Loving the West to Death

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THE BEST TOWN IN AMERICA

Backtracking from Moab, I drove to tiny Paonia, Colorado, elevation 5,694. Paonia may look like something from a mountain biker's fantasy, but it displays the usual western split personality, with a per capita income of less than $20,000 and 30 percent of its economy dependent on the coal mines that greet you as you drive into town. I was there to visit High Country News, the magazine that has long been at the center of many of the West's environmental fights. After a tour of the offices, I headed over to Louie's Pizza on Grand Avenue with a group of editors and interns.

"There are just too many of us," said Sarah Gilman, a young editor. "I used to work for the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, a group that helped preserve the state's 14,000-foot peaks. On Mount Massive we would get over a hundred people coming up the mountain a day, even on weekdays. Because of sheer numbers we had resource damage, erosion, destruction of the tundra, trail-breaking, and poop. Lots and lots of poop." 

I found myself thinking of outdoor magazine covers that have made me cringe: Visit Ten Wild Places Where No One Has Ever Been. But when I verbalized the idea, one of the interns, Rob Inglis, demurred. 

"I wouldn't come down too hard on the magazines," he said. "For me they were a gateway drug. I was a completely unenvironmental kid in South Carolina. Then I picked up Backpacker and Outside and started to read. I got into adventure first but that led me on. The next thing I knew I had decided to spend my career working for the environment."  

Rob's story, I suspect, is not an uncommon one, and it has a famous historical precedent in Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau never read Backpacker, but his love of the woods began not with any environmental theory or even with hints of the transcendental, but with a sheer physical delight in tramping around in the wild. "First be a good animal," wrote Emerson, and though Thoreau often wrangled with his mentor, this was one piece of advice he listened to. From that base of physical pleasure grew both the man's passion for the wilderness and his increasingly biocentric philosophy, a philosophy that would anticipate almost every aspect of modern environmental thought. As I listened to Rob, it occurred to me that being a good animal sometimes leads to being a good steward.

I remembered what Kristen McKinnon, the river guide, had said: "It's once we have you on the trip that changes can occur." Exactly.

My own wide open spaces contracted when I reached the extended sprawl that has metastasized from Denver to Boulder. Boulder is almost annually anointed as Outside magazine's top outdoor town in America. The knee-jerk reaction is to criticize it, and I know that impulse well, since I once did it for a living, as a cartoonist for the Boulder Weekly, filling the Jim Stiles role. The town is easy enough to mock. The population is homogeneous and wealthy, and most of my friends can't afford to buy a home there.

On the other hand, Boulder fulfills many of the requirements of Stegner's dream western town, including a non-extractive economy built on goods and services, supplemented by a large university. Boulder has just under 100,000 residents, more than 40,000 of them associated with the University of Colorado. It was recently dubbed "America's smartest city" by Forbes, since it has more advanced degrees per capita than anywhere else in the country. It also has, as Stegner suggested, a prominent writer or two. Reg Saner is one of those writers, and not long after I arrived, I found myself hiking with him up the Mesa Trail, a squiggling red line that runs for miles below Boulder's flatirons. I believe Saner is our best contemporary western writer, a large thinker on par with Stegner, but when I brought him my report from Utah's hinterlands, he merely shrugged. "It's simply a numbers game at this point," he said. "I call it global swarming. Too few resources for too many of us. Those resources include both wilderness and wildness."

Yet he didn't begrudge the Lycra-clad runners who came crashing by as we hiked these trails he has walked for decades. "I like seeing them out here enjoying themselves in a beautiful place," he said. "It gives me pleasure."

It's strange, the way it's harder to hate a person than a people. Collectively we spread like roaches, but individually we can still be admired. It is these very trails, and the adjacent open space that the town long ago voted to preserve, that led to Boulder being such a coveted place.

Boulder feels even more crowded and Spandex-spangled than when I lived here, but for all its imperfections it has retained its character and has something to offer the story of the new West. The crush of population is rewriting the old western script, and we might as well admit it. If we don't we are fighting an old fight, like pronghorns running from long-gone cheetahs. Bush's plans for BLM lands cover the next 15 to 20 years, years of unrestrained use, exploitation, and extraction. Meanwhile, talk of communal restraint and legislative regulation chafe against our notions of a free West. To hold back, to not plunge ahead, means acting in a way the West has rarely acted before.   

"If you're looking for the new West, don't look at Moab," says Thomas Power, the University of Montana economist. "Resort towns make up less than 1 percent of the western population. And there's no reason for us all to go down Moab's road." 

Nor is it possible to go backward, given the West's population boom, since agriculture and mining simply do not support enough people. Power sees the burgeoning population as both burden and luxury. While the burden is obvious, the luxury is in the fact that "we are a growth economy, and so we are not beggars." In other words, there is no desperate need to turn predominantly to tourism or to return to mining or drilling when you are already an attractive place for humans to live and are already drawing professional, scientific, and knowledge-based industries, as many western towns are. Think Grand Junction before the boom, and perhaps in the near future as a new bust looms. Think Boulder, which, while a college town, is really driven by an information technology and knowledge-based economy made up of workers who live there because of the place itself. Or think Missoula, Montana, with Boulder's appeal but without a nearby metropolis like Denver. Or a smaller retirement and recreation community like Sandpoint, Idaho. Or Gunnison, Colorado, fighting to diversify a local economy that is currently dependent on skiing and mining.

All these places seem to have followed Stegner's formula and begun to remove themselves from the cycles of boom and bust, while relying on their natural beauty as an essential part of their economic appeal. "It used to be that jobs led to migration," says Ben Alexander, associate director of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Montana. "But what we see now is that it is the migration that is driving economic development."

Power feels his notion of the amenities economy has been twisted by Stiles and others to apply merely to tourism. The combination of physical and social amenities in these towns -- like Boulder's flatirons on the one hand and its libraries and bike shops on the other -- is more what he has in mind. The relevance of Boulder to him is that it "has provided an example of what you can do and what the costs will be." The costs include unaffordable housing within the city limits and surrounding areas filled with the sprawl of cheap town houses. But the benefits are protected land and the retention of some of the town's character. Which is exactly how Power defines appropriate scale: "Scale depends on what the community can absorb without the community losing its identity and being taken over by strangers.

"We are going to have islands of density," he said. "But it is not so dismal. People are still going to occupy a small part of the landscape and manage a very large commons." 

In other words, clustering. Which, according to Power, happens in both the "ruined" cities like Phoenix and Denver -- "which provide the environmental service of keeping millions off the greater landscape" -- and the booming towns (but not boomtowns) that he sees as representing the future of the West. His own hometown, Missoula, bought its foothills as public lands in 1995, and these are often closed for half the year for wildlife. People initially grumbled, but the result has been positive, both environmentally and economically. In discussing Missoula's efforts to keep nature an integral part of the town, Power echoes the sentiments of Rob Inglis, the High Country News intern: "We need to be relating to those landscapes. The basis for environmental protection has to be people valuing those landscapes."   

You could call this the unsexy, anti-Ed Abbey approach to wilderness. The real fights of the moment are the fights of restraint, of preserving wilderness lands and open space, of zoning laws and commons -- not only Missoula's and Boulder's foothills but the greater BLM lands and parks. As Stegner says in the preface to his "Wilderness Letter," those lands are true commons, since they belong not just to those who live nearby but to "all of us."

While admitting that this might seem mystical to the more practical-minded, Stegner says the value of wilderness is something ineffable, something beyond "exploitation or 'usefulness' or even recreation." This is a view that most environmentalists share. But what does it hurt to throw in a more hardheaded way to tally up the value of wilderness? Western towns depend on wilderness in the most basic of ways: wilderness is why people come. 

Ben Alexander of Headwaters Economics takes this even further: "There's a cognitive dissonance a lot of people have when it comes to the western economy," he says. "People still can't get their heads around the fact that mining and agriculture are not the major players, even with the current boom. They're a tiny percentage of our regional economy. Our self-identity is always closer to where we've been than to where we're going. But the future is already happening. Beautiful places are attracting people, not just to work in the service industries, but people who drive a knowledge-based economy."

Alexander cites a recent report he put together on the town of Bend, Oregon, which stressed the benefits of creating a local wilderness area -- the Badlands Wilderness -- and focused on how western towns "benefit economically from land protections." And if the health of the towns is tied to the wilderness, the less obvious fact is also true: the health of the remaining wilderness may be tied to the health of the towns. 

Of course Bend is not Moab, and Moab is not Boulder, and Boulder is not Gunnison. For all the easy generalizing, each town is unique, though each is being forced to wrestle with growing population and diminishing resources while protecting its commons and preserving what is left of its character and spirit. To do that may require a new vision of the old cowboy myth. Liz Thomas of the Southeastern Utah Wilderness Alliance sees the beginning of this in the trickle of phone calls she is getting from ranchers about off-road vehicle use along or over their property. "Their little piece of heaven is turning into a scene from Mad Max," she says.

It would be wrong to dump all the blame on the motorheads, however, and I for one am willing to get off my bike, or restrict myself to a few trails, if it means there is still a place out there that none of us can get to. The larger reality is that it will require some restraint and some laws -- the legislative embodiment of restraint -- if we are to preserve these
final wild patches, these final strands of hope in a diminished geography.

Maybe the work ahead, as Ken Sleight has discovered, is the work of reining in as much as letting -- yee-hay -- loose. And while old myths are hard to abandon, there is no reason why the cowboy myth of George W. Bush can't turn back into the cowboy myth of Teddy Roosevelt.