Balancing Commercial, Recreational, and Tourist Uses of the West

Question for Discussion: According to the reading,
how should we balance commercial, recreational, and
tourist uses of the west?

Reading:Mike Davis, "Las Vegas vs. Nature";
Travis, Building a Better Mountain ; Anaya, "Why I Love
Tourists" ; Rothman, "Water and the Future of Las
Vegas"

Video: VHS: Las Vegas Growth (2004);
DVD: Las Vegas Water (2007)

Learning to Live in the West

Debating the West's Future: Agriculture,
Urban, or Tourist? (in-class)
Anaya: The West as land of Diverse Peoples,
Culture, and Environments (in-class)
Anaya: The Future of the Multicultural West
(in-class)
Mapping Development in the West: 1960-2040
(in-class)
Mapping Development: Image of Projected
Growth
State Map of the 20th Century American West
Percentage by State of Western Land
owned by the Government
Government Agency Land in the
Intermountain West (in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night (in-class)
USA Today: Census 2000 Map (in-class)
Growth Data Sheet in the West: 1960-2040
(in-class)
Peopling the Intermountain West today:
Where do new residents come from? (in-class)
Growing Minority Populations in the
West

Tourism, Recreation, and Retirement
Retirement Hotspots in the West
Ghost Homes in the New West
Western Tourist Playgrounds
Major Western Ski Areas
Western Cities as rated Good Places
to Live
Money Magazine: Best Places to Live in 2006
(in-class)
Money Magazine: Best Cities to Live
in the U.S. in 2006 (in-class)

Debating the West's Future
Davis, Las Vegas vs. Nature (in-class)
Davis, The Failure of the Las Vegas
Miracle (in-class)
Davis, Las Vegas as hyperbolic Los Angeles
(in-class)
Travis, Building a Better Mountain (in-class)
Anaya, Why I Love Tourists (in-class)
Rothman, Water and the Future of Las Vegas
(in-class)
Russell, Kill the Cowboy (in-class)
Las Vegas Looks North to Slake its Thirst (in-class)
No on Las Vegas Water Grab Committee
Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
State Water Use in the West (in-class)
Agricultural Water use in the West (in-class)

Population per Square Mile in the West
2000 Census U.S. Population at Night (in-class)
USA Today: Census 2000 Map (in-class)
Peopling the Intermountain West today:
Where do new residents come from? (in-class)
West Population Growth 1990-2005 (in-class)
Fastest Growing Counties are in the West (in-class)
Mapping Development: Image of Projected
Growth (in-class)
Growth Data Sheet in the West: 1960-2040
(in-class)
Debating the West's Future: Agriculture,
Urban, or Tourist? (in-class)
Tourism, Recreation, and Retirement in the West
(in-class)
Anaya: The West as land of Diverse Peoples,
Culture, and Environments (in-class)
Anaya: The Future of the Multicultural West
(in-class)
Atlanta is Fastest Growing City since 2000 (in-class)
Money Magazine: Best Places to live in 2007
(in-class)

Davis, Las Vegas vs. Nature

"At the edge of the millennium, this strange amalgam of boomtown, world's fair, and highway robbery is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States . (It is also, as we shall see, the brightest star in the neon firmament of postmodernism.)

More than 30 million tourists had their pockets picked by its one-arm bandits and crap tables in 1996: a staggering 33 percent increase since 1990. (By the time you read this, Vegas should be hard on the heels of Orlando , Florida , which is, with 35 million visitors to Walt Disney World and Universal-MGM Studios, the world's premiere tourist destination.) While southern California has suffered through its worst recession since the 1930s, Las Vegas has generated tens of thousands of new jobs in construction, gaming, security, and related services. As a consequence, nearly a thousand new residents, half of them Californians, arrive each week."

"The explosive, and largely unforeseen, growth of southern Nevada has dramatically accelerated the environmental deterioration of the American Southwest. Las Vegas long ago outstripped its own natural resource infrastructure, and its ecological "footprint" now covers all of southern Nevada and adjacent parts of California and Arizona. The hydro-fetishism of Steve Wynn (he once proposed turning downtown's Fremont Street into a pseudo-Venetian Grand Canal( sets the standard for Las Vegans' prodigal overconsumption of water: 360 gallons daily per capita versus 211 in Los Angeles, 160 in Tucson, and 110 in Oakland. In a desert basin that receives only 7-8 inches of annual rainfall, irrigation of lawns and golf courses (60 percent of Las Vegas 's total water consumption--not to mention artificial lakes and lagoons--adds the equivalent of another 20 to 30 inches of rainfall per acre)."

"Southern Nevada is as thirsty for fossil fuels as it is for water. Most tourists naturally imagine that the world's most famous nocturnal light show is plugged directly into the turbines of nearby Hoover Dam. In fact, most of the dam's output is exported to southern California. Electricity for the Strip, as well as for the two million lights of downtown Las Vegas's new (and disconcerting) "Fremont Street Experience," is primarily provided by coal-burning and pollution-spewing plants on the Moapa Indian Reservation northeast of the city, and along the Colorado River. Only 4 percent of Las Vegas 's current electrical consumption comes from "clean" hydropower. Cheap power for the gaming industry, moreover, is directly subsidized by higher rates for residential consumers.'*

"Las Vegas, moreover, is a major base camp for the panzer divisions of motorized toys --dune buggies, dirt bikes, speed boats, jet-skis, and the like -- that each weekend make war on the fragile desert environment. Few western landscapes, as a result, are more degraded than the lower Colorado River Valley, which is under relentless, three-pronged attack by the leisure classes of southern Nevada, Phoenix, and southern California . "

"The Las Vegas "miracle," in other words, demonstrates the fanatical persistence of an environmentally and socially bankrupt system of human settlement and confirms Edward Abbey's worst nightmares about the emergence of an apocalyptic urbanism in the Southwest. Although postmodern philosophers (who don't have to live there) delight in the Strip's "virtuality" or "hyper-reality," most of Clark County is stamped from a monotonously real and familiar mold. Las Vegas , in essence, is a hyperbolic Los Angeles -- the Land of Sunshine and fast-forward."
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Las Vegas as hyberbolic
Los Angeles

Las Vegas , in essence, is a hyperbolic Los Angeles -- the Land of Sunshine and fast-forward."

Although Las Vegas's third-generation sprawl incorporates some innovations (casino-anchored shopping centers, for example), it otherwise recapitulates, with robotlike fidelity, the seven deadly sins of Los Angeles and its Sunbelt clones such as Phoenix and Orange County.

Las Vegas has:

(1) abdicated a responsible water ethic;

(2) fragmented local government and subordinated it to private corporate planning;

(3) produced a negligible amount of usable public space;

(4) abjured the use of "hazard zoning" to mitigate natural disaster and conserve landscape;

(5) dispersed land uses over an enormous, unnecessary area;

(6) embraced the resulting dictatorship of the automobile; and

(7) tolerated extreme social and, especially, racial inequality. "

"Unlike Los Angeles , Las Vegas has never practiced water conservation or environmental design on any large scale. It was born dumb. Cheap water has allowed it to exorcise even the most residual semiotic allusion to its actual historical and environmental roots. Visitors to the contemporary Strip, with its tropical islands and Manhattan skylines, will search in vain for any reference to the Wild West (whether dude ranches or raunchy saloons) that themed the first-generation casinos of the Bugsy Siegel era. The desert, moreover, has lost all positive presence as landscape or habitat; it is merely the dark, brooding backdrop for the neon Babel being created by Wynn and his competitors. "

"For most of the 1990s, contemporary Las Vegas has been one vast freeway construction site. Nothing has been learned from the dismal California experience, not even the elementary lesson that freeways increase sprawl and consequently the demand for additional freeways. When completed, the new Las Vegas freeway network will allow most local commuters to bypass the Strip entirely, but it will also centrifuge population growth farther into the desert, with correspondingly high social costs for infrastructure and schools."

"Confronted with the Devil himself, and his inexorable plan for two-million-plus Las Vegans, what can the environmental community do? The strategic choices are necessarily limited. On one hand, environmentalists cart continue to defend natural resources and wilderness areas one at a time against the juggernaut of development: a purely defensive course that may win some individual victories but is guaranteed to lose the larger war. On the other hand, they can oppose development at the source by fighting for a moratorium on further population growth in the arid Southwest. Pursued abstractly, however, this dogmatic option will only pigeonhole Greens as enemies of jobs and labor unions. Indeed, on the margins, some environmentalists may even lose themselves in the Malthusian blind alley of border control, by allying themselves with nativist groups that want to deport hardworking Latino immigrants whose per capita consumption of resources is only a small fraction of that of their native-born employers."

Travis, Building a Better Mountain

A DEVELOPMENT BOOM was had over the American West in the 1990s and early 2000s. The results were especially conspicuous in the region's ski resorts, all of which seemed to be adding ski terrain, lifts, and expanded base villages simultaneously in the largest region-wide expansion in decades.

The ski industry's effort to build better mountains was only one manifestation of an all-encompassing wave of development. No
landscape was left untouched as new geographies of development spread across the region. Driving through the West, you can easily see the transformation, starting from the new lofts in downtown Denver and Boise, past new suburbs that are now whole cities in their own right, out to the small towns newly " discovered " by urban refugees, on to the
West's rangelands bedecked with trophy ranches, and finally to the region's wildlands, now fringed by a settlement ring of rural mansions and ranchettes.

The West's rapid development raises new debates about land use: how much resort growth, suburban sprawl, and rural land subdivision can be accommodated while maintaining the region's remarkable natural wealth its extensive wildlands and rich biodiversity as well as its vibrant communities situated in an awe-inspiring landscape?

Traditional land use planning has done little to mitigate the negative effects of rapid western growth; indeed, planning in the West is mostly about encouraging and enabling growth and land development. Yet concern over growth is part of daily conversation among westerners. Some western states have entertained constitutional amendments meant to slow growth, and others have passed legislation mandating " smart growth. " letters to the editors of newspapers from San Diego to Helena speak of (and often grieve over) lost views, crowds where once there was solitude, skyrocketing house prices, and farms and ranches subdivided. The heart and soul of the West is being whittled away by new suburbs, new ski resorts, and new ranchettes.

The American West especially the roughly
1 million square miles of mostly dry, rugged terrain from the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains westward to the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges— remains, to many Americans, the land of wide-open spaces, cowboys and miners, and national parks. Even its cities, such as Tucson, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Boise, although in many ways similar to cities eyerywhere, are seen as slightly exotic outposts on the " frontier."

Nothing seemed to express the region's new, and newly problematic, economic dynamics better than Las Vegas, the nation's fastest growing city at the millennium, which author Mike Davis labeled a " hyperbolic Los Angeles
---the Land of Sunshine on fast-forward " and the advance guard of "an environmentally and socially bankrupt system of human settlement, "a sprawling, water-greedy" apocalyptic urbanism in the Southwest. ?

Apocalyptic? Well, maybe. Western land development is certainly sprawling and water-greedy, although Las Vegas itself is one of the densest cities in the country. Spreading residential and commercial land uses are transforming the West's emblematic landscapes: its mountain fronts, its great swaths of rangeland, and its desert canyons. At risk is wildlife habitat, biodiversity, nurturing human communities, and the sense of place that comes from the West's terrain, climate, and history.

This landscape transformation is at a critical juncture. As the fastest-growing region in the United States, the West is at risk of losing the qualities that make it unique. Indeed, exigencies of climate, geology, and geography make modern western development
espec ially harmful to ecological health. The most ecologically valuable land is especially attractive to development. Preserved public lands, such as national parks, draw residences and businesses to their fringes and feed a growing recreation and tourism economy that further invades the wilderness.

Furthermore, development's "ecological footprint " is larger than the area physically covered by houses, parking lots, office buildings, malls, and gravel pits. Western development requires more water than local watersheds can provide, so communities reach into distant river basins for water. Development demands energy, much of it extracted from the public lands, and it stretches roads like a net over the region. Relatively natural areas near developments are less inviting to wildlife, more subject to invasive species. The enlarging human imprint of' regional develop merit pervades even remote wildlands, where, for example, wildfi r es cannot be left to burn because they might eventually threaten the sub divisions that have crept up to the boundaries of the public lands.

Russell, Kill the Cowboy

"For a growing number of critics, the cowboys connection to the land is clearly skewed--in favor of production. Over 70 percent of the West is grazed. To the cowboy, this is good, for the land must be used. You can't eat scenery. Although he or she would not admit it , the cowboys job is to transform the wild West into something that resembles, prosaically, a feedlot."

"The West is still recovering from its own history. Some places will never recover. Today, the health of our rangeland is unclear. The Forest Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Land Management in the U.S. Department of the Interior admit that they don't have information for a quarter of the public land they lease grazing rights on; they estimate that another half could be rated as fair or poor, the lower two of four categories. Groups such as the National Wildlife Federation believe these figures to he conservative; ranchers believe they are an exaggeration. A 1992 report to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development estimated that half of the U.S. rangeland (both public and private) is severely degraded, with its carrying capacity reduced by at least 50 percent. Of greatest concern are the riparian areas, those narrow habitats around streams and rivers. Stream-lying areas make up only a fraction of the West, but they are crucial to its ecology and to the survival of wildlife."

"Our problem is how to minimize this destruction and still get the natural resources we want and need. No one seriously suggests that we stop being destructive altogether--stop growing corn or stop building houses.

But more and more people are questioning the grazing of cattle in the West. Suddenly it is not the cowboy on the open plain who is so seductive, it is the open plain itself. We want not the Marlboro man but what he stands in front of him.

The heart of this controversy lies in that half of the West that belongs to the American public. Many environmentalists have made the health of this rangeland a priority, and a new range war is being fought--in every national forest and on every piece of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, in every western town, and in every western city..."

"In sixteen of the western states, we lease to ranchers some 307 million acres, an area the size of the eastern seaboard, from Maine to Florida . Nearly 80 percent of the land managed by the Forest Service and BLM is grazed. About half of designated wilderness areas are grazed. A quarter of our national parks, national monuments, national recreation areas, national memorials, and historic parks are grazed. Thirty five percent of our national wildlife refuges are grazed."

"Through most of the twentieth century, most ranchers thought of their BLM or Forest Service allotment as a private kingdom. Typically, they had a small base of deeded property and then leased grazing rights on thousands of acres of federal land. This land often was remote, forgotten, and rarely visited. The rancher might have "inherited " the lease from his or her parents, who might have gotten it from their parents."

"Environmentalist have important concerns about land health. But ranchers have historic claims they will not relinquish easily. From their perspective, the environmentalist is simply trying to muzzle in. In truth, land health is not always the issue. Sometimes non-ranchers just want to see elk instead of cows, camping sites instead of cowpies, views without fences. They want a piece of the action."

It would seem that public-lands ranchers don't have a chance.

"Yet the livestock industry remains an extremely powerful force in the West. Ranchers got here first, and wealthy ranchers often went into politics, as did their sons and grandsons. Many western governors, senators, and congressional representatives have ranches themselves. (If you have money in Wyoming , you don't buy beachfront property---you buy a ranch.) Cowboys, in any case, play well in Washington , D.C.., where their dress is colorful and their authenticity valued.

Ranchers are also loyal. Public-lands ranchers make up only 3 percent of all livestock producers in the United States and 10 percent of those in the sixteen Western stares."

"Perhaps most important, the public-lands rancher's struggle to survive resonates for many westerners. Miners and loggers ally with the rancher. They, too, want traditional access to the resources of the public land. Popular groups such as "People for the West" advocate "wise use" policies of continued and intensive grazing, logging, and mining. Even private landowners fear that their rights will be eroded by new environmental regulations. There is strong and historic sentiment in the West against any form of interference--from resource managers or from environmentalists or from your next-door neighbor. There is a great resistance to change and a great desire for continuity.

Despite the growing polarization, I believe that an opportunity exists to find common ground, in all senses of that phrase. The public lands, after all, are not just a gift from our parents, an inheritance over which we can squabble and litigate. They are a gift to our children and to our grandchildren and to our great-grandchildren--even, as the Iroquois suggest, to the seventh generation to come."

"The conflicts between ranchers and environmentalists are very real. Both sides feel fear and anger and a deep sense of loss. For those of us who balance ecological concerns with our own desire to ride a horse across a golden plain, the question is painfully immediate. If we "kill the cowboy," who will replace him?

Out of our fear and anger, much is lost and not enough is gained if we only find new laws and management plans. We need, as well, new ways to live in the West. We need new myths and new role models, ones that include heroines as well as heroes, urbanites as well as country folk, ecologists as well as individualists. Ranchers need these things as much as anyone if they are going to be ranching in the twenty-first century."

"The bitter antagonism between environmentalists and ranchers is striking because in many ways they share the same needs and the same values. They are both seeking connection. They are both seeking ways to enter the landscape.

If there were no cowboys, my son would have to invent them. Connection. Invention. Re-invention. This may be the real work of the West."

Anaya, Why I Love Tourists

"But tourists and natives often clash, perhaps because the tourist cannot love the place as much as the native. We learn to love the land that nurtures us. We, the natives, become possessive about "our place." Westerners especially feel a great love toward this land that stretches north and south along the spine of the Rocky Mountains . I believe this sense of possessiveness about "our land" means we, the denizens of the West, are turning inward. We now truly understand that "there's no where else to go," so we had better take care of what's left."

"Westerners seem bound by one desire: to keep the land the way it was. Now the megacities are crowding us in. More and more people seem to be touring our turf. Are all those tourists looking for a place to settle? That's what bothers us. There are just too many tourists discovering and re-discovering the West. The tourist has become the "other" to the westerner. I hear my New Mexican paisanos say: "Take their money but let them go back where they came from. Please don't let them settle here."

"Tourism affects our lives, we believe, because it affects not only the topography; it also affects the sacred. We believe there is a spirit in the land; we know we cannot trample the flesh of the Earth and not affect its soul. Earth and spirit of the place go hand in hand. The transcendent has blessed this land and we don't want it ruined, we don't want it destroyed. We have a covenant with the land, we have become the keepers of the land. No wonder so many dharma bums-those looking for their essential relationship to the Earth--have crossed the West's rugged terrain, looking for a home, not just a home with a majestic view, but a home rooted to a landscape that allows the true nature of the person to develop."

"The West was never one homogenous region; it is not only the land of the pioneers and the cowboy of the western movies. The West is a grouping of micro-regions and cultural groups. Even the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains can't unify us, because there are too many different landscapes in the West, too many different indigenous histories. My home, the northern Rio Grande , is such a micro-region, with its unique history and people. It is--and here I show my indigenous bias--one of the most interesting multicultural areas of the West."

"This spiritual connection to the land seems to describe the westerner. Even in the harshest weather and the longest drought, we stand in awe of the earth. Awe describes our relationship to the land. Perhaps tourists are simply people who don't stand still long enough to feel the immediacy of awe. They don't understand the intimacy of relationships woven into the people of the land. "

"Still we fear that tourism has become just one more consumer item on the supermarket shelf. Tourists who come only to consume and don't connect their history to ours leave us empty. "

"Maybe the West is going through a new era. We are a vast and exciting region where new migrations of people are creating an exciting multicultural world, one that has very little in common with the older, conservative myth of the West. Perhaps the idea of the West as the promised land isn't dead; a new infusion of cultures continues even as postmodern technology changes our landscape once again. "

"In Spanish we have a saying: Respeto al ajeno. Respect the other person's property, respect the foreigner. As we respect places and people in our travels, we expect to be respected by those who travel through our land. Respect can be taught. After all, we are on Earth "only for a while" as the Aztec poet said. We are all dharma bums learning our true nature from the many communities of the West. Let us respect each other in the process."

Rothman, Water and the Future of Las Vegas

"Water still flows uphill to money in the American West, and, thanks to a revolution that took the city from gambling to gaming and on to tourism and then entertainment, Las Vegas has had plenty of cash. The key was to figuring out how to use its financial clout to turn enemies within the state into friends and allies. Las Vegas had enough to provide rural Nevada with money and the autonomy to manage its water as its communities saw fit."

"No American city has ever ceased to grow because of a lack of water and its unlikely that Las Vegas will be the first. Los Angeles , Phoenix, Tucson, and the rest all found sources for their expansion and, at least for now, so has Las Vegas . It's easy to see that Las Vegas is confident about its access to plentiful amounts of water. Air quality provides a perfect example. The city has had problems complying with Environmental Protection Agency air-quality standards. The result is that construction sites are required by law to
limit the amount of dust particles they produce,
a difficult task in an arid, desert environment.
But they have been successful by following
this profligate regimen: every morning, and
often twice a day, water trucks roll onto the many sites and spray water on the dirt to keep down the dust.... "