[Vision2020] Limerick on the West

[Mark Solomon]

This thoughtful piece on why we seem to have an 
unusual level of tension in the West is from 
today's NY Times.

Mark Solomon


June 22, 2005

Hope and Gloom Out West

  By PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK


The American West, Wallace Stegner once wrote in 
one of the region's most quoted aphorisms, is 
"the native home of hope."

Having put this very cheerful sentiment on public 
record, Mr. Stegner soon began to wonder what on 
earth had possessed him.

With its extraordinary landscapes, wide horizons 
and great natural resources, the West might 
qualify as hope's native home. But the West is 
also - in large part because of these very assets 
- the second home of tension, conflict, regret, 
dismay, gloom and bitterness.

Yet for all these miseries, the West has become 
the return address for my own sense of hope. I 
have the good luck to be employed as a kind of 
shuttle diplomat, carrying messages and 
attempting negotiations among various contending 
parties in the West today. That work has given me 
a deep - if perhaps naïve and lamblike - faith 
that these are great times for bridge building, 
alliance making and solution finding.

True, we live in an era in which we are told 
daily, if not hourly, about the intense and 
draining polarization of our political world, and 
the West has its own well-developed version. 
Environmental conflicts - energy production and 
consumption, water allocation, wildfire 
management, land-use planning, growth control - 
provide fine battlegrounds for the display of the 
rattier aspects of human nature.

But our conflicts present one great advantage: 
neither major political party offers much in the 
way of solutions. Consult the platform and 
mainstream positions of either the Republican 
Party or the Democratic Party and, on the issues 
that matter most to the West, you will find 
yourself contemplating the yawning interior of 
Mother Hubbard's cupboard.

This vacancy presents a fine opportunity to 
notice the mounting irrelevance of partisan 
squabbling. When it comes to the all-important 
environmental issues, most Westerners are 
actually political hybrids, mixtures and muddles 
no matter what their party registration. They 
want to be supplied with the necessary natural 
resources to support their current level of 
comfort and convenience, yet they want the 
production sites of those natural resources to be 
out of sight and out of mind. They want water 
coming out of the faucet without disruption of 
the river system; they want to build 
Western-style log houses without disturbing a 
single tree within their viewshed.

  And it's no wonder the muddled outnumber the 
clearheaded, and the ambivalent inherit or at 
least manage the earth. In the last part of the 
20th century, the West became the fastest growing 
region in the nation, and in that same era, 
Congress wrote a whole new draft of the 
assumptions and processes that govern 
public-lands management, environmental decision 
making and natural resource development. We feel 
awash in people, legislation and confusion. 
Pollsters would be advised to add a question to 
their protocol: "Are you one of those rare 
individuals whose principles and convictions 
actually match up to and shape your conduct as a 
voter and as a consumer? Or are you as muddled, 
ambivalent and inconsistent as the rest of us?"

  The environmental laws - the Wilderness Act, the 
National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air 
Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water 
Act - were national in scope. But they carried 
particular consequence for the West, given the 
huge percentage of its lands still under federal 
management, and the importance of natural 
resources and natural beauty to local economies.

So a flood of new residents has been colliding 
and jockeying for position with old-timers and 
each other. At the very time they were most 
needed, the ground rules for all this colliding 
and jockeying were up in the air as the 
environmental laws were being carried out, 
applied, interpreted, condemned, defended and 
second-guessed.

Could anyone have created better conditions for 
the production and proliferation of conflict, 
tension, bitterness, litigation and reciprocal 
demonization?

But now, as many of the various contenders look 
back at years of energy-draining contention, many 
of them yearn for a better code of conduct among 
opponents, a more productive manner of dealing 
with conflict and a more effective way to 
distinguish substance from noise in these 
under-refereed debates.

And with that yearning, hope returns home.


Patricia Nelson Limerick, director of the Center 
of the American West at the University of 
Colorado and the author of "The Legacy of 
Conquest" and "Something in the Soil," is a guest 
columnist for two weeks.

E-mail: limerick at nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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