For those who live on these parched plains and blizzard-swept mountains, this ornery attitude makes perfect sense. With its grandeur and desolation, the land dominates a Westerner’s psyche. For the price of a beer in any saloon in the Rockies, you can get an earful about this monumental legacy. I learned as much on my first story as a NEWSWEEK correspondent out West, covering a federal program to capture wolves in Canada and return them to their former habitats in the Lower 48. Environmental groups were gung-ho. But ranchers howled that the Feds were mucking about with their birthright: a West safe for wolf-free cattle ranching. They had been happy enough to take federal money to exterminate the wolves in the first place–but they’d be darned if “the guvmint” could tell them anything else.
Make no mistake. Americans revere this land–and its creatures. We love it so much that we fight over the question “What is it good for, anyway?” Once, near McCall, Idaho, a rancher told me that his spread–a river ran through it–was the perfect place for grazing cattle. A few hundred miles downstream, commercial fishermen groused that the cows were ruining the stream for salmon by muddying up the waters. The rancher, a good-hearted soul with whom I’d shared coffee and home-baked cookies, couldn’t understand why anybody else would care about where he grazed his cattle, or how many he raised.
The rancher was staring right into a blind spot in the modern West’s otherwise panoramic vistas–a blind spot that seems to be shared by the new Bush administration. Fact is, the West ain’t as big as it used to be. Once the frontier was so sprawling and inhospitable that the federal government had to entice people to come: free land for homesteaders and railroads, massive water projects, subsidized grazing, logging and mining concessions. Those policies succeeded too well. We’ve long since bounced off the California coast and are rapidly filling the country’s arid innards with strip malls, golf courses and 35-acre ranchettes. Where buffalo roamed and the pronghorn played, the game is now development. According to the latest census, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada are growing at rates that make the Gold Rush seem like a scouting party.
How to reconcile the myth with 21st-century demands of the so-called New West? The United States, like no other country in the world, retains public ownership of more than a quarter of its national space, mostly in the West. Do we “manage” this magnificant patrimony by repeating the past–clear-cutting forests, digging up mountainsides, fencing the range and damming the rivers? Or do we respect that which is deeper–what this land means to Americans as something other than a disposable resource?
It is not a new debate. As early as 1872, Congress created Yellowstone National Park, arguably the first time in history that otherwise accessible wilderness was permitted to exist without having to pay its way in timber, minerals or commodities. The year 1872 also brought the General Mining Law. To this day, it allows any person who finds hard-rock minerals on public land to mine them–virtually free of charge. President Clinton tried to reform the law in the name of preservation. President Bush is considering unreforming it in the name of exploitation. Few Americans fully appreciate the stakes in this economic calculus. A few years ago I had a chance to ride horseback across Yellowstone’s prolific valleys and experience how the northern Rockies used to be. At a gallop, my guide and I crossed open country with no fences and forded streams never trampled by cattle. We passed bison herds of 300 head, watched three 6-point bull elk at the edge of a lodgepole forest. The sun sank into a cloud just above the horizon, rays of red-tinged light streaming in all directions like holy writ. A breeze that hinted of autumn brushed past and we both sighed inadvertently. “You can feel God’s breath up here,” he said.
For me, that’s the poetry of living myth, proof that the environmental debate is about more than owls versus jobs, caribou versus $1.39 unleaded. Yet there’s no ignoring the disconnect between the wonder of the natural world and our urbanized, Internet lives. Rangers at Yellowstone have lately taken to handing out notices that the bison, elk and bears in the park are indeed truly wild. Think about it. The government is afraid of being sued by a tourist who got himself gored because he wanted to capture the Wild West on Kodak. What could be more American than that?
