Still Dreaming Old and New Dreams in the West

Question for Discussion: What role does our
conviction that we can still shape the future of the
West play in creating and developing a vision
for the American West in 2050?

Reading: Travis, "Fashion Land Use Codes for the
New West"; High Country News, "Where do we Go From Here?" ; Davis, Seeds to Grow: Smarth Growth;
What is Smart Growth? ; Main Elements of a Smart Growth Policy ;

Video: Subdivide and Conquer DVD--The Growth of
Surburbs

Mapping the 21st Century West

High Country News Staff, Where do we
Go From Here? (in-class)
Marston, The American West's Future (in-class)
Introduction to Western Futures Study (in-class)
Western Futures: Business as Usual (in-class)
Bust as the Most Effective Growth Control (in-class)
Center for the American West:
Western Futures, 1960-2040s

Creating a Sustainable West
Seeds to Grow: Thinking about Smart Growth
in the West (in-class)
Qualities of a Sustainable West
Center for the American West:
Boom and Bust in the West Report
Knowing when a Bust has Begun
The New West and the Overproduction
of Resorts

The Western Governor's Association Work
Western Governors' Association (in-class)
Western Governors' Association
Strategic Agenda (in-class)
Western Governors' Association
Initiatives (in-class)
WGA 2006 Report: Building a Sustainable West
WGA 2005 Report: Protecting the Western Environment

The Enlibra Model for the West's Future
Enlibra: A Doctrine for Managing the West
WGA:Enlibra FAQs (in-class)
Principles for Environmental
Management in the West: Enlibra (in-class)

Maps of the New West
World Map, 1997
Map of Indian Reservations today
Map of the American West 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

Marston, The American West's Future (in-class)
High Country News Staff, Where do we
Go From Here? (in-class)
Introduction to Western Futures Study (in-class)
Western Futures: Business as Usual (in-class)
Why Should we protect Wilderness, Recreation,
and Open Space lands in the West? (in-class)
What is Smart Growth? (in-class)
Organizations working on Smart Growth (in-class)
Travis, Fashion Land Use Codes for the New West
(in-class)
Growing Smarter at the Egde:
Smart Growth at the Suburban Edge
Guiding Principles for Seattle's Open Space
(in-class)
The Western Governor's Association Work (in-class)
WGA: What is Enlibra?
WGA:Enlibra FAQs (in-class)
Principles for Environmental
Management in the West: Enlibra (in-class)
Western Futures: 2000-2040

Travis, Fashion Land Use Codes for the New West

Standards for land use are well developed for zoning, design, construction, and various health and safety matters, but are less available for landscape-scale themes such as comprehensive land use planning, open space, habitat protection, and the many, subtle dimensions of the overall shape and look of communities. But the seeds of land use stan dards suited to landscapes and tension zones in the West are starting to appear, and they deserve our attention.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Sonoran Institute concluded that, despite urban infill and re-development efforts, more than half of the new growth in the West over the next quarter century will be greenfield projects at the suburban edge. So the two groups analyzed a dozen cases of smart urban-edge development and collected the lessons in an easily accessible report, "Growing Smarter at the Edge." They found that the best master-planned communities encompass several basic smart growth elements, including integrated open space; mixed public, commercial, and residential uses; pedestrian orientations and alternative transit; and a range of housing densities and prices. But the report concludes that the benefits of "smart growth at the edge " accrue only if ' local jurisdictions have detailed master plans in place and enforce them. Detailed guidelines for master-planned communities are also important, as is a community's commitment not to "budge on the basics, " such as open space and a mix of densities and prices. The report concludes that well designed urban-edge developments can reduce the negative effects of growth on western landscapes.

Today, even in the sprawls that our cities have become, people identify subsets of the city as their place, their community, their neighborhood, their shopping district. When asked to draw a map of' their communities, residents of' large cities often draw their neighborhoods, delineated by certain well-known but unofficial boundaries, such as a road or a park or perhaps a more subtle change in quality of the housing stock, and often centered not on their home but on a civic facility such as a library or park. I have met many residents of small towns and rural areas who counted not only the whole town, but an entire valley, as their community, inverting the urban dwellers ' search for a more con-strained place.

Model land use codes for most western locales and ecosystems will include provisions and guidelines for maintaining open space, which I believe will become the single most important ingredient of regionally appropriate development. Open space will serve both social and ecological needs; it is the prime element of the region's essential green infrastructure.

Strategic planning for open space should consider broad guiding principles and the many roles that open space plays in a region's
natural and social ecology, as Seattle's planning process does (box 9.3). More detailed rubrics might include how representative a protected area is of local habitats, whether it has historical significance, and even production values such as agriculture.

How do we set priorities for protecting open space? The most obvious, and inevitable, priority is set by development itself. Land threatened by development, which is almost always land near expanding suburban and exurban landscapes in the West, must have priority protection. The Boise foothills protection program emerged simply because the growth of the metro area threatened to leap right up the foothills, into that "backdrop that inspires and soothes the soul." When applied in this way, land protection not only protects land, but also builds human relationships with one another and with the land.

A second priority must be the needs of nature. We might best use the term "natural spaces" rather than "open space" here because "open space" is simply too vague, applying to golf courses and heavily cropped farmlands as well as to natural landscapes less transformed by human action. Most natural spaces play the role of open space, providing recreation, views, and community buffers, but they also supply critical ecological services: sequestering carbon, trapping floodwaters, cleansing runoff. Providing space for nature is challenging, however. Nature is a demanding taskmaster;

0f course, the green infrastructure of the West naturally includes its federal and state lands, which, in their domination of the West's rural geography, are unique in the nation. So much has been written about, and so much effort has been expended on protecting, the federal lands that little need be added here. The state lands across the West represent a less recognized fount of open space and habitat (constituting some 146 million acres), and they are more threatened by development because most state lands can, if their governing commissions choose, be sold for private development. State land reform campaigns in Colorado and Arizona have blunted this risk somewhat in those states, especially in Arizona...

Ultimately, some form of comprehensive ecological planning is needed across the West, across all land categories; but experience and research tell us that integrating ecological dimensions into comprehensive planning will be difficult and controversial. So a program of tactical preservation, on both private and public land, is in order, one that includes every open space effort, no matter how small, in a broader scheme of ecosystem and regional " conservation by design " that helps us value the ecological and social role of each open parcel.

Almost half of Wyoming's counties have countywide zoning in place, for example, but the zoning is weak, it is typically of limited value to land conservation, and it may even encourage sprawl by requiring orthodox, large-lot rural residential development. Still, the county comprehensive plans that provide the basis for this admittedly weak zoning are worth the effort, and every county in the West should have a comprehensive land use plan in place (as required by most western state laws). Where practiced, county planning is becoming more comprehensive, at least conceptually, addressing issues not typically found in plans up through the 1980s. Most plans now include housing, transportation, open space, community separators, wildlife habitat, and slope..

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)

High Country News Staff, Where Do We Go From Here?

"That call for change saw some results in the 1990s, but during the last four years, the movement to reform the West has slowed. The Bush administration has opened the region’s resources to development, massively increasing oil and gas drilling on both public and private land. At the same time, it has dramatically reduced public involvement in decision making. The federal government has repeatedly disregarded or manipulated its own scientists’ work, sometimes to devastating effect, as during the repeated die-offs of salmon and endangered steelhead in the Klamath Basin. It has stripped roadless forestlands and citizen-proposed wilderness areas of federal protection. The list goes on." But regardless of the national political situation during the next four years, we need to keep moving forward. We have been running the West at full throttle for a long time, and the dashboard is aglow with warning lights: water shortages, forests aflame, water contamination from coalbed methane drilling, and the conversion of wildlife habitat into housing at breakneck speed. If we refuse to acknowledge the problems, disaster may not be far off."

1. Energy

That leaves the states to explore renewable energy options and energy efficiency on their own. Colorado just became the nation’s 18th state to set its own renewable energy standards; utilities must generate 10 percent of the state’s energy from renewable sources by 2015. And Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, D, has called for her state to become the "next Persian Gulf of solar energy." California has an ambitious 20 percent by 2017 goal, and state legislatures in Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona have all set renewable goals as well.

2. Global Warming

Was this really global warming at work? Most scientists, with their customary caution, still aren’t ready to give a definite answer to that question. But they will say that in the future, the West is likely to look a lot like the summer of 2002. With continued global warming, current research suggests, the Interior West can expect deeper and more widespread drought, hotter temperatures, less snow — and, of course, more and bigger wildfires (HCN, 9/27/04: In a warming West, expect more fire).

3. Water

"After a century’s worth of tremendous public investment in the construction of Western waterworks, we have piled up plenty of water behind dams. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which together hold four years’ worth of the Colorado River’s flow, have often been depicted as a sort of regional insurance policy. Now, after five full years of drought, they are half-empty, most of the water having gone not to cities or to the environment, but to grow crops such as iceberg lettuce in California’s Imperial Valley. It is time to remove the bar from the door so that water can begin moving to where it’s most needed — to meet the evolving needs of the West’s urban areas as well as those of the region’s streams and rivers. It is possible to do so equitably through the use of water transfers, which allow those in need of water to lease or otherwise "borrow" it from willing water rights holders, many of whom claimed their rights over a century ago.

"4. The Nuclear West

"The time has come for states to oppose a reckless federal policy of proliferation, by refusing to take part in building new weapons — and refusing to be a dumping ground for a new generation of nuclear waste. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, introduced a bill last year that would require Congress, rather than the president, to authorize resumption of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. But he supports nuclear weapons production and voted to decrease the amount of time required for the site to be "test-ready." Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., will soon become the new Senate minority leader. Reid opposes storage of the nation’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and supports aid for weapons workers and communities affected by fallout; now may be the time for him to tackle the problem at its production-and-testing root."

5. Endangered Species

"For years, Congress has refused to provide the agencies in charge of endangered species protection with enough money to determine which species to protect, much less to actually protect them. Those agencies — the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries — spend much of their inadequate budgets defending themselves from lawsuits by environmentalists, who charge them with neglecting their ESA responsibilities.The key to reviving the ESA is money. There needs to be a steady funding source to provide more incentives for landowners to protect and create endangered species habitat. Increased, regular funding would help eliminate the backlog of species still waiting for consideration, and bolster recovery plans for those already listed. It would also help support the reintroduction of species into habitat from which they have disappeared."

6. Private Lands

"The West is renowned for its public lands, but roughly half the region is privately owned. The private lands, located primarily in the valley bottoms, are not only the most biologically rich in the West; they are also the most endangered. Ranchlands and farmlands are being converted to housing tracts and strip malls at an astonishing rate (HCN, 3/29/04: Who will take over the ranch?).Nonetheless, it is private lands that present some of the greatest conservation opportunities for the next four years and beyond. Over the past decade, a land trust movement has sprung to life to keep the most valuable lands intact. The more than 265 land trusts in the West have conserved over 2.5 million acres through conservation easements and outright purchase.""But the biggest bang for private-land conservation may come through another Bush administration priority — tax reform. Conservationists, allied with ranchers, farmers and sportsmen’s groups, will continue pushing for reforms in the federal tax code that increase the incentives for landowners to voluntarily conserve wildlife habitat, says Rand Wentworth, director of the Land Trust Alliance."

7. Healthy Forests

"There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the evils of the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act. The act’s backers, including Western congressmen and President Bush, sold it as a way to protect communities from wildfire, but critics say it strips the forests of protection and, in some cases, deprives the public of its right to comment on and appeal timber sales.

For all its genuine dangers, however, the Healthy Forests Act is something Westerners need to embrace.

Already, under the act, local advisory groups, fire-safe councils and watershed alliances are working with the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to protect homes from wildfire and restore forests. Communities that develop fire-protection plans can receive funding to thin trees and clear brush on both public and private lands. Tribal, state and local governments can get funding and technical assistance for watershed restoration and protection projects. There’s also money for research on environmentally friendly forest practices, and for jump-starting small businesses that use small-diameter trees and other "biomass." There’s even a clause that allows the government to create temporary "healthy forest reserves" to protect endangered species on private lands."

8. Agency Openness

"In contrast to corporations, public agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are required to open their doors — and their decisions — to the public.

Over the past several years, however, federal land-management agencies have become increasingly secretive, to the point that they seem like branches of the timber and energy industries.

It has become difficult for the press, and the public at large, to talk with agency personnel. Requests for interviews with agency employees — even leaders such as Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Clarke and Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth — are routinely bumped.""But truly bridging the secrecy divide is a challenge for people outside the government as well. Local citizens and environmental groups need to become savier watchdogs, to learn the issues inside and out, and to be front and center at every public meeting. They also need to have the sort of over-the-backyard-fence conversations with agency staffers that seem to have disappeared with the rise of the FOIA request. No matter how badly science and public process have been manipulated, continued and unrelenting public involvement will create a brand of local solidarity that extends into the agencies, to the bureaucrats under siege."

9. MAKING IT LOCAL

"If there were any doubts that the Bush administration is out of touch with Westerners on environmental issues, the November elections should have laid them to rest. In race after race, Westerners stood up to industry and demanded protection for their crisp, clear air, gurgling trout streams, and wide-open landscapes. Oddly, the administration insists that the election gave it a mandate to continue to dismantle environmental protections, clearing the way for its corporate backers to run roughshod over the region. To make the administration understand the error of its ways, it will take a new Sagebrush Rebellion.In fact, a new rebellion has been brewing for some time, and it has a distinctly different flavor than the original, which was championed by President Ronald Reagan and Interior Secretary James Watt, who set out to plunder the public lands. The new rebels recognize that the days of strip-mining and clear-cutting and overgrazing are past, and that the future rests, first, on repairing damaged landscapes, and second, on building an economy that doesn’t clean out the West’s larder in one massive gulp.""The new Sagebrush Rebels may be able to turn the far right’s agenda to their own purposes. Bush administration appointees and congressional Republicans claim they want to put the public lands in the hands of the locals. If locals understand that finding a lasting place in the region requires standing together against industry efforts to plunder it, they may finally create a Sagebrush Rebellion worthy of the West."

10. Solidarity

"The environmental movement campaigned against George W. Bush for three years and had no noticeable influence on his re-election. That’s the clearest evidence yet that the movement has stalled. There is widespread public support for protecting environmental quality, but the national groups have trouble tapping into it. For decades, they’ve built their staffs and budgets, but as they’ve grown large, they’ve become a bureaucracy — a movement of clerks filing the paperwork of appeals and lawsuits and official comments, insisting on procedure and technicalities.

The movement needs to reinvigorate itself, to get more creative, and to reach out to people who don’t necessarily consider themselves environmentalists. "

"Environmental issues need be framed around people, and the movement could do that in a big way by marching on Washington, D.C. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. drew 250,000 people to the Washington Mall to rally for civil rights. Today — when the Sierra Club alone has 700,000 members — the environmental movement should be able to rally a million people to demonstrate the extent of public opposition to anti-environmental policies.

A Green March would be proof of the great variety of people who believe that environmental protection is important. It could include the mothers of children who suffer from asthma, which scientific studies link to air pollution. It could include the residents of Libby, Montana, the mining town where people are dying from the asbestos fibers in their lungs. It could include government scientists whose research is being squelched; American Indians and commercial fishermen who want more done to save salmon runs; and anglers who can no longer eat the fish they catch because of mercury contamination from power plants. It could include caravans of ranchers who don't want their land ruined by coalbed methane wells, and outfitters and even real estate agents who rely on healthy rivers and scenic country to lure their customers."