Daily Class OutlineDaily Class QuestionsDaily Class Web LinksDaily Class Notes


Question for Discussion: How can we use the
cultural tension between the Old West and the
New West to help us reclaim and restore the
21st-century West?

Reading: Robbins, "Recycling the Old West";
Marston, "The American West";
Jones, "Drawing Strength"; Snow, "The Last
Place on Earth" ; Gowdey, "Crazy Horse must
be Laughing" ; Blevins, Coaltion Builds to Keep
Mining Off Beloved Peak; Stiles, "Old West, New West"

Video: Subdivide and Conquer DVD--The Choice

Daily Class Web Links



Daily Class Outline

  1. Designing Future Scenarios for the West
    in 2040     (in-class)

  2. Center of the American West:
    Western Futures Study: 1960-2040

  3. State of the Rockies Project

  4. State of the Rockies Report 2008 (in-class)

  5. Rockies Baseline: Vital Signs for a Region
    in Transition     (in-class)

  6. Marston, The American West's Future

  7. Mining Claims are Up in Colorado in 2008 (in-class)

  8. Coaltion Builds to Keep
    Mining Off Beloved Peak     (in-class)
  9. Confronting Sprawl in the New West (in-class)

  10. What Good are Greenbelts?

  11. Filling Up the New West (in-class)

  12. Stiles, Old West vs. New West (in-class)

  13. Jones, Drawing Strength from the Diversity
    of the West     (in-class)

  14. Snow, The Last Place on Earth (in-class)

  15. Robbins, Recycling the Old West (in-class)

  16. Gowdey, Crazy Horse must be Laughing (in-class)

  17. Characteristics of the West as a Place

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

  19. Contradictions facing the American West (in-class)

  20. Wilkinson: Goals for the West's Future
    (in-class)

  21. Organizations Working for the Future of
    the West     (in-class)

  22. Lewis, The West after the 2008 Financial
    Collapse



Daily Class Questions

 



Daily Class Notes

Marston, The American West's Future

"I was, of course, statistically safe from such a fate. The West is associated with cattle roundups and the felling of trees, but most Westerners work as real estate and insurance salesmen, teachers and hardware-store clerks. We turn "Western" only on weekends, when we climb into, not onto, our Broncos and create new roads and new verbs by four-wheeling into the backcountry ." (180-181) "Thinking globally and acting locally, the publisher also inveighed against the "hippies" - former urbanites like ourselves who were settling and unsettling the socially conservative North Fork Valley, The valley's own children routinely Ieft after high school, and the town folks weren 't keen on the young newcomers who were replacing their children." (181) "The schools reflected the priorities of the communities as a whole. I was struck by the quickness with which traditional small Western towns, including my own, would put their community and landscape and clear air at risk in order to host a mine, mill, or power plant...." (182) "The concluding service is still a concern, but it is a concern submerged by my inability to imagine being a free person anywhere else in America . The rural West allows me to be free both physically, because of the vast space and the scarcity of people, and mentally. The sense of physical freedom is easy to explain. The sense of mental freedom is more difficult. It is made up, for me, of freedom from the social, economic and intellectual lockstep I associate with urban areas: their high degree of organization, their intense economic demands, and the large amount of time given over to such chores as commuting and shopping." (183) "A city person's attraction to the Rocky Mountain West is much like a male’s attraction to the woman he eventually marries. I was captured by snowcapped mountains and high, cold lakes. But after several years had passed, I was held by the sense of community, despite my outsider status, and by the more subtle beauty of the arid land below the mountains." (184) "For one hundred years, the foundation of this region's economy has been farming and ranching, mining, milling, and drilling, and a special, lucrative relationship with the federal government, which has built dams, nuclear-bomb factories, military installations, power plants, and the like. It is true that the region has more salesmen and hardware clerks than ranchers or miners, but it is the latter who shape the place. A way of life -- I call it an extractive culture -- has grown up in step with the extractive and agricultural economies. We collided with that way of life when we tried to settle in the rural West. That extractive culture is, among other things, family-centered, religious in a fundamentalist sense, and anchored in the region's small towns. It is characterized by its recreation - hunting, snowmobiling, jeeping; by its disinterest in or xenophobia toward the outside world; by its friendli ness; and by its pride in the beauty of the place." (185) "The schools illustrate the workings of a remarkably stable way of life, one based economically on the extraction of natural resources and culturally on the religious, recreational and social arrangements I've described. I could have made the same points using polities rather than education. The West's army of twenty U.S. senators has maintained the nineteenth-century laws that guarantee cheap, free or subsidized access to public land and water for miners, loggers and ranchers.

That tremendous political power -- 6 percent of the nation's population controlling 20 percent of the Senate -- could have been used in many ways. Instead, it has been used almost exclusively to defend the extractive culture by preserving the extractive economy, just as the South's senators for so long defended that region's racial arrangements, and thereby foreclosed other opportunities. The Western senators are the primary defenders of what Charles Wilkinson calls the Lords of Yesterday." (186)

"The dominance of extraction and the extractive way of life persevered into the early 1980s. Then a huge, pervasive bust occurred. Mines closed, power-plant projects were canceled, mills shut down, and the prices of land and water plummeted. There was an outflow of people from the region. Whole sections of small towns emptied, schools lost one-third of their students, churches lost chunks of their congregations, ambitious public administrator--school superintendents, hospital directors, town managers --- went looking for yeastier places. The bust is interesting for the havoc and losses it caused." (187) "What we have, then, is a region rooted in nineteenth-century economies, ways of life, and laws. The economies and culture are both in decline. So the West approaches the twenty-first century uprooted from its traditional economies and way of life, and lacking the three institutions that could help it meet the new century. The collapse, symbolized by extremely low prices for homes, Iand and water, and by an outflow of population, has resulted in a reopening of the Western frontier - in the West being up for grabs.

What is likely to come of this re-opening? Will the West build the three missing institutions in response to this crisis? Will it be taken over by urbanites enamored of its landscape and low real estate prices? Or will the region both fail to reform from within and be rejected by the larger, wealthier America , and thus have no choice but to decline into an Appalachia-like dark night? The West is so thin in terms of economics and population that conventional extrapolations of trends are useless." (188)

"It is, of course, almost a cliche to predict an economic future for rural areas based on modern communications. But if the West is to survive as a rural region with a rural culture, there must be more than subdivisions of electronic cottages, tourist resorts, and retirement villages. Some extraction -- hopefully less destructive extraction -- will continue. But my hope and expectation is that the new rural economy will be based on reclamation and restoration. The damage or neglect of the past century will be healed by communities that sit among the ruins created by the last century of mining, milling, logging, and agriculture. My expectation, and prayer, is that over the next century, forests will be deroaded, dams will be dismantled or operated so as to preserve streams and rivers rather than destroy them, mine sites will be reclaimed, and acidic streams will be restored to health. Such work will do a great dea lfor the Western landscape. But it will do more for Western communities. " (189)

"To accomplish reclamation and restoration will require deep changes in the West: different schools, different social institutions, different media. Those changes will not come automatically out of a wish list. But they will develop as the region changes and adapts to new times. I see the signs of change not in large events, but in the same kinds of small events I discussed in the first part of my talk. The major danger is that the commodities (coal, uranium, oil shale, et al.) will boom before the West has set itself firmly on the path to reclamation and restoration. If that happens, the West will again sacrifice its landscape and sky to provide jobs for the young people whose basic attitudes toward education were shaped during the boom. But each year that passes with low commodity prices, and with an economically straitened federal government unable to sprinkle dams and subsidized logging on the West, encourages change." (190)

Robbins, Recycling the Old West

"California has not been the centerpiece of this book, but its story provides a fitting illustration and symbol for the continuing instability of economic life throughout the American West, even in the once seemingly most buoyant and spectacular sector of the region's economy. Its special promise worn thin amid choking smog, crumbling urban communities, clashes among its citizenry, and an economy suddenly gone wrong, its dream literally imploding, the post-industrial malaise plaguing California is sending reverberations across the West. More than a half a million people left California in 1990, half of them settling in adjacent states. And while the state gained nearly 300,000 new residents between 1992 and 1993, the number leaving during the same period was even greater -- 377,000."

[In St. George, Utah,] "The newcomers, who are responsible for the opening of five non-Mormon places of worship, are diluting the town's social and religious base, a change exemplified in part by the construction of the striking state-operated liquor store. Although fewer newcomers are flooding other small western towns, their money--much of it garnered from real-estate sales in the overheated California market during the Iate 1980s and early 1990s--is skewing hitherto traditional life-styles and otherwise disrupting local economies in a number of ways."

"More than any other factor, the staggering flow of cash in recent years is the driving force behind the changing face of the rural West. Floundering communities, whose livelihoods were once dependent on mining, agriculture, or fishing, are especially vulnerable to newcomers with ready capital to invest in home-building real-estate deals, small- business enterprises, or resort and recreative developments. Rural towns are being commercialized and their natural settings commodified by new and ingenious methods; indeed, the transformation of some of those hinterland communities reminds one of the way the entrepreneurs of snow remade Aspen from a small and faded mining town into the glitz and glamour of Colorado's most famous and pretentious ski resort in the years after World War II"

"Park City, and the specter of growth that the resort community continues to confront, reflects similar conditions being played out elsewhere in the intermountain West, where old resource-dependent settlements are being wrenched into a strikingly different social and cultural world. Places such as Jackson Hole, a seasonal playground for the wealthy dating back to the beginning of the century, have become thoroughly gentrified, a setting for gated residential subdivisions, expensive condominiums to house affluent snow birds, and equally costly resorts to cater to winter-sports enthusiasts and summer tourists."

"Beyond the realm of cold statistics, however, there is a material world that explains far more. Although certain sectors of the California economy are in a state of free-fall from cuts in defense expenditures in the early 1990s, there remains a vibrant, global, borderless component to its economic life centered on exports (electronics, computers, biotechnol­ ogy, and aerospace), transnational business alliances, and overseas-partnership relations. These primary activities are propelling the changes occurring in California and in adjacent states. Even in the midst of a fierce and deep-seated depression, California continues to attract new people, with non-whites constituting more than 80 percent of the newcomers. The counterpart to that sizable inmigration is the out-migration, the white flight of modestly affluent and wealthy Californians to less densely settled urban and rural areas in adjacent western states. High Country News listed the familiar litany of reasons given by those people who were leaving: "crime, the congestion, the smog, the economy, the high cost of living."

"Except for those agricultural areas where a low-wage, surplus labor force is deemed important to production and profits, most of the population shift to the hinterland is made up of the educated and affluent. And whether they are retirees, active, information-age business people, or trekkers to recreational and resort areas, the combined effect of their presence is revolutionary. The New West taking shape beyond the city is considerably removed from the resource- and production-oriented industrial world of the mining, logging, and milling communities of yesteryear. The values of the newcomers and their opposition to local and state taxes--especially among the newly arrived retirees living on fixed incomes--promise to wreak havoc with social-service infrastructures. The writer William Kittredge observed that "these good folk don't seem to give a damn about the welfare of our next generation. They want to buy into our functioning culture on the cheap. "

"The influx of capital that is triggering the creation of the New West is also leaving in its wake a two-tiered society: (1) on one level the "equity refugees or "equity bandits," well-to-do newcomers with sizable capital savings or independent sources of income; and (2) on the other, low-wage service workers and longtime residents dependent on relatively fixed incomes." The juxtaposition of new money and dying industries on such a scale is relatively new to the West, but it is a specter that will probably continue to haunt smaller communities. In terms of real income, service-sector jobs bring a poor return in comparison with older forms of industrial work. The consequence is a sharpening of class divisions on a scale never witnessed in the older, more traditional West with its agricultural and industrial base."

"But Coeur d'Alene, like other towns of its kind, is at the cutting edge of change in the New West, communities in transition from resource-based production to information-based tourist enclaves with new displays of wealth apparent on every hand. With convenient travel by automobile and air and with ease of communication through facsimile machines and computers, the outside world is readily accessible to the rural West. From Kalispell, Montana, to Bend, Oregon, and southward to St. George, small towns in the interior West are becoming part of a larger constellation of capital and business relations linking rural areas with the great metropolitan centers on the coast and with the global community beyond. "

"In the central Oregon town of Bend--once a bustling center of pine sawmilling--a winter-sports boom following World War II has mushroomed into an incredible growth spurt. Retirees, monied refugees from inflated real-estate markets elsewhere, and affluent and active business people have created the driving force behind the booming land and home-building sales occurring in the greater Bend area in the last few years."

"The creation of the still-emerging New West of recent years has wrought the obvious--open opposition in many communities, especially among older residents suddenly hit with crowded traffic conditions, escalating taxes, sharply rising real-estate prices, and the other distortions that large infusions of outside capital bring to local economies. In a letter to the Portland Oregonian, one disgruntled resident of Bend observed that the newcomers have meant "gaudy ostentatious houses, big cars, pseudo-Italian suits, soap-opera tart dresses, and deals, deals, deals."

"And, as the writer openly acknowledged, a sometimes overblown chauvinism has resulted, directed in most instances at the euphemistic Californian:

The locusts of our time, the Californians cut a swath of destruction wherever they go, always in search of that lifestyle that only exists in Hollywood movies."

"Even though places such as St. George, Utah, and Bend, Oregon, are far removed in kind, distance, and size from Orange County, they function in a broad global theater of market-exchange relations, industrial strategies, and investment decision-making that is linked to the great mobility of capital in the late twentieth century. Moreover, as capital increasingly disperses itself across the hinterland West as the close of the century approaches, it will leave in its wake a local autonomy more diminished than ever before."

Gowdey, Crazy Horse Must be Laughing

"To borrow a Iine from Bob Dylan, "The times they are a changin ."One hundred and fifty years ago my relatives invaded the West, dispossessed the local inhabitants, and ran roughshod over their culture. Proud peoples with centuries of tradition were burned off their land, herded into rural ghettos, and reduced to beggary. In a less violent, but no less sure, manner the same thing is happening again. Perhaps there is Karma."

"Here in the western United States, the process is called "Aspenization " after the economic slaughter of the innocents that happened in Aspen in the late I970s and early I980s. Wealthy outsiders, mostly from southern California, fell in love with the small mining-turned-skiing town and began buying up all the property. They pushed property prices so high that lawyers and doctors making almost $100,000 per year now receive government assistance so they can afford housing in Aspen. Locals, working for tourist-economy wages, no longer have any hope of being able to afford housing in town, They commute from rural ghettos to clean the toilets and mow the lawns of the rich and famous. A few realtors got fabulously wealthy, but as usual the majority of the townsfolk got screwed."

"As southern Californians continue to flee the urban monstrosity they have created, and refugees stream from Chicago and Detroit, this cultural destruction of the West proceeds at an ever-increasing pace. Jackson Hole, Bozeman, Taos, Flagstaff Boulder, Ketchum, Prescott, Telluride, Moab, Santa Fe--the list of towns that have been Aspenized or are facing Aspenization continues to grow."

"Although we are both Americans, I have as much in common with a resident of Los Angeles or Orange County or Chicago as I do with a Frenchman. The ethics and values of these urban refugees baffle me. I cannot understand why they build a golf course in the middle of beautiful mountain meadows so they can build expensive houses on the fairways. I cannot understand why they increasingly demand that public schools teach their children morality, while they oppose increased funding for education. I cannot understand their instinctive belief that the poor should be punished for lacking the moral fiber to rise above poverty."

"Unless the citizens of the rural West decide to prohibit the construction of housing targeted at affluent immigrants, this wave of urban refugees will continue to spill over the region like sewage from a backed-up toilet. These newcomers will continue to abolish hunting, and rodeos, and god knows what else, and replace them with fat ladies singing the "Luftwaffe Serenade " by that anti-Semitic bastard Wagner.

I sometimes wonder if some Sioux, and Cheyenne, and Navajo, and Apache braves weren't saying these same things around a campfire a century ago. I fear they were. Crazy Horse must be laughing himself silly."

Raymond Jones, Drawing Strength from the Diversity of the West

"A lot of different things can help you find your place. Blacks, too, have a place in this place. It would be well for all of us, as we consider the American West, to reflect on the way in which it has been shaped, and the way it has been exclusive in the past. One of the factors that must be considered is the extent to which we will include all of the people in this place. We have not been good at that. We are 100 or 150 years too late in discussing this."

"Yet when our forbearers saw this place, they saw frontier. Even today we speak of it as frontier, as though it were empty, as though it were no one's home. They saw something, and still today we see something that we call the frontier, which is there for the taking. Certainly it was treated that way - as something there for the taking and something to be given in reward. We didn't see other peoples' homes, we didn't see other peoples' sacred places, we didn't see animal habitats in ecological balance with the whole. We didn't see animals at all -- animals that lived and thrived and enabled human inhabitants themselves to thrive."

"We must take a regional view of this place. We are long, long too late in approaching the West as a region that must be seen as a whole socially and economically. Certainly we have been beaten and bludgeoned into looking at our water in those terms. But we devastated the land in many other ways before we had the foresight to look upon it as an interrelated region."

"It is important for us to bring that imperative home to the West, to undertake a kind of democratization of this region and develop a sense that it is populated by people who are of this place, who know this place, who are comfortable and in balance with this place, and who have been shaped by this place. It is important that we recognize the mistakes that we made in not including those whose home it was before. It is important that when we talk of shared values, we are very careful to include all of those who have made a contribution in this place.

We have made mistakes. We are now talking about concepts that we might have profited from talking about 150 years ago. Let us now, at this late date, act on these concepts and act on these ideas. Let us use the strength that this place has put in us and truly make this place, this region, this American West, a great thing of beauty."

Snow, The Last Place on Earth

"John's answer was this: No amount of cash would purchase hunting rights on his farm. But they were welcome to hunt in exchange for work. One hour planting windbreak equaled one hour hunting. They could start next spring, since the year was old already. John pointed to the mile-long row of poplar saplings and cottoneasters we'd already put into place. Now it was time to start the conifers. We'd provide the training free, and we'd drill the holes since John wanted no gringos fingering his orchard tractor. They walked off shaking their heads. You'd have thought he'd asked for their firstborn."

"The historian K. Ross Toole liked such stories too. He tells one something like that at the beginning of The Rape of the Great Plains . You remember it, even if you haven't read that book. A well-dressed stranger shows up at a rancher's place one day. The stranger has a big idea about what to build next, what will save this little podunk economy out in the howling prairie. Grass just doesn't get people excited.
It 's industry, our savior, the stranger represents. He wants the rancher to sell.

He and the rancher talk awhile; then the rancher asks the fellow to judge the distance of yonder mountain. The fellow guesses ten miles. The rancher smiles. Yonder mountain is more than sixty miles overland. The West is not quite as it seems. Never was, never will be. The air is pretty damn clean."

"The problem is this: Two tiny worlds endlessly came into collision across the West. There's a scuffle, better if it's a good-humored one, lurid if someone goes for the gun, but the scuffle tends to end in a draw. The gentry, we sacred firsterners of the West, hold our moral high ground, which we continue to irrigate. Newcomers, perennially baffled, either beat the holy rolling hell out of us (another Pyrrhic victory for progress, Manifest Destiny, whitefolks), or turn away dazed. Maybe they learned something, maybe not.

I say these worlds are tiny because I mean it. It doesn't matter if K. Ross's rancher is facing draglines while John and I faced only a trio of shotguns and the shattered peace of a dozen Sunday mornings. The end is still the same: new people come to fill up this land. They bring every damn thing with them. That's the story of the West--always was, always will be."

"It haunts all who are not so jaded and somnambulant from the cities that we can no longer feel and see. We straddle a crack, a suture, in the white Navajo sandstone, the fossil dunes that form the parietal bones of the canyon head, and we follow the little crack until it widens, and then begin our descent into the dark brains of the canyon. We lose our minds as we go; we can hardly believe there is such a place left on this exhausted earth. And yet here it is. We drive the Datsun right to it.

The West is a land of dreams, and we cannot and should not hope to stop the dreaming. I want to finish my sad-dude story another way. I want them to say yes, a hesitant, ponderous yes. I want them to come back, not next spring ."

Lewis, The West after the 2008 Financial Collapse

Vice-President Cheney told Senate Republicans that
if they didn't support the Bailout of the Auto Industry
and that industry collapse "they would be forever
known as the party of Herbert Hoover." As of today,
it looks as if they are willing to let the auto industry collapse. This would mean the loss of millions of
American jobs.

It is in the context of another looming Great Depression that we are talking about the West's future. With the
Federal government broke, the state governments broke, and the economy flat on its back, the money and resources needed to solve the looming problems caused by rapid population growth, spawl, and unmanaged
growth just aren't there. Managing growth and sprawl is even harder in such an economic environment. But the financial collapse creates opportunities as well.

Faced with re-building our financial economy, our housing economy, and our industrial economy, we now have opportunities that we didn't have last year. We don't have the money to continue to support sprawl. We must now do more with less. We need Smart Growth and to
re-vitalize our urban centers. We need to protect the remaining rural farms, ranches, recreation, and open space lands. We need to preserve greenbelts at the edge of our cities and suburbs to improve the air and water we breathe and to create a healthier environment. We need to better think about where we are going to put all those
people who come to the rural West. If we do this right,
we can now re-build our economy, our cities, our suburbs while at the same time protecting our quality of life, making our cities and communities livable places, and preserving the great open spaces and rural land that still makes the West such a draw to tourists. If we don't begin to tackle the problems of growth and sprawl, then
we will get Limerick's "business as usual" future, which
will leave a diminished West to ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

 

 

 


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