My Page: Courtney White
Column: Along the Frontier
The Geography of Hope
One of the enduring mythologies of the so-called New West was that it would last forever. Well, not forever, of course, but certainly past our lifetimes – long enough to create a sense of inevitability. You know: an amenity economy was here to stay, subdivisions were here to stay, crab cakes and free trade coffee were here to stay. If you liked (or profited from) this version of the New West, this meant you could relax and order another latte. If you were unhappy with these changes, well…tough.
I witnessed this sense of inevitability a few years ago while attending two separate conferences in Colorado. In talks and by two different professors of geography, the same bleak future of the Rocky Mountain West was presented as a sort of fait accompli. Current patterns of growth would continue for decades, they reported. Business-as-Usual spread across their electronic maps like an unstoppable rash. On one, hundreds of second-home McMansions popped up all around a small rural town over a thirty-year period – as inevitable as flowers in May. I think everyone in the room felt their spirits sink with every new black dot. I know mine did.
Love the so-called New West or leave it – the maps didn’t lie. Right?
[more]Column: Along the Frontier
After the West’s New Gold Rush
When we talk about what happened to the West over the past generation or so and where the region might be headed next, I think it’s important to place recent events in a historical context – as well as appreciate the good things that happened.
The context comes by way of a book entitled ‘The Age of Gold’ by H.W. Brands, a history professor at Texas A&M University. It chronicles the momentous California Gold Rush, which began in January 1848 near present-day Coloma, when John Marshall made a dramatic discovery. Gold! Within months, an infectious gold fever spread to all corners of the nation, as well as many points beyond. A great wave of gold seekers poured into sparsely populated California, each jostling for a stretch of creek someplace in hopes of making their fortune. Some became rich, many did not; but still they came, all lured by a vision of Easy Street.
[more]Column
Along the Frontier: Chasing Moab, Part II
If the Old West faded away and the New West never happened, as Charles Wilkinson says, then what went on in the West over the past generation? More importantly, what might be coming next to the region?
After picking up a pizza and a latte during a recent stopover in Moab, Utah, I wandered down to Back of Beyond, a great bookstore, where I found a few clues to my first question in a book titled Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed. Its author is Jim Stiles, a former seasonal park ranger, friend of author and social critic Ed Abbey, publisher of the alternative newspaper Canyon Country Zephyr, and long-time Moab resident and observer.
He clearly doesn’t like what he sees.
[more]Column
Along the Frontier: Chasing Moab
In an interview included in a new book titled “Voices of the American West,” I was surprised to read author and law professor Charles Wilkinson state matter-of-factly that the much ballyhooed New West “never happened.”
It didn’t? I thought the New West was exactly what did happen to the region over the past thirty years. What about all those mountain bikes, lattes, art galleries, jeep tours, spiritual vortexes, fancy megahomes, microbreweries, destination resorts, pink coyotes, crab cakes, traffic jams, telecommuters, bird-watchers, river runners, amenity buyers, downhill skiers, real estate agents, migrant housekeepers, foreign tourists, and myriad nonprofit employees?
[more]Guest Column
Living Leopold: The Rise of a New Agrarianism
In 2009, we celebrate the centennial of the arrival of the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold to the Southwest as a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service. Over the course of a diverse and influential career, Leopold eloquently advocated a variety of critical conservation concepts including wilderness protection, sustainable agriculture, wildlife research, ecological restoration, environmental education, land health, erosion control, watershed management, and famously, a land ethic.
Each of these concepts resonates today – perhaps more so than ever as the challenges of the 21st century grow more complicated and more pressing. But it was Aldo Leopold’s emphasis on conserving whole systems – soil, water, plants, animals and people together – that is most crucial today. The health of the entire system, he argued, is dependent on its indivisibility; and the knitting force was a land ethic – the moral obligation we feel to protect soil, water, plants, animals, and people together as one community.
After Leopold’s death in 1948, however, the idea of a whole system broke into fragments by a rising tide of industrialization and materialism. Fortunately, today a scattered but concerted effort is underway to knit the whole back together, beginning where it matters most – on the ground. Leopold’s call for a land ethic is the root of what is being called a new agrarianism – a diverse suite of ideas, practices, goals, and hopes all based on the persistent truth that genuine health and wealth depends on the land’s fertility.
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