The New West’s Unquiet Crisis

By Courtney White, A West That Works., 5-25-10

	Stewart Udall

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.”

The book is a thoughtful history lesson of how America came to this moment of crisis. To make his point, Udall labels key eras with unsubtle sobriquets, such as “The Big Raid,” The Ax Age,” The Great Giveaway,” and “The Myth of Superabundance.” Basically, Udall says Americans took from nature without thinking. Then, when we began to think about what we were doing, we tried to slow down the destruction. History was a big circle, he argued, with the land determining the character of Americans, who, in turn, determined the future of the land itself – round and round to the present day.

“The result of this interaction,” wrote Udall, “was the clearest example of the American ambivalence toward the land that continues to dominate our relationship to the continent and its resources. It is a combination of love for the land and the practical urge to exploit it shortsightedly for profit.”

The ‘New West’ that followed the book’s publication was supposed to correct this ambivalence. With the rise of the science of ecology, the blossoming of environmental advocacy, and the rapid expansion of a recreation-based economy (in contrast to the previous exploitative economy of logging, mining, and grazing), the ‘quiet crisis’ of the 1960s was supposed to be resolved in favor of a new land ethic that would steer the West to a hopeful horizon of preservation, protection, and play.

It didn’t quite turn out that way.

Even Udall himself could see the handwriting on the wall. In the Introduction to the second edition he wrote: “The quiet conservation crisis of the early 1960s has evolved into the very unquiet ‘crisis of survival’ of 1970.”

But he didn’t despair. Echoing author Wendell Berry, he insisted that we cannot save the land unless we save the people and that conservation must encompass humans and all of our manifold activities, including the livability of cities, regions, continents, and the planet itself. He urged us to get busy.

I think we shouldn’t despair either. Although the current ‘New West’ didn’t resolve the ‘quiet crisis’ the way we had hoped (I was born at the time Udall wrote his book and thus grew up in the middle the New West’s efflorescence), there are enough signs of change in the air and on the ground to suggest that we are the early stages of turning an important corner in the region’s history. You see it in bits and pieces right now, in the local food movement, in renewable energy development work, in efforts to sequester atmospheric carbon in soils, in creek restoration projects, in local governance, and in innovative public-private partnerships.

Where you don’t see signs of change are in efforts that essentially do the same things over and over while hoping for different results (which is Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity). For example, polls indicate there is a declining interest in nature among Americans, particularly among the next generation. This call into question the decades-old case for the protection of nature based on its intrinsic value. Instead, some are saying that we should build a case based on the value of ecosystem services that nature provides humans. If this happens, it would represent a major corner-turning event in our history.

What actually happens next is a mystery, of course, though it is safe to say much of it will be determined by young people – as it should be. On this point, Udall gets the last word: “Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all but brief tenants on this planet.”

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 runs on NewWest.Net twice a month. Read more from Courtney at his Web site, www.awestthatworks.com.

You can read Courtney’s entire series of columns, which are presented as a sequence, on his New West archive at www.newwest.net/courtneywhite. See the most recent columns below.

The New, Carbon West
Understanding the ‘New’ West: Whither the Public Lands?
The Geography of Hope
After the West’s New Gold Rush
Do We Care Less? Polls Show Decline in Concern for the Environment

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.