Missoula News

31st annual public land law conference

Western Energy: Patricia Limerick Looks Back, and Looks Ahead

By Emily Darrell, 9-25-07

The University of Montana's 31st annual Public Land Law Conference continues Tuesday and Wednesday. Click here for more information.

If there’s one thing often missing from talks about energy efficiency, it’s, well, energy. But when renowned Western historian Patricia Limerick took to the podium at the University of Montana’s University Center Theater Monday night it didn’t take long to realize she wasn’t there to spout off depressing statistics and flash pie chart after pie chart.

At her keynote address for the 31st Annual Public Land Law Conference, Limerick discussed the future of energy in the Rocky Mountain West, citing hypocrisy, stereotyping, and nostalgia as key causes that undermine the Western quest to find realistic solutions to growing energy demands—all the while spicing her talk with anecdotes about drunken friends, limericks, and a good dose of self-deprecating humor.

Limerick, author of numerous books on Western history, director of the Center of the American West, and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius grant” in 1995, believes that in determining the wisest course for the West’s future we need to take a good look at the West’s past—but not before removing our rose-colored glasses.

“Life before fossil fuels was not a glorious time,” Limerick said. Not only was life more difficult then—the intensive labor that was once washing clothes, the lengthy ordeal of fetching water—but it wasn’t so clean as we might like to think, she pointed out, with streets filled with manure from horse drawn carriages, and public sanitation not what it is today. Limerick also believes that to be nostalgic about life before modern conveniences is to be “inadvertently sexist,” considering the back-breaking work that constituted household chores pre-Industrial Revolution.

“Before we start thinking about a post-fossil fuel time, we need to look back at a pre-fossil fuel time and wipe away the nostalgia,” she said.

Limerick also urged Westerners to “rethink or discard a lot of our either/or categories and our loyalty to outmoded, outdated categories.” She said that when we classify Westerners into neat categories—hunter, biologist, rancher, conservationist, logger—we make too many false assumptions about what a person might really believe in or stand for. She cites the example of John Muir, pioneer of Western environmentalism and believer in “pure” landscapes, who married into a family wealthy from owning orchards, what Limerick called “the most domesticated trees.”

Limerick also urged us to consider “re-engineer[ing] our relationship with engineers.” Limerick believes that Americans have always wanted to have their comfort and conveniences, but don’t want to see their impact. “If our engineers have made environmental messes—and they have—they made them at our request.”

Limerick also believes that Westerners need to “recover from our extraordinary production/consumption disengagement.”

“The places where energy is produced is so out of sight from where it is consumed,” she said.

Progress, Limerick said, is a word that gets sadly underused in our country today. “We need more progress,” she said, “[more] exhilaration and adventure, not solemn duty and lowered expectations.”

Limerick joked that if people took these suggestions to heart we could see “a massive cut in hypocrisy...and the carbon impacts of that would be great.”

The Public Land Law Conference runs through midday Wednesday. Click here for the full schedule and registration information and here for the conference brochure (opens PDF).

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