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<div>This thoughtful piece on why we seem to have an unusual level of
tension in the West is from today's NY Times.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Mark Solomon</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"> <br>
<b>June 22, 2005<br>
<br>
</b></font><font size="+3" color="#000000"><b>Hope and Gloom Out
West<br>
<br>
</b></font><font color="#000000"><b> By PATRICIA NELSON
LIMERICK<br>
<br>
<br>
</b><font size="+1">The American West, Wallace Stegner once wrote in
one of the region's most quoted aphorisms, is "the native home of
hope."<br>
<br>
Having put this very cheerful sentiment on public record, Mr. Stegner
soon began to wonder what on earth had possessed him.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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?"<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.</font></font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"><br>
Could anyone have created better conditions for the production and
proliferation of conflict, tension, bitterness, litigation and
reciprocal demonization?<br>
<br>
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.</font></tt><br>
<tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"></font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font size="+1" color="#000000">And with that yearning, hope
returns home.</font></tt><br>
<tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"></font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"><i><br>
Patricia Nelson Limerick, director of</i></font><font size="+1"
color="#000066"><i> the Center of the American West</i></font><font
size="+1" color="#000000"><i> at the University of Colorado and the
author of "The Legacy of Conquest" and</i></font><font
size="+1" color="#000066"><i> "Something in the
Soil,"</i></font><font size="+1" color="#000000"><i> is a guest
columnist for two weeks.</i></font></tt><br>
<tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"><i></i></font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"><i>E-mail:</i></font><font
size="+1" color="#000066"><i>
limerick@nytimes.com</i></font></tt></div>
<div><tt><font size="+1" color="#000000"><i><br></i></font></tt></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-2" color="#000066">Copyright 2005 The
New York Times Company</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-2" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
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