My Page: Hal Rothman

Over the Horizon Line | Hal Rothman

Fire season again approaches, and as always, we’re prepared physically to fight the annual cycle of fires that sweeps the western U.S. every summer. The fire bosses have congregated, the computer models and the weather reports are ready, the training has begun, the Hot Shot crews are poised, and the smokejumpers stand prepared for the call. Bring it on!

Psychically it’s a different story. Americans no longer know how to deal with wildfire. [more]

Over the Horizon Line | Column By Hal Rothman

I love the national parks, both for what they are and what they represent about this country, but I have great fear about their future. I am afraid that both the public and park advocates take the parks for granted, in very different ways, but that unintentionally create long-term dangers for the national park system.

National parks are a highlight of American democracy, one of our few genuine additions to the principle of a social contract between the governed and the governors. Despite the American conceit that we invented the idea of democracy, we didn't; all we did was tweak it a bit. National parks were one of the best wrinkles we put into the game plan of the Age of the Enlightenment. [more]

Over the Horizon Line | Column By Hal Rothman

The current attempt by the Bush administration to cut the National Park Service operating budget by 20% is only the latest in a shameless series of efforts to gut the most beloved institution in American society. An administration that has taken pride in ignoring popular opinion now offers a gratuitous slashing that cuts at something Americans regard as a birthright. If you really want to piss off the public, mess with their vacations. "So what if the public's experience is affected?" these beltway divas are telling each other. "They won't be voting for us again." [more]

Over the Horizon Line | Column By Hal Rothman

Real estate and retirement in the West will certainly become intertwined and even synonymous in the very near future, but the relationship has its drawbacks. The new "wilderburbs," as the historian Lincoln Bramwell calls them, will surely gray at a faster rate than the population at large. They offer everything the retiree of the future could want: beautiful vistas, trails to walk or mountain bike, small-town, idyllic living and plenty of enticements for the children to bring their grandkids for a visit.

What they don't have is a clear way to pay for the upkeep of services, to keep the streets clear and the water running, to protect the population with police and fire services and to pick up the garbage. Designed as something less than full-service communities, they lack the tax base and sometimes, the critical mass of population to pay for services. Here will be the most difficult intersection of desire and reality: transfer-payment retirees in communities in which their stake is short term. Retirees fit the model of what my old friend Myles Rademan, Park City’s “prophet of boom,” calls CAVIES - citizens against virtually everything. CAVIES have an even greater impact than NIMBYs, the “not in my backyard” folks. They consistently vote down social services expenditures, even when they stand to benefit from them. [more]

Over the Horizon Line | Column By Hal Rothman

If you think the boom in Western real estate is nearing its apex, think again. It is only just beginning. Even as publications bemoan the disappearance of affordable mountain paradises, the parade of communities that are beginning to feel the pressure of rising land and housing costs grows and grows. What was once a coastal phenomenon has become ubiquitous. Land all over the West has gotten pricey and the process is only just beginning.

The reasons are more complicated than the truism, "buy land because they aren't making any more of it," would suggest. [more]

Over the Horizon Line | Column by Hal Rothman

The departure of Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton is hardly a victory for environmentalists. Who can blame her for fleeing a sinking ship? And after six years, nearing the middle of the second term? As the Bush administration has turned into the gang that couldn't govern straight, wise cabinet officials cannot be faulted for seeking a soft landing. Norton's timing is typical of departing officials even in popular administrations, and for her, the opportunities should abound. Little in her tenure made life difficult for anyone who might be inclined to retain her services after she leaves government.

But environmentalists should not cheer too long or loud. Norton was no prize, but there have been plenty worse. Her administration was clumsy and even inept; the recent effort to emasculate the long-standing most popular of federal agencies, the National Park Service, revealed the shortcomings of her management objectives. Ideologically, the message from Interior throughout her tenure was consistent; application of those ideas proved more difficult. Quite simply, the public objected. [more]

Over the Horizon Line | Commentary by Hal Rothman

Any old Texican would recognize the axiom "to populate is to govern." This was the principle of the Texas Revolution in the 1830s, that by creating facts on the ground in Spanish-speaking Catholic north Mexico, they would in fact establish an Anglo-American, Protestant republic of their own.

I thought of this as I watched a Mexican guy, clearly an immigrant, cut sushi in a toney restaurant. He was wearing a Rising Sun bandanna, the emblem of Japan, and his knives flew. When I asked him where he was from, he told me "Zacatecas." 28 years old and a father of three, he had come to the United States like so many others to make his way in the world and do better for his family. [more]

Over the Horizon Line | Hal Rothman

The world of water has changed of late and it is about time. For almost 20 years, a gradual shift has been ongoing: water that was historically used for agriculture and ranching is increasingly going to western cities. Called reallocation, this process has become common throughout the West. It is so pervasive that the real question is no longer whether water will be transferred from rural to urban use. The debate concerns the terms of the transfer, how rural communities that cede water will derive fair and valuable benefits from it.

Editor's Note: This is part two of a series on Western water from Hal Rothman. Click here for the part one. [more]

Over the Horizon Line / Hal Rothman

I stood at an overlook above Lake Mead and marveled at the white of the bathtub ring, the area once under water now exposed to light by the extended drought the Southwest has experienced. A remarkable repository of rural California’s water, the man-made Lake Mead has precipitously decreased from 1,214 feet in elevation in 1999 to 1137.5 feet in December 2005. Even last winter's powerful weather only temporarily reversed the decline. Since early in 2005, when water levels rose after unusually heavy rainfalls, the lake has again dropped to nearly unprecedented levels.

The resulting landscape is ominous. New islands, once submerged when the water was deeper, break the lake’s smooth surface. "Dangerous boating down there," my seatmate on a recent flight into Las Vegas wryly informed me with the faux panache of an experienced sea captain. But he had a point. Rock formations appear like icebergs, dark in the places where never submerged, pale white where the water once covered their exposed points. They stick up, far above the water level, like the submerged mountains hiding long-buried canyons they truly are. [more]

Over the Horizon Line / Hal Rothman

In the American West the age of preservation has ended and that of recreation has begun.

Preservation is predicated on what is now a more than century-old, class-based value system. It began as conservation in the age of Theodore Roosevelt, when it was easy to separate sacred space and that fouled by humans, and even easier for those who fouled that space to accept the distinction and throw their energy into preserving places that were beautiful and remote. No wonder conservation and preservation were watchwords of the American elite for the first half of the 20th century and beyond. [more]