Four Corners Stew

When it Comes to Our Public Lands, Call Me a Sagebrush Patriot

By Ken Wright, 3-24-06

Let’s face it: We in the American West are blessed. No need to be shy, humble, or coy about this. We know it. We are blessed.

Sure, sure, there are mountains and deserts and valleys in other places. Some really pretty ones, even. But what makes the American West a place like no other is that this landscape is still largely undeveloped and unprofitable, and still mostly accessible and egalitarian. And outside of widely spaced outposts of urbanity, it is populated mostly by small, scattered villages and towns build on and around the big open around us. Hard places to get ahead, if that’s your aim.

But that’s okay with most of us living on the other side of the cattleguard on the information superhighway. We are strange by modern standards: we like it that way.

And who are “we”? Even though it goes against our mediated cultural-political training, I like to look past the conflicts and seek “we” in the broadest terms possible: We are those who live here because we define quality of life as more than mere quantity of income. In the rural West, quality of life means all that glorious land we are free to gaze into, to roam over, to dream about, or to work in or to play on, regardless of our position in the socio-economic food chain.

And this is what makes the American West a place like no other: It is a place still offering real freedom of choice -- the choice of how to live, rather than just how to make a living.

And this is not by luck. It’s because even though, like the rest of the country, sprawl surges like some mad-real-estate disease along its accessible arteries, the West’s vital organs are uniquely immune to the growth-and-development affliction. That protecting inoculation is our public land. Lots of public land. A great shield of public land -- more than half the land between the Front Range and the Sierra Nevada -- that keeps much of the West from the clutches of the cult of economics degrading wildlands and rotting rural culture everywhere else.

Our public lands are the American West. And not just the physical West, but the cultural and psychological West.

But we cannot be complacent. Because nothing drives free-market zealots rabid more than “public” anything. Especially when it’s used as an adjective to modify “land.”

For example: The Forest Service planning to sell some 300,000 acres of public land to pay for a federal program; Sen. Richard Pombo’s proposal to sell some national parks to help pay off the national debt; the Cato Institute, the highly influential free-market think tank, arguing in favor of selling the Grand Canyon to the Disney Corporation; the Bush Administation’s recission of roadless-area protection; the Bush Administration’s energy development-leasing free-for-all; RS 2477, a Civil War-era law being used to declare vague and unused paths on public lands as “county roads,” and Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s lame duck (with the emphasis on “lame”) ruling this week that local decisions on RS2477 claims are to be adhered to by public lands agencies. And much more.

This stuff worries me.

I worry because to keep available this uniquely Western lifestyle option -- and to be able to pass that option onto our kids -- we must protect our public lands.

And I worry also because too often, those of us who need to do the protecting -- those who love the West for what it is rather than what it could be, and what it could earn -- are too busy arguing with each other for what the other is doing on our public lands to see that without them we’d have nothing to argue about.

We also can’t afford to bicker anymore. Let's agree to argue ourselves giddy over how to best manage our public lands, but let's first agree to unite around and hold firm on one front line: Keep our public lands public. On this point we can’t afford to argue, because once we lose our public lands – all or some, ecologically or economically – they are gone for good.

If we love the West as a holdout of livable communities surrounded by a dazzling landscape that our children and their children all inherit, then we have must stand up. We need to put our arguments aside and rally together over out public lands as refuges no just of land, but of culture. Those who wanted to take these lands away once called themselves Sagebrush Rebels, rebelling against the “public” in public land for the money that could be extracted by making them private. Call me a Sagebrush Patriot: a fighter standing by my country -- as in countryside, as in country living.

For that stand to work, though, we need an army of Sagebrush Patriots. There needs to be a diverse but unified force of Western people -- not just organized environmentalists, but fishermen and hunters and ORVers, alongside backpackers and mountain bikers and loggers and ranchers -- standing together as a vanguard for the future.

Blessed people in a blessed country. Let's keep it that way.

* * *

Society is like a stew: if you don’t keep it stirred,
you get a lot of scum on top.
-- Edward Abbey

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