978 Wilbur Jacobs wrote, "Environmental history can be a window to a clearer image of the past and can offer us unique perspectives on generally accepted historical concepts of unlimited growth, frontier expansionism, and the rapid use of nonrenewable natural resources."54 This quote sums up the contribution toward clarification of the American West that environmental history can provide. The civilizational process, after all, is the history of the modification of the earth for human benefit; environmental history seeks to evaluate the beneficial use of the earth in terms not only of humanity, but to include all other earthly entities, organic and inorganic, on the premise that loss or degradation anywhere has universal impact.

Kemmis, The Lay of the Land

"If any one feature sets the West apart from the rest of the country, it is the power and presence of its landscape. The West is about land, and about the relationship of people to land. No other region comes close to the West's expansiveness of landscape in proportion to the number of its people.... But that relatively low population density is only one dimension of the dominance of land and landscape in the region. Land is ubiquitous in every dimension of western life. Ask people why they live in the West and the answer will most often have to do with landscape far more often than would be the case in any other region. Attend ten public meetings in the West and see how many more of them involve land than would similar meetings anywhere else. "

"The West is also Indian country.... Indian tribes govern roughly one-fifth of the interior West, and as devolution comes to their lands, they control them with less and less federal interference. More than 1 million Indians live in the eleven lower western states, roughly half of them on reservations. Arizona contains the largest percentage of Indian land, with roughly one-third of the state covered by reservations, The largest western reservations are the size of some eastern states, and they are governed at a very high level of complexity and sophistication."

"By the 1990s the interior West had become (and was expected to continue to be) the country's fastest growing region. In terms of percentage of change in population, the five fastest-growing states in the 1990s were located in the interior West. Utah, and Idaho ranked first through fifth, respectively, in per centage of population increase during that decade. New Mexico ranked twelfth and Montana twentieth, with Wyoming trailing the regional pack as the country's thirty-second fasten-growing state. The regional growth affected both city and countryside, Between 1990 and 1998, the region's metropolitan areas grew by 25 percent and its rural areas by 18 percent, both rates significantly higher than elsewhere in the United States. 4 The relentless wave of migration into the mountains puts steadily increasing pressure on all western land, including public land. It also creates growing challenges in terms of regional identity as relative newcomers, less familiar than old-timers with the region and its traditions, become a more dominant force in the West."

"Despite the increasingly diverse demographics of the West, by the end of the twentieth century the political geography of the region had become remarkably homogeneous. Whereas much was made in the 1990s of the southern domination of the Republican Party, far less attention was paid to the fact that Republicans exercised even more solid control over the interior West. The maps of districts of the U.S. House of Representatives and of governorships shown in figures 5 and 6 tell that part of the regional story very clearly. Following the 2000 elections, three-quarters of the congressional districts in the interior West were held by Republicans. The story with governorships was even more telling. There were Democratic governors in Missouri and Iowa and in the Pacific Coast states, but none--not one--in the giant. 1,200-mile-wide swath in between."

Wood, Water Crisis Squeezes California Economy

"In the water business we are facing the biggest challenges here in over half a century … there is no way any knowledgeable person could contest that," says Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, which represents more than 450 of the state's water agencies that provide water to 95 percent of the state's farms and cities. "The state has had some success in better managing this problem for the last decade, but we have hid ourselves from the biggest issue … and Mother Nature is telling us there is no more hiding.

"The biggest issue, say Mr. Quinn and others, is the clash between the environment, the California economy, and the population, which is pouring in at more than 600,000 per year."

Eighty percent of the water in California moves from above the delta to farms and communities in the south of it via pumps. The environmental groups said that current use of water pumping through the delta endangered several species of fish, including two kinds of smelt (long fin and delta), steel head, green sturgeon, winter and spring salmon, and split tail.

"This ruling was essentially an agreement that we need to protect habitat in the delta more than we have been, and what state and federal agencies have been doing is likely to drive the smelt to extinction," says Barry Nelson of the NRDC. "For all the serious concern about how the state is now going to meet its water needs, no one is saying that the court got it wrong. Everyone has known for a long time that this was coming."

"Farmers across the state know this will be very tough and not pleasant," says Dave Kranz, spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "To the extent that you take farmland out of production for whatever reason, it increases another problem, which is providing enough American-grown food to serve the US population as well as demand from other countries."

Solutions are now in the works. A commission appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is planning to make recommendations next month, including ideas for dams and more storage capacity.

State Senate President pro tem Don Perata (D) is pushing two measures. One provides $200 million for immediate safeguards of freshwater flows from north to south. The second is a $5 billion bond that includes $2 billion to fix the water supply, improve flood protection, and boost fisheries in the delta, and $2 billion for water storage projects such as dams."