Westerners Speak Up in “Voices of the American West”

By Jenny Shank, 1-25-10

Voices of the American West
by Corinne Platt & Meredith Ogilby
Fulcrum Press, 280 pages, $29.95

Photographer Meredith Ogilby and writer Corinne Platt met each other several years ago at the Headwaters Conference, an annual discussion of wide-ranging issues facing the West at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo.  At the time, Platt writes in her introduction to Voices of the American West, she was “considering who the people with enough passion and vision to make a difference in today’s West are.” They decided to embark on a project of interviewing and photographing people “shaped by the geography of the West.”

Platt asked each person they met with a series of questions, including: “How has the West defined you?  Where do you think the West is heading, and what is your role?  Are you hopeful about the future of the West?” They spent four years traveling and meeting with businesspeople, politicians, ranchers, environmental activists, writers, and other Westerners, and the result is this insightful collection of personal stories and black-and-white photographs.

Voices of the American West includes reflections from people whom many Westerners are familiar with, such as former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and writer Terry Tempest Williams, alongside people who are less well-known, but whose actions have shaped today’s West, such as the environmental activist trio of Connie Harvey, Joy Caudill, and Dottie Fox (Fox died in 2006).  The three women from Aspen began researching and writing letters to preserve Colorado’s wilderness in the 1960’s.  As Caudill explains, “Connie and I started writing letters at my kitchen table.  One of our first projects was to add on to the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness.” Those letters and community meetings that they hosted had a big impact.  Platt writes, “Together they are largely responsible for initiating legislation that secured a half-million acres of wilderness in Colorado.”

The women are included in “Fighting for the Wild Lands,” one of the book’s eleven sections.  Other topics are “Preserving the Cultures of the West,” “Creative Ways of Working the Land,” “New Types of Economies” and “The West as Saudi Arabia.”

Frequently the book’s subjects contradict one another.  For example, Jon Marvel, the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, believes, “In parts of the West where the average rainfall is less than fifteen inches a year, ranching really doesn’t make sense.  It’s an irrational idea that comes form our settlement history…We’ve tried to sustain it, and the result has been an ecological disaster.”

But ranches continue to be a major part of the West, and Voices of the American West features the reflections of several ranch owners, ranging from traditional to innovative in their approaches.  Doc and Connie Hatfield are cattle ranchers in Oregon and help run the Country Natural Beef cooperative that supplies natural food retailers and Whole Foods stores with beef raised without hormones and antibiotics.  As Doc puts it, “I mean, we’re a group of redneck, conservative, Republican, right wing, touchy-feely Earth muffins!  And it is really neat that most of our customers are urban, liberal, secular Democrats.  Yet there is no conflict.  Those things don’t have anything to do with healthy land, healthy families, healthy foods, healthy communities, and healthy animals.”

One topic that many people agree on is the danger the proliferation of subdivisions poses in disrupting Western lands and communities.  The same story repeats itself many times: when a rancher dies, his family can’t afford to pay the estate taxes on the land, or the money a developer offers for the land is too much to resist.  Whether land is designated as wilderness or whether it is ranchland owned by one family, many agree, the result is more open space free of development that sustains animal habitats and the classic open vistas that are the reason many Westerners live here. 

Jennifer Speers took matters into her own hands by buying the Cottonwood Bend Ranch and an adjacent housing development near Moab, including “its thirty-two-hundred-square-foot model home.  In an unprecedented act, she disassembled the house, pulled the pavement out of the subdivision, and replanted the land with native seeds.”

Ogilby’s photographs add an extra dimension to the commentaries, providing a glimpse into people’s natural settings, and offering clues about how they feel about their lives.  For example, William Kittredge, who wrote the introduction, stands with a big grin next to his radiant wife, a portrait of a Western couple satisfied with their accomplishments and their surroundings.  Doc and Connie Hatfield, those natural beef ranchers, have smiles so wide as they stand in front of a herd of cattle that it’s hard for the viewer to refrain from participating.  Pueblo artist Roxanne Swentzell is serene and regal in her pose next to one of her striking sculptures of a Pueblo clown.

On the other hand, rancher Stephen Gordon and his ranch manager Jon Robinett look uncomfortable and aggrieved in their photo, which goes along with their discussion of how wolves from Yellowstone have killed their livestock.  Jill Morrison, who runs the Powder River Basin Resource Council in Sheridan and is fighting to moderate rampant oil development in Wyoming, has a tired dignity in her portrait.

Reading Voices of the American West is like sitting in on a most unusual cocktail party, where wealthy individuals and those of more modest means, lifelong Westerners and passionate newcomers, environmentalists, ranchers, politicians, teachers, and artists all have an equal chance to participate in the discussion about where the West has been and where it should go.