Learning to Live in the West as a Region: Daniel Kemmis

Question for Discussion: What does Daniel
Kemmis mean by the need to "re-inhabit" the
West as a place?

Reading: Kemmis, "The Home of Hope";
Travis, Development and the Heart and Soul of the West;
What is Cooperative Conservation? ;

Video: Subdivide and Conquer DVD-- The Boulder
Model,The Oregon Model

Daniel Kemmis Bio (in-class)
Center for the Rocky Mountain West (in-class)
Kemmis: Regional Policy in the West
(in-class)
Kemmis, The Lay of the Land (in-class)
Kemmis, The Art of the Possible
and the Home of Hope (in-class)
Kemmis: How the West was Lost
Kemmis: The Politics of Re-inhabitation (in-class)
Across the Great Divide:
Collaborative Conservation (in-class)
How Cooperative is Collaborative Conservation
(in-class)
Science's Role in Natural Resource Decisions
Finding Common Ground in the West (in-class)
Limits on the Federal Government's
Ability to support the 21st century West (in-class)
Learning from the Native Inhabitants
of the West (in-class)
Koyaanisqatsi: Dilemmas facing the
American West (in-class)

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The 21st Century West
Map of the American West today
State Map of the 20th Century American West
Population per Square Mile in the West
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night (in-class)
Western Land owned by the Government
Government Agency Land in the West
1940 West Metropolitan Areas
1990 West Metropolitan Areas
West Population Growth 1990-2005 (in-class)
USA Today: Census 2000 Map
2000 US Census Factfinder Map
Western Growth Rate by County
Growing Minority Populations in the
West
Western Cities as rated Good Places
to Live

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Koyaanisqatsi (1983): Internet Movie Database
Powaqqatsi (1988): Internet Movie Database
Naqoyqatsi (2002): Internet Movie Database
The Qatsi Trilogy
Life in Turmoil/Out of Balance:
An interview with Godfrey Reggio

Finding Common Ground in the West

West Final Exam Question:
The West in 2040
Kemmis, The Lay of the Land (in-class)
Travis, Development as the Heart and Soul
of the West
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night (in-class)
Percent of Government Land in the West
by State
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West
West Population Growth 1990-2005 (in-class)
Megapolitan Areas: Urban Growth Zones in
the West
Limits on the Federal Government's
Ability to support the 21st century West (in-class)
Characteristics of the West as Place
(in-class)
Contradictions facing the American West
(in-class)
Koyaanisqatsi: Dilemmas facing the American
West (in-class)
Learning from the Native Inhabitants
of the West (in-class)
Study of Oregon Land-Use Model (in-class)
Daniel Kemmis Bio (in-class)
Center for the Rocky Mountain West (in-class)
Guiding Principles for the Rocky Mountain
West (in-class)
Kemmis: Regional Policy in the West (in-class)
Center of the American West (in-class)
Western Governors Association (in-class)
Regionalism in the West: A Policy Report
Index of Regional Initiatives in the West
(in-class)
Across the Great Divide:
Collaborative Conservation
What is Cooperative Conservation? (in-class)
How Cooperative is Collaborative Conservation
(in-class)
Stakeholders in the American West (in-class)
Tips for Working with Stakeholders (in-class)
Kemmis, The Lay of the Land (in-class)
Kemmis, The Art of the Possible
and the Home of Hope (in-class)
Kemmis: Science's Role in Natural Resource Decisions (in-class)

Limits on the Federal Government's ability to support the 21st century West

1. U.S. National Debt Clock FAQs

2. U.S. National Debt Clock

3, The Baseline Scenario:
Financial Crisis for Beginners

4. What's the tab for the Bailout?

5. Bush's 10 Trillion Borrowing Binge (in-class)

6. Greenspan's Social Security Scam

7. Bush's Record on Cutting Taxes

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Stakeholders in the American West

1. Ranchers

2. Miners

3. Loggers

4. Farmers

5. Suburban communities

6. Recreational users

7. Environmentalists

8. Wilderness Advocates

9. Urban Populations

10. Local and Regional Ecosystems

11. Indian Tribes

12. Tourist Industry

13. Blue-Collar Workers

14. White-Collar Workers

15. Government Agencies

16. Local Governments

17. State Governments

18. National Government

19. Global Community of Nations

20. Future Generations

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Learning from the Native Inhabitants of the West

Chief Seattle's Speech (1887)

Russell Means, "For America to Live,
Europe Must Die" (1980)

The Ishmael Community

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

The conflict has not been Capitalism vs. Communism, Reggio said. Both systems have had the same objective: an accelerated technological society that will create a geologic layer of synthetic commodities. Both have exploited the human need for mysticism by producing a mystical faith in the material world, an unquestioning belief in quantity and sheer size. This puts us in a deep spiritual and political social crisis. The real conflict is North-South, northern hemisphere thinking in Third World countries.

Then he reeled off a fairly exhaustive sociopolitical litany of polar opposites:
large-small; synthetic-organic; centralized-decentralized; technological-traditional; homogenous-indigenous; mass scale-human scale; bureaucratic-democratic.
Interview with Godrey Reggio

We never did vanish. The tribes are still here and have no intention of leaving the American West. In fact, most traditional Indian beliefs are that we will be here long after the white man has gone.
...Walter Echo-Hawk

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.....And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.
Chief Seattle Speech (1887)

There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans--the Europeans' arrogance of acting as though they were beyond the nature of all related things--can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony.
Russell Means (1980)

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution. And that's a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.

American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It's only a matter of time until what Europeans call "a major catastrophe of global proportions" will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don't want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That's revolution.

American Indians are still in touch with these realities--the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. I don't care if it's only a handful living high in the Andes. American Indian people will survive; harmony will be re-established. That's revolution.
Russell Means (1980)

What makes values shared and what makes them politically powerful is that they arise out of the challenge of living well together in hard country. When people do that long enough to develop a pattern of shared values, those values acquire a political potency.
....Daniel Kemmis

The way we will be able to do something about it is to claim our homeland--to say this is our home, and to be able to say "our" and mean it, not only of the people that think and dress and behave like us, but of the other inhabitants of the region who are equally rooted here. When the West is ready to do that, then it will be ready for a real politics of inhabitation.
.....Daniel Kemmis

I agree with Mayor Kemmis that the world spirit is alive in Western valleys, but it is alive in people, and not a place....If hardship is possibility, then it is these people and their continuing hardship...where those powerful concepts of freedom and democracy might finally be realized.
....Camille Guerin-Gonzalez

Travis, Development and the Heart and Soul of the West

Rapid development is also changing western society. Sprawl, lack of affordable housing, and traffic jams are changing the mentality of the West. Westerners, even relative newcomers, lament the landscape and social values squandered as roads are carved into mountainsides and ranches are subdivided. Many are working to protect what's left of the
region's natural wealth and working landscapes, but weak planning institutions and a resurgent property rights movement frustrate their efforts. Growth's critics argue, with some justification, that rather than ensuring quality of life, government in the West mostly promotes further development with pro-growth programs of all sorts, from tax breaks to water projects. Much of what we lament about modern development in the West was planned....
Anti-growth, slow-growth, and even "smart growth " forces are weak, their campaigns outmaneuvered by local and regional growth machines.

There is time for change. Despite the rapid spread of western development, the mountains, basins, deserts, and Canyonlands of the West are still by and large open country, sparsely settled, for the most part, outside its few large cities (such as Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Denver) and medium-sized towns (such as Reno, Boise, Grand Junction, Bozeman, Helena, Colorado Springs, and Tucson). Nighttime satellite images reveal that, from the Rocky Mountains west to the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges, the explicit footprint of development is still small compared with that in other American regions. Open land is the region's chief asset, providing habitat for something close to the full suite of its natural biological heritage as well as a compelling matrix for its human residents.

Many western communities are surrounded by farmland and ranchland that provides open space, character, and even the potential for local food supplies. Others lie in a geography of public lands. Although they are not subject to private development, the national forests, national parks, and wildlife refuges do host timber cutting, mining, grazing, roads, and recreational developments that can and do degrade the land. Such uses must be curbed as private lands are developed and the public lands become the main reserve of habitat on which the region's ecological well-being relies.

Much more development is on tap: the
region's population will double in the next forty to fifty years, and up to half of the remaining developable land is on the chopping block, slated for houses (at low to high densities), offices, warehouses, ski villages, golf courses, shopping malls, highways, airports, and the other accoutrements of modern American development.

If the current trajectory of western development undermines the region's
natural and social sustainability, then how should it be altered? I worry about rapid development, especially in my own western place, on Colorado's Front Range. I am concerned that we will be sorry after we have, in historian Patricia Nelson Limerick ' s phrase, "fully deployed conventional American culture in [this] unconventional landscape." The region is rapidly becoming just like the rest of the country, with sprawling suburban cities, the standard malls and office parks, and cookie-cutter housing developments on subdivided farms and ranches. Residents respond to the region's booming development with attitudes ranging from resentment to grief. Their calls for better land use planning, and even limits on growth, have had limited effects thus far, but their efforts show that westerners want something different.

Koyaanisqatsi: Dilemmas facing the American West

The mega-city versus the countryside
Anglo-American versus the Indian worldview
Destruction of the land versus preservation
Pollution versus Pristine Nature
Alienation versus Sense of belonging
Accelerated life versus natural cycles
Growth of Industrial West versus its collapse
Humanizing the landscape versus leaving the
land to follow its natural cycles.
Continued progress versus an apocaylptic future.
Constant motion versus belonging to a place
Despiritualizing the land versus re-inhabiting the land
The Modern world versus the Native world
Material consumption versus preserving the past
Rushing into the future versus staying in the past
Accepting the future versus controlling the future.
Industrial landscape versus human landscape
Mega-technology versus small-scale technology
Amassing individual wealth versus supporting the larger welfare of the community.
Headlong rush foward versus a slow, deliberate speed.
The Modern, industrial West versus the natural West

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, as figure 1 illustrates. 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." (xviii)

"These federal holdings are so vast that they dominate not only the geography but also the politics of the West. Geographically, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) alone own more than 411 million of the roughly 1.2 billion acres that make up Alaska and the eleven lower western states--about 34 percent of the total land area. Nationally owned lands take up an astounding 83 percent of Nevada 's total land base, more than 80 percent of Idaho 's and Utah 's, and more than 45 percent of the land base in four other western states. These lands are owned by the national government and run by its agencies in Washington , D.C." (xx)

"The West is also Indian country, as figure 3 demonstrates. 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 reservation. 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." (xxi)

"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." (xxi)

"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....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. " (xxiii-xxiv)

Kemmis, The Art of the Possible in the Home of Hope

"Politics as "the art of the possible," in other words, may mean that "the glass is half empty," but it may also mean that "the glass is half full." I do not want to argue that the second sense of the definition should be entirely substituted for the first. but simply that politics should be understood as "the art of the possible ' in both of these senses. it is the tension between these two meanings which makes politics interesting--which makes it, indeed, a human enterprise. " (109)

"Perhaps the time has come to lift our gaze to the far horizons, to open up the boundaries of politics, to begin the hard but endlessly rewarding job of creating, here, in the native home of hope, a politics to match our vistas. We need to begin to imagine what a politics of possibility might look like." (111)

"Yet it is important to keep in mind that the concept of "place" enters into this situation in a literal as well as a metaphorical way. The pulp mill and the local environmental group were brought to the point of collaboration because both of them had a stake in what happened to a particular place. They had different stakes, and had they been left to themselves, they would have done different things with the place, but in the end it was one and the same place. Neither party wanted to leave the place, and both recognized that what Lester Thurow says of territoriality in such a case is true: neither side could gain a decisive or lasting victory over the other (although they were both free to use the procedural republic in an attempt to win)."

"But the actual practice of finding solutions that people can live with usually reaches beyond compromise to something more like neighborliness--to finding within shared space the possibilities for a shared inhabitation. Such neighborliness is inconceivable without the building of trust, of some sense of justice, of reliability or honesty. This practice of being neighbors draws together, therefore, the concepts of place, of inhabitation, and of the kinds of practices from which civic virtues evolve."

"So it is that places may play a role in the revival of citizenship. Places have a way of claiming people. When they claim very diverse kinds of people, then those people must eventually learn to live with each other; they must learn to inhabit their place together, which they can only do through the development of certain practices of inhabitation which both rely upon and nurture the old-fashioned civic virtues of trust, honesty, justice, toleration, cooperation, hope, and remembrance. It is through the nurturing of such virtues (and in no other way) that we might begin to reclaim that competency upon which democratic citizenship depends."

"A politics of citizens working out the problems and the possibilities of their place directly among themselves implies a revival of the old republican notion of citizenship based upon civic virtue; it rejects the federalist use of procedures to "supply the defect of better motives." But a politics which rests upon a mutual recognition by diverse interests that they are bound to each other by their common attachment to a place also rejects the notion of a politics of "keeping citizens apart." Escaping from each other into frontiers of any kind is explicitly rejected. "

"But as rural life is threatened more and more severely by inter-national markets, by technological dislocations and corporate domi nation, it may be time for a reassessment of the relationship between cities and their rural environs. It may well be that neither towns nor farms can thrive in the way they would prefer until they turn their attention more directly to each other, realizing that they are mutually complementary parts of the enterprise of inhabiting a particular place--whether that place be called a bioregion, a city-state, or a polis. As a rule, we come closer to this way of thinking in the economic than in the political sphere. Cities and towns, in their economic development policies, recognize at least dimly that it is to their advantage to add value locally to the produce and raw materials of their hinterlands." (124)

"At this point we have to speak of politics and economics in the same breath. If localities in the West had more control over their resources, and if the various interests within those localities could agree on some common directions for utilizing those resources, then local economies could be substantially strengthened and stabilized. But the political "ifs" which precede this economic "then" are significant indeed. This is plainly illustrated by the history of the Sagebrush Rebellion." (127)

"The movement was led by conservatives, with particular support from grazing, timbering, and mining interests. Environmentalists and recreationists saw the rebellion (with considerable justification) as an effort to place public land in private hands, with one major objective: to increase the profit margins of various enterprises. In the end, an unusual opportunity for the West to gain some much-needed control over its own territory and resources was stalled by the distrust which so thoroughly characterizes western politics. It is on this level, finally, that the West must finally confront the challenge of cooperation which Stegner so tersely poses. The region cannot transcend its colonial heritage until it gains a much more substantial measure of indigenous control over its own land and resources. But it can neither gain nor exercise that control until the left and the right gain enough trust in each other, and establish a productive enough working relationship, to enable them to agree, at least roughly, on what they would seek to accomplish if they had such control." (127-128)

"The lesson can hardly be overstated: proponents of the public interest must find ways to break out of the politics of stalemate, even if it means (as it does) that they have to begin opening up arenas of cooperation with "the enemy." (132)

"If inhabitation of the place depends upon the sustained production of timber, the corporation must either take on the task of nurturing forests or else forego its claim to citizenship. If inhabitation means looking beyond the extraction of a non-renewable resource to the building of a replacement economy once the mine closes, then the mining corporation, if it is going to call itself (and claim the advantages of being) a corporate citizen, must put its shoulder to the wheel (through severance taxes or some genuine alternative) to help build that replacement economy." (133)

Left to themselves. of course, corporations are not going to practice citizenship in this way. The main reason is that they are not inhabitants in the same way that other residents of the place are. Once the mine plays out or the large sawlogs are all cut, the corporation can simply leave--a pattern all too familiar in the West. The corporation's chief loyalty is not to the place, but to the shareholders and executives who almost always live somewhere else. A realistic appraisal of the situation will take account of this semi-inhabitory feature of the corporation. But having taken this factor into consideration, the politics of inhabitation need not be stopped cold in its tracks. Here, the "art of the possible" must turn from the half-empty glass to the one that is half full. The politics of inhabitation must realize its own possibilities, in part by nurturing citizenship among its corporations." (133-34)

"I do not mean to minimize the factors that stand in the way of a genuinely inhabitory kind of citizenship on the part of corporations. particularly those extractive industries which depend, to a certain extent, upon the West remaining a colony for the rest of the nation. The hurdles are very substantial and very deeply rooted. But it is a mistake to assume that all of those problems derive from the nature of the corporation itself, and that they are therefore beyond public control. A large part of the corporate problem in public life is the public's problem, stemming from its own lack of a clear identity. That lack of identity, in turn, stems from our overall failure to demand of ourselves an active practice of citizenship. Until corporations are presented with a public which understands and practices citizens their own corporate citizenship will never be fully brought into play." (135)

"A politics which finds its opportunity in its hardship, in its limitations, and more particularly in the limitations of its place, is a politics which captures the dual meaning of politics as the "art of the possible" and at the same time recaptures the ancient meaning of politics as the project of inhabiting a polis." (138)

"In the West, this would imply that the people who live here would claim a much larger share of dominion over their own territory. Yet this can only happen when the people of the West learn to listen to each other and to work effectively on the project of inhabitation. Cooperation is essential to inhabitation, and it will have to extend to cooperation between right and left, between Democrats and Republicans, even between environmentalists and corporations. Finally, this politics will not come into its own until cities and their rural surroundings learn to appreciate the common stake they have in one another's welfare. The new politics in the West will be successful only if it is willing to carry decentralization even further than states' rights-back to the polis itself. In the rediscovery of the city-state as the locus of inhabitation, politics might be renewed. " (138-39)