Column: Along the Frontier

The Geography of Hope

By Courtney White, 1-19-10

	Photo used under http://www.flickr.com/photos/merfam/ / Creative Commons license .

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?

Maybe not. By the time of the second conference I was beginning to have my doubts. At the end of the geographer’s presentation, I raised a hand. “Your maps seem to be based on variables that fit current patterns of behavior, including certain economic assumptions. But what if one of the variables changed a lot?” I asked. “What if, for example, the price of gasoline rose to $7 a gallon?”

That got a discussion going. Though clearly skeptical, the professor picked up my challenge and tossed it to the audience: what would $7 gas do to the West? Animated speculation ran the gamut from less population growth, less tourism, and less little black dots on maps (huzzah!) to more unemployment, higher taxes, and expanded energy exploration (boo!).

While everyone enjoyed the intellectual exercise, by the end of the discussion the consensus to my impertinent question was clear: I should stop reading whatever nonsense I was picking up in airport bookstores. This was 2006 and the idea of $7 gas was as far-fetched as, say, the nation’s real estate market developing a price bubble.

History had other ideas, of course. During the summer of 2008, gasoline crossed the $4-a-gallon threshold and a barrel of oil reached a record high of $141 (it was $12 in 2000). This was followed shortly by the Bubble-Burst-Heard-Round-The-World. Suddenly, the so-called New West looked a lot less inevitable.

Curious about history and current events, I recently reread what the editors of the Atlas of the New West, published in 1997, had to say about the region’s future.

“The West has moved beyond extracting natural resources to appreciating them in place: mountainsides not excavated for copper or molybdenum; rangeland for wolves instead of cattle; and old growth forests rather than clear cuts,” they wrote.

Economists, they continued, predict that the West will move beyond a wage economy, basing its new-found wealth on non-labor sources like investment, trust fund income, retirement, and welfare. As a result, we’ll toss out the standard economic development model that says industries create jobs, which then lure people. Instead, the region lures people first, who then create jobs by starting their own businesses or attract footloose industries from cities.

“The New West, the editors concluded, “is truly built by New Westerners, not by the commodities industry, not even the corporate logic of economies of scale.”

Except that it wasn’t. Corporate logic ruled after all – at least until the real estate bubble and the Recession brought big parts down. An amenity economy, full of footloose types, proved to be built on shifting sand, as chimerical as a desert mirage. Meanwhile, an old-fashioned commodity industry – oil-and-gas – has had a field day. And if oil prices continue to rise, as I suspect they will, then many westerners will continue to earn wealth the old fashioned way: by taking it from the ground.

Wallace Stegner famously described the American West as the “native home of hope.” Of course, he wrote that before the latest gold rush took off. That type of hope never really materialized. But now that we’re on the backside of the bell curve, I think we can start feeling hopeful again. I see all sorts of progress taking place on the Back Forty across the West. In fact, I think a new frontier is emerging from the mirage of the past thirty years or so. You just don’t read much about it in the daily headlines, or hear it in political speeches, or see it in the electronic maps of geographers.

Not yet anyway.

Courtney White is the executive director and co-founder of the Quivira Coalition and the author of Revolution on the Range: the Rise of a New Ranch in the American West as well as countless articles and essays on the region. His Along the Frontier column will run on NewWest.Net twice a month. Read more from Courtney at his Web site, www.awestthatworks.com.

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