Loving the West to Death

A Story of Drill Rigs, Mountain Bikes, and the Fight to Save Our Last Wild Lands

THE LYCRA HORSEMAN 

It was 48 years ago that Wallace Stegner wrote his celebrated "Wilderness Letter," a manifesto that extolled the ineffable values of wilderness and called the American West "the geography of hope." If the geography was hopeful, the economy was less so. No one knew that better than Stegner, who famously described the West's cycles of boom and bust. He divided westerners into two camps: "the stickers," who came to settle, and "the boomers," who came to exploit the land before moving on. Stegner made it clear that the latter more often prevailed, and that the effects were disastrous for the arid and fragile lands of the West.

Anyone who thinks this past is past should fly to Denver and then head west, as I did in early October. Blazing yellow aspens lit up the mountains as I drove up the Continental Divide before descending the western slope. I arrived in Grand Junction, Colorado, around dusk, and got the last room at the Hawthorn Suites on Main Street, $220 for the night, or, as they're called in the business, Exxon rates. The city has the state's lowest vacancy rate, thanks to the roughnecks staying in hotels while working at the ever-increasing number of natural gas wells. At the moment the West is growing faster than any region in the country, and it's here that the cries of "Drill, baby, drill!" resound most loudly.

And drilling is just part of the picture. A few weeks before I boarded my plane, a 2,000-page document landed with a thud on the desks of environmentalists in Utah. This was an 11th-hour surprise from the Bush administration, courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the latest installment in a plan to open up millions of acres of public land, not just to the extractive industries but to off-road vehicles (ORVs).

It's easy to wag a finger and say "bad drillers," but as a former Lycra-clad mountain biker myself, I wonder: Where does our recreation culture fit into the West's overall economic and environmental picture? Are we helping or hurting? Is this just another way of exploiting the resources of our public lands -- like natural gas, gold, silver, oil, and uranium? In "Thoughts in a Dry Land," Stegner wrote: "We are in danger of becoming scenery sellers -- and scenery is subject to as much enthusiastic overuse and overdevelopment as grass and water."

On the other hand, there are those who feel scenery is vital to both western environmentalism and western economics, a key to moving beyond an extractive economy. Thomas Michael Power, a professor of economics at the University of Montana, believes that the future of western towns may depend on the preservation of the undeveloped lands that surround them. One of the historic arguments against wilderness areas in the West is that they take potentially lucrative lands out of the hands of those who might use them for economic gain, thus hurting local economies. But even during boom times, the extractive industries make up a small percentage of the western economy -- only around 5 percent -- and the small number of people they employ undermines their value to the economy.

Power's studies suggest that preserved wilderness lands actually spur the creation of businesses and services, from bike shops to tech start-ups to restaurants, what has come to be called the amenities economy -- a term Power himself has done much to popularize. The formula is simple enough: people tend to move to beautiful places, and money tends to follow people.

"Thus it cannot be said that environmental quality is only an aesthetic concern to be pursued if a community feels prosperous enough to afford it," writes Power in Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies. The amenities economy depends on preservation, not exploitation, of resources, and so may at first seem to run counter to our usual notions of western freedom. While acknowledging that there are pitfalls to this sort of economy -- for one thing, the majority of service jobs are not high-paying -- Power argues that it is a potentially more reliable model, less given to cycles of boom and bust. In other words, communities that depend on the beauty of their environment, while in danger of becoming scenery sellers, may also be less likely to allow the exploiters and extractors to soil that beauty. Power admits of course that the amenities economy has "to be maintained at an appropriate scale."

After I dropped my bags at the Hawthorn Suites, I headed over to the local brewery to meet Rob Bleiberg, executive director of Grand Junction's nonprofit Mesa Land Trust. Rob and I were friends back in the 1990s when I lived in Boulder, Colorado. In the plague-devastated world of Stephen King's novel The Stand, the last evil people retreat to Las Vegas while the last good people make for Boulder, and there are plenty of folks in Boulder who think this sounds just about right. But if there is something smug about the town, there is also something right about it, much of that rightness springing from a decision made three decades ago to preserve open space in the surrounding foothills.

Grand Junction, unlike Boulder, does not have a major college or a larger city like Denver nearby. It began as an agricultural and ranching center, then rode an oil-shale boom in the 1970s that ended on a day in May 1982 that locals called Black Sunday, when Exxon decided that shale was not economically viable. Yet the town proved remarkably resilient, seeming to move beyond boom and bust over the next two decades. Junction, as it is affectionately known, reached a metropolitan population of more than 100,000 and served as a regional hub for Mesa County. It cultivated a strong, non-extractive economy built on services, tourism, and retail and wholesale businesses, and offered abundant housing, strong schools, and good health care. Of course that was before the recent wild surge of drilling, which has left affordable housing scarce, strained roads and services, and flooded the place with gas field workers.

Yet when I mentioned that I felt like the only guest in the hotel without a tattoo and a big truck, Rob said, "What would you do if you had the choice? You're a kid with a high school education. Do you work at Burger King or make 120 grand a year?"

Rob's job involves putting vast acreage into conservation trust and he has great respect for the ranchers and farmers with whom he works. While they may sometimes fit the stereotype of conservative old-timers, he has found that most have an inherent respect for the land and a deep concern for its future. "They're in it for the long haul," Rob says. "They could sell their highly appreciated properties and lounge on the beach. Instead they enter into binding conservation agreements that ensure their farms will never become subdivisions. Show me a stronger declaration of place above profit."

He also warned me not to be too hard on the Lycra set. The town of Fruita, which neighbors Grand Junction, has become a mountain biking hot spot, but in Rob's eyes this is not all bad. "They come here to play but then maybe some of them decide to stay," he said. "And then maybe they get involved in the town. They move here because they love this place, and more than a few of them end up fighting for it."

Being outdoors has always defined being western, and who says that an outdoorsman can't straddle a Stumpjumper instead of a stallion? Stegner, speculating on how a western town might move from temporary to permanent -- how it might fight to "make itself into a place and...likely remain one" -- suggests that it would help if that town had, on top of the traditional enterprises, a university and a writer or two who actually come from and write about that place. Why not add some hikers and mountain bikers into the mix?

Continued...