Restoring and Renewing the West as Home

Question for Discussion: According to Stegner
and Wilkinson, how can Westerners learn to
live in the West as Home? Do we first have to
admit that the West is now finally settled?

Reading: Stegner, " A Geography of Hope";
and "A Sense of Place" ; Wilkinson, "Toward
an Ethic of Place"

Video: Subdivide and Conquer DVD-- Rural Sprawl

Major Issues in the 21st century West

Common Characteristics of the
American West (in-class)
Contradictions Facing the Present
and Future American West (in-class)
Koyaanisqatsi: Dilemmas facing the
American West (in-class)
Stakeholders in the American West (in-class)
Overview of Western Futures (Maps)
Western Region Population Growth: 1960-2040
(in-class)
Growth Data Sheet for Western States: 1960-2040
(in-class)
Western Futures: Growth Trends: 1960-2050
(in-class)

Increasing U.S. National Debt

U.S. Economy in Crisis
U.S. National Debt Clock (in-class)
U.S. National Debt Clock FAQs (see graph of its rise)
(in-class)
Foreign Financed U.S. Debt (in-class)
Bush's 10 Trillion Borrowing Binge
Government Borrowing Social Security Contributions
IMF Warns about Growing U.S. Debt (in-class)
IMF Report on increasing U.S. Indebtedness 2004
(in-class)
World Bank: Global Debt -- 1995-2003 (in-class)

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The West as a Settled Place

Stegner: The Challenge of the West (in-class)
Stegner, The Geography of Hope:
Creating a Society to Match the Scenery (in-class)
Stegner, A Sense of Place (in-class)
Wilkinson, Towards an Ethic of Place (in-class)
Stegner: The Need for Wilderness (in-class)

The Geography of the 21st Century West
Topographic Map of the American West (in-class)
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
1940 West Metropolitan Areas
1990 West Metropolitan Areas
2000 West Metropolitan Areas
USA Today: Census 2000 Map
2000 US Census Factfinder Map
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night
Western Growth Rate by County
Growing Minority Populations in the
West
Mapping Development in the West
Western Cities as rated Good Places
to Live

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The Changing Cultural Geography of the West

2000 Census U.S. Population at Night (in-class)
Megapolitan Areas: Urban Growth Zones in
the West (in-class)
Measuring Sprawl
Fractal Model of Sprawl (in-class)
Finding Exurbia: Rapid Growth of the Exurbs (in-class)
David Brooks, Our Sprawling Supersize Utopia
Western Futures Study: The West 1960 to 2040
(in-class)
Western Futures Study Website (in-class)
Western Region Population Growth: 2000 to 2040
(in-class)
Topographic Map of the American West (in-class)
Worster: The Challenge of the Arid West (in-class)
(See the pictures of the West on this webpage)
Stegner: The Larger Challenge Facing
the Future West (in-class)
Stegner, The Geography of Hope:
Creating a Society to Match the Scenery (in-class)
The West as a Place of Shared Memories (in-class)
Stegner, Developing A Sense of Place (in-class)
(Focus on how we become "placed" persons)
Major Issues in the 21st Century West (in-class)
Increasing U.S. National Debt (in-class)
Stegner: The Need for Wilderness (in-class)
The Wilderness Society: Why We Need
Wilderness (in-class)
Wilkinson, Towards an Ethic of Place (in-class)
The Geography of the 21st Century West
The Changing Cultural Geography of the West
The West as a Settled Place (in-class)

Stegner, The Geography of Hope

"I once said in print that the West --- and I mean the interior West of plains, mountains, and deserts -- is the geography of hope, the native home of optimism, the youngest and freshest of America's regions, magnificently endowed and with the chance to become something unprecedented and unmatched in the world.

I was probably demonstrating my thesis while I expressed it. I was shaped by the West and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it, in all its subregions and subcultures, both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery. Whenever I return to the Rocky Mountain states where I am most at home, my native enthusiasm overcomes me, and I respond as unthinkingly as a salmon that swims past a river mouth and tastes the waters of its birth and feels an irresistible impulse, born I am sure of love, to turn inland in search of the stream where it was hatched."

"Too often, when it has been prosperous, it has been prosperous at the expense of its fragile environment, and its prosperity has been most unequally distributed among its citizens. Its civilization, still nascent, has too often degraded the natural habitat while exploiting it and drawing most of its character from it. So I curb my enthusiasm, I begin to quibble and qualify; I say yes, the West is the native home of hope, but there are varieties and degrees of hope, and the wrong kind, in excessive amounts, goes with human disappointment and environmental damage as bust goes with boom."

"I believe in the profound influence of places on people, and nobody could miss the effect of people on places. But there remains a doubt: Maybe a continuing cross-fertilization between people and places is not feasible in the West, or is feasible only between a damaged environment and a limited population. Maybe any stable society in the West is destined to be not merely mobile, but sparse.

The Western states do contain some deeply lived-in places, but they are scarcer in the West than elsewhere. Western places are newer, for one thing; for another, many of the people who established them came to pillage, or to work for pillagers, not to settle for life. When the pillaging was done, they moved on."

"What makes the West a difficult place to stay put in is aridity. Past and future, the West is a dry subject, and all sorts of social, economic, political, and psychological consequences flow from the fact of too little water."

"But, some will object, if the boosters promise too much and the suckers expect too much, should that make us knockers? In any human effort there will be risks and casualties. But obviously not everyone has failed in the West, or there wouldn't be 45 or 50 million people living there, the Pacific Coast would not be conurbia from Seattle to San Diego, and Denver, Salt Lake, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Tucson would not be spreading...." (224)

"True, many people live successfully in the West, and many of them could not be bribed to live elsewhere, and more keep coming. They come looking for opportunity, but also they come following the hopeful dream of escape from industrial civilization and its discontents. They want healthful space, clean air, sun, skiing, a vigorous outdoor life, access to mountain and desert wilderness, emancipation from the dirt, crime, and crowding of the cities." (225)

"An oasis civilization. People settled where there was water and left essentially empty the wide dry spaces in between. It was aridity that made those empty spaces, and that also brought into being the federal bureaus charged with managing a public domain largely unfit for human habitation. Human engineering let us move out a little into the empty spaces; but altogether, in all its history, the Bureau of Reclamation reclaimed only an area about the size of Ohio. Now we are at the end of the dam-building era and close to the end of our exploitation of underground water." (225)

"In Bernard DeVoto's phrase, Western economics have always been the economics of liquidation. Even presumably renewable resources such as timber and grass have been mined, not nourished. The blame has often been laid on Eastern capitalists, but whenever they have had the chance, Westerners have happily plundered themselves. From the very beginning, Americans approached the West not as the Children of Israel approached the Land of Canaan (except the Mormons, who did just that), but as Egyptian grave robbers might approach the tomb of a pharaoh."

"If I thought , the American Dream was only the dream of bonanza that my father lived by and that contemporary energy conglomerates live by and that agribusiness and the stockmen and the mining industry live by and that politicians applaud as the spirit that won the West, I could be pretty pessimistic about the West's future. It could easily, under the attacks of those who will not admit its limits, degenerate and deteriorate until not even massive engineering can keep it liveable. It could achieve its proper population sparseness the hard way and end up supporting far fewer people and cattle and sheep than it would if it were treated, in the cant word of contemporary environmentalism, "sustainable." For we cannot forget that the dry country heals, if at all, very slowly."

"That, I submit, is what the people of the plains and mountains and deserts had better not do. If I knew the answer to the West 's future, I would carry it to every legislative hall from Helena to Santa Fe. But I don't. All I know is that whatever combination of ranching, mining, logging, and taking in each other's wash the West finally comes to, all of the extractive industries are going to have to be far more scrupulous about the environment than they have been in the past, and that the permanent population of the Western states is going to be a lot smaller than the boosters project."

"When I ponder the effects the dream has already had on the country I knew sixty-five or seventy years ago, I remember the advice that Satan gave the world at the end of Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger. "Dream other dreams, and better!" Satan advised. He was speaking of the dream of human life, and speaking as a real pessimist; but as a person of wide experience he should be listened to, and his wisdom applied wherever it works. Dream other dreams, and better."

Stegner, Developing a Sense of Place

"But if every American is several people, and one of them is or would like to be a placed person, another is the opposite, the displaced person, cousin not to Thoreau but to Daniel Boone, dreamer not of Walden Ponds but of far horizons, traveler not in Concord but in wild unsettled places, explorer not inward but outward. Adventurous, restless, seeking, asocial or antisocial, the displaced American persists by the million long after the frontier has vanished. He exists to some extent in all of us, the inevitable by-product of our history: the New World transient. He is commoner in the newer parts of America – the West, Alaska – than in the older parts, but he occurs everywhere, always in motion.

To the placed person he seems hasty, shallow, and restless. He has a current like the Platte, a mile wide and inch deep. As a species, he is non-territorial, he lacks a stamping ground. Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none. Culturally he is a discarder or transplanter, not a builder or conserver. He even seems to like and value his rootlessness, though to the placed person he shows the symptoms of nutritional deficiency, as if he suffered from some obscure scurvy or pellagra of the soul."

"I know about this. I was born on wheels, among just such a family. I know about the excitement of newness and possibility, but also know the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness. Some towns that we lived in were never real to me. They were only the raw material of places, as I was the raw material of a person. Neither place nor I had a change of being anything unless we could live together for a while. I spent my youth envying people who had lived all their lives in the houses they were born in, and had attics full of proof that they had lived."

"So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it – have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef."

"Changing everywhere, America changes fastest west of the 100th meridian. Mining booms, oil booms, irrigation booms, tourist booms, culture booms as at Aspen and Sun Valley, crowd out older populations and bring in new ones. Communities lose their memory along with their character. For some, the memory can over time be re-instated. For many, the memory too will be a transient...."

"Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it. In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless man that Carl Jung wrote about, who lives “like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He . . . lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”

"Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don’t know where you are you don’t know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it."

"I doubt that we will ever get the motion out of the Americans, for everything in this culture of opportunity and abundance has, up to now, urged motion on him as a form of virtue. Our tradition of restlessness will not be outgrown in a generation or two, even if the motives for restlessness are withdrawn. But after all, in a few months it will be half a millennium since Europeans first laid eyes on this continent. At least in geographical terms, the frontiers have been explored and crossed. It is probably time we settled down. It is probably time we looked around us instead of looking ahead. We have no business, any longer, in being impatient with history."

"History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history, we did both the country and ourselves some harm along with some good. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging."

“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” says Robert Frost’s poem. Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established."

Wilkinson, Towards a Sense of Place

The contentiousness has rarely created satisfactory or lasting results. Often, although not always, the dissenting parties leave angry, determined to undercut the temporary solution bred of combativeness. Perhaps worse, the process tears at our sense of community; it leaves us more a loose collection of fractious sub-groups than a coherent society with common hopes and dreams."

"To quote Patricia Nelson Limerick again, "Indians, Hispanics, Asians, blacks, Anglos, business people, workers, politicians, bureaucrats, natives, and newcomers, we share the same region and its history, but we wait to be introduced."

"Environmentalists, in particular, have repeatedly come into collision with these antiquated laws -- these lords of yesterday --that radically tilt decisions toward extractive interests. Environmentalists have had little choice but to engage in pitched battles that are more often directed at the outmoded laws than at the westerners who espouse them. Still, the result is personal hostility and shallow solutions."

"We need to develop an ethic of place. It is premised on a sense of place, the recognition that our species thrives on the subtle, intangible, but soul-deep mix of landscape, smells, sounds, history, schools, storefronts, neighbors, and friends that constitutes a place, a homeland. An ethic of place respects equally the people of a region and the natural world. It recognizes that westerners revere their physical surroundings and that they need and deserve a sustainable, productive economy that is accessible to those with modest incomes. An ethic of place ought to be a shared community value and manifest itself in a dogged determination to treat the environment and its people as equals, to recognize both as sacred, and to insure that all members of the community not just search for but insist upon solutions that fulfill the ethic."

"The ultimate object of the ethic of place is to achieve sustainability in a broad-gauged sense
-- ecological, economic, and cultural. The most relevant boundaries for defining place in the American West often accrue from watersheds. The region is marked off by water or, more accurately, by the lack of it."

"An ethic of place looks to more things than the geography of water for definition. The legitimate governments and societies in a region must also be identified. State and local governments hold established places, as do ranching, farming, and logging communities."

"The idea that an ethic of place requires respect toward other constituent parts of the community in no sense means that the ethic tends toward a homogeneous society. On the contrary, the ethic of place is founded on the worth of the subcultures of the West and thereby promotes the diversity that is the lifeblood of the region. We will always have disputes over land, water, minerals, and animals. Such raspings are inevitable and ultimately healthy in a dynamic and individualistic society. The overarching concern therefore is not to deny that conflict will occur but rather to acknowledge an ethic that sets standards for resolution and, as importantly, provides a method for dealing with disputes."

"Disputants need to recognize that they exist within a community and that consensus is the preferred method of resolution. Litigation is expensive. It is also inflexible: no judge can craft a settlement in these complex public disputes as well as the parties themselves. Furthermore, a voluntary agreement reached by consent draws groups into joint cooperation during the implementation stage that follows."

"Consensus resolution involving all affected watershed parties has an independent core value, one separate from the worth of ending a confrontation for the time being. An agreement can glue former adversaries together in a continuing process jointly conceived. Consensus builds trusting communities. Agreements heal and strengthen places."

"ONE IMPLICIT THEME in the ethic of place is that we westerners fail to aspire high enough. We fail to ask the hard but right questions. How great a society can we build? Should greatness be denied to us because our sophistication is of a different kind than Paris of the 1920s or ancient Rome or Athens? Are we somehow disqualified from greatness because we tend to build our philosophies around deep back canyons and the sweep of high plains vistas?"

"We are taught by sophisticated people in this global age that regionalism is passe. Let us not participate in that. Let us take the emotional and intellectual chance of saying that this is not the leftover sector of our nation; that, rather, this is the true soul of the country, the place that cries out loudest to the human spirit; that this place is exalted, that it is sacred. Use that word, sacred, and whatever kind of ethic it is, use the word ethic, because the word properly connotes rigor and high aspirations."

Stegner, The Larger Challenge Facing the Future West

For, as Wallace Stegner has written in The Sound of Mountain Water, when the West "finally learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the pattern that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery."

Stegner, A Western Sense of Place

....[A]nd reaching out from those the wilderness; the wilderness as opportunity and idea, the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men. For an American, insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild. The American experience has been the confrontation by old peoples and cultures of a world as new as if it had just risen from the sea. That gave us our hope and our excitement, and the hope and excitement can be passed on to newer Americans, Americans who never saw any phase of the frontier. But only so long as we keep the remainder of our wild as a reserve and a promise--a sort of wilderness bank.

.....These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Stegner: The Wilderness Letter

The West as a Place of Shared Memories

"...The West--and I mean the interior West of plains, mountains, and deserts--is the geography of hope, the native home of optimism, the youngest and freshest of America's regions.."
Stegner, "The Geography of Hope"

"The Dream of the West is the dream of the New World extended into the present."
Stegner, "The Geography of Hope"

"What lures many people to the West always has been, and still is, mirage."
Stegner, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the
Lemonade Springs"

"The West, Walter Webb said, is 'a semi-desert with a desert heart.'...The primary unity of the West is a shortage of water."
Stegner, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the
Lemonade Springs"

"As early as 1908, in the so-called Winters doctrine decision, the Supreme Court confirmed the Indians's right to water originating within or flowing through their reservations."
Stegner, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the
Lemonade Springs"

"Especially in the West, what we have instead of place is space. Place is more than half memory, shared memory. Rarely do Westerners stay long enough at one stop to share much of anything."
Stegner, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the
Lemonade Springs"

"When I ponder the effects the dream has alreaday had on the country I knew sixty-five or seventy years ago, I remember the advice that Satan gave the world at the end of Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger." "Dream other dreams, and better! Satan advised...As a person of wide experience he should be listened to, and his wisdom applied wherever it works. Dream other dreams, and better"
Stegner, "The Geography of Hope"
.......................................................................................

"Breathe deeply. It is the smell of sage we share in the West, the mutuality of stories that tell us who we are."
Terry Tempest Williams

"...Within whatever subculture we belong to that there is a sense of place. We can articulate our relationship to the land, honoring our own natural autobiographies, realizing wild rivers run through our veins."
Terry Tempest Williams

"If there is a miracle in the West, it is in the fabric these subcultures create, the tension and strength woven together through regional diversity; the warp dressed by individual commiunities and the weft created by the landscape that binds us."
Terry Tempest Williams

"Do you hear yourselves? You people out here talk about the land as though it was a person."
Terry Tempest Williams

....................

"La tierra cura. The earth heals.

The value of regional diversity lies in the mutuality of our tales. Disparate voices articulating the land, remembering, discovering where the source of our power lies.

A new soft wind blowing through the American West is paving the way for the 'future primitive.' It is as potent and irresistable as the ritual of burning sage."
Terry Tempest Williams

................................................................................................

"How much do we develop? How much of our resources do we use now, for us, for this generation, and how much do we save, and how do we preserve it for future generations? This battle is fought, for better or worse, largely through the discussion and resolution of issues involving public lands.

....Because the West, more than any other place, is concerned with the ethic of place--the issue that is at the heart of everything."
John Echohawk
.....................................................................

"When the West finally learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the pattern that most characterizes and perserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery."
Wallace Stegner