My Page: Courtney White

Column: Along the Frontier

If the mission of the Valles Caldera National Preserve is going to change, let’s make it what I call a ‘carbon ranch’ and give it the goal of fighting climate change.

After all, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and nearly every leading environmentalist in the nation agree that confronting climate change is a crucially important challenge. I agree. I say, let’s take on that challenge on the Valles Caldera.

Column: Along the Frontier

I wonder what Stewart Udall would have thought.

On May 27th, his son Tom, along with Jeff Bingaman, both Democratic Senators from New Mexico, introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate that transfers title to the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve, located near Los Alamos National Laboratory, from the U.S. Forest Service to the National Park Service. 

This is big news because the intention of the original bill creating the Preserve, passed by Congress in 2000 and signed by President Clinton, was to maintain the formerly private property as a “working ranch.” Congress also created a nine-member Trust to manage the Preserve and charged it with the unprecedented mission of combining ecological stewardship with financial self-sufficiency. 

When former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall died in March at age ninety, I decided to buy a copy of his most famous book, The Quiet Crisis. Published in 1963, on the heels of Rachel Carson’s more famous Silent Spring, I knew it had fired up a generation of activists to protect western lands and was a clarion call for action on behalf of the environment.

I had never read it, but I was curious what Udall, quintessential westerner and democrat, had to say about an era that coincided with the onset of what we call today “the New West.”

To my surprise, I couldn’t find a copy in local bookstores (Udall lived in Santa Fe). When a second edition arrived from a specialty dealer, I was intrigued to discover that the former Secretary’s ‘quiet crisis’ of the early 1960s sounded a lot like the rather unquiet crisis we face currently. “America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power,” Udall wrote, “yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.”

Along the Frontier Column

America needs a new grassroots political party – one that literally starts over at the grass and the roots. 

I’ve had this idea for a while, but I’ve kept it on a mental shelf as unworkable, unreachable, and just plain nutty. But the rise of the Tea Party, the Coffee Party, and a recent poll released by the Pew Research Center showing that nearly 80% of Americans have little or no faith that the federal government can solve the nation’s ills, has convinced me to pull my crazy idea down from the shelf and blow some dust off.

What we need is a Party that focuses on municipal and county offices, and no higher. Let the Democrats and Republicans gridlock themselves at the state and federal level; what we need is action at the local level, such as the promotion local food production, or the creation of local energy trusts. We need a Party that focuses on the wealth of local communities – by that I mean local history, culture, economic opportunity, and can-do spirit. 

Colunm: Along the Frontier

The apparent declining interest in the environment among Americans was much on my mind as I attended the 21st Annual Southern Plains conference in Lubbock, Texas, recently. Organized by the nonprofit Ogallala Commons, the event focused on a famous date in environmental history. No, it wasn’t the upcoming 40th anniversary of Earth Day, but the 75th anniversary of ‘Black Sunday’ – April 14th, 1935 – when a massive dust cloud arose from the Great Plains like a biblical vision and blew topsoil all the way to Washington, D.C., and out to sea.

It was the Dust Bowl, of course – a national calamity of epic proportions that still reverberates today. It was a ‘perfect’ storm of ecological and economic havoc. Massive tilling of prairie topsoil, abetted immensely by the introduction of diesel-powered tractors, followed by a series of unusually dry years in the early 1930s, followed by big winds put hundreds of millions of tons of fertile soil into the air. Nearly one-third of the human population left the area as a result, most never to return.

It wasn’t an act of God. 

Column: Along the Frontier

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day, two new polls, as well as one recent report, raise important alarm bells about our attitudes toward nature and should, by extension, influence a new mission statement for the next ‘New West.’

The first poll is Gallup’s annual update on American feelings toward the environment. The news is sobering. According to Gallup, national concern continues a steady decline and has reached a point where “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”

On six of eight specific environmental problems, concern is the lowest Gallup has ever measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming. On the latter, the poll shows that the public has become less worried about the threat of global warming over the last two years. Citizens are “less convinced that its effects are already happening,” says Gallup, “and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence.”

Along the Frontier Column

In early March, I had the privilege of visiting a project in northern California that felt very much like a preview of the future.

If the current ‘New West’ is inexorably giving way to the ‘Next West,’ as so many ‘New Wests’ have done before, and if the region is in search of a new mission statement as a consequence, then clues to what’s coming might be found among the bright green grass of a small ranch in Marin County.

Column

If the American West were a business or a nonprofit organization, what would be its mission statement?

Thirty years ago, back when the current ‘New West’ was taking off, the region’s purpose seemed pretty clear: provide an attractive backdrop to an emerging amenity economy. Part playground, part nature reserve, with some residual natural resource extraction (cows, trees, minerals) thrown in, the American West, after decades of argument among competing visions, seemed to have found its calling as a majestic refuge. Its mountains, rivers, and plains were seen by many as a sanctuary for stressed-out wildlife and humans alike. Its chief product was relief.

Along the Frontier Column

Whatever we think of the so-called ‘New West’ – the good along with the bad – it should be clear to all that the challenges of 21st century are different than those of the previous century, requiring a different response from the West’s people, institutions, and policy makers. Whether it’s climate change, food security, water scarcity, energy depletion, or ecosystem service decline, we’ll need to increase innovation and cooperation in order to maintain human and animal well-being in the arid West.

In other words, we need to move on to the next ‘New West.’

Along the Frontier Column

As we try to understand why the so-called ‘New West’ never came to be, despite the film festivals and yummy food, and what might be coming next to the region as a result, we can’t neglect the question of public lands.

Although much of our failure to fulfill Wallace Stegner’s famous instruction to “create a society to match the scenery” is focused on private land – the cascade of ranchettte subdivisions, golf courses, mega homes, low-paying service jobs, and so on – we shouldn’t overlook the “other half” of the West, including our public forests, rangelands, parks, and refuges. That’s because the so-called ‘New West’ largely failed to live up to our expectations there as well.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a logger, rancher, environmentalist, agency employee, local resident, or someone else with a strong feeling about public land, the past twenty to thirty years can’t be called terribly progressive. For many, in fact, we may be farther away from Stegner’s vision than ever. And as we tip over the top of the bell-shaped curve of the so-called ‘New West’ and enter a period dominated by 21st century anxieties, such as climate change, high fuel prices, water shortages and food security, how we view our public lands will be crucially important.

The first step, however, is to actually leave the 20th century behind.