State of the Rockies

Finding Common Ground on the Future of the West

By Jonathan Weber, 4-05-05

	Patricia Nelson Limerick

If you ever get the chance to see a talk by Patricia Nelson Limerick, head of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, just do it. She is smart, insightful and funny as hell, and she put her talents to work to great effect Tuesday night at Colorado College's State of the Rockies conference. In her rapid-fire, poised but very self-effacing and personal way, she made a truly profound point about the need to listen to people who disagree with you and get beyond the stereotypes that so divide Westerners.

She recounted her own evolution from fire-breathing "myth-buster" to subtle, persuasive advocate who now counts James Watt - the symbol of anti-environmental evil during the Reagan Administration - as a close friend. Her frustration with limousine environmentalists is matched only by her lack of tolerance for empty academic rhetoric, and yet her committment to finding human solutions and common ground is always on display. While her humor and passion won't come through here, her suggestions are refreshing and oddly sensible: more rituals - my favorite was 'take posterity to lunch day' - which might put us in closer touch with the consequences of our own actions. I'll try and think of a few of my own.

Another thing I'll remember is never to follow Patty to the podium. On Tuesday that unwelcome task fell to Terry L. Anderson, executive director of the Bozeman-based Property and Environment Research Center, but he acquitted himself admirably. Anderson's philosophy is free market environmentalism, and he sketched out some ways that market forces could address water, land-use and other issues far better than bureacratic solutions handed down from Washington.

Offering a little myth-busting of his own, he pointed out that the old Westerners, rather than being either the rugged individualists of lore or the selfish wards of the state of revisionist history, were in fact cooperative pragmatists who worked together to overcome the awesome challenges of the frontier. The key to it all was property and people's ability to negotiate good transactions and agreements on that basis, and more of that is what the West needs now, argued Anderson. He's another one who doesn't fit neatly into a box, and when it comes to the conflicts that divide the West, that is high praise in itself.

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