Along the Frontier Column

Understanding the ‘New’ West: Whither the Public Lands?

By Courtney White, 2-02-10

As we try to understand why the so-called ‘New West’ never came to be, despite the film festivals and yummy food, and what might be coming next to the region as a result, we can’t neglect the question of public lands.

Although much of our failure to fulfill Wallace Stegner’s famous instruction to “create a society to match the scenery” is focused on private land – the cascade of ranchettte subdivisions, golf courses, mega homes, low-paying service jobs, and so on – we shouldn’t overlook the “other half” of the West, including our public forests, rangelands, parks, and refuges. That’s because the so-called ‘New West’ largely failed to live up to our expectations there as well.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a logger, rancher, environmentalist, agency employee, local resident, or someone else with a strong feeling about public land, the past twenty to thirty years can’t be called terribly progressive. For many, in fact, we may be farther away from Stegner’s vision than ever. And as we tip over the top of the bell-shaped curve of the so-called ‘New West’ and enter a period dominated by 21st century anxieties, such as climate change, high fuel prices, water shortages and food security, how we view our public lands will be crucially important.

The first step, however, is to actually leave the 20th century behind.

This observation struck me a few weeks ago while attending a conference in Boise, organized by the Idaho Chapter of the Society for Range Management (SRM). Titled a “Western Congress on Rangelands,” the two-day event featured hopeful stories of collaboration, wildlife/cattle coexistence, and innovative management by speakers from the ranching, academic, and agency communities.

The overall tone, however, was surprisingly “retro.” With a sinking heart, I learned that a handful of anti-grazing activists are still stoking the ‘range wars’ that dominated the 1980s and 1990s. I listened gloomily to the defensive tone of presenters as they catalogued an all-too familiar landscape of litigation, appeals, bureaucratic inertia, and political gridlock. Even their responses, such as the desire by one rancher to “get the story out to the American people better” sounded out-of-date.

It was like a flashback to early 1990s. How did Yogi Berra put it – déjà vu all over again?

Twenty years ago, the ‘range wars’ made sense, I suppose. Back then, the tussle over public lands seemed like a straightforward choice between “use” and “protection” – with nothing meaningful in between. The amenity economy was on the rise, commodity production was sinking. The highest and best use of public lands was recreation and wildlife habitat. Right? The so-called New West had arrived for good – the scenery had won. It was all pretty simple.

Except it wasn’t, as we know now.

But that’s all beside the point. In the 21st century, we have bigger fish to fry.

Take local food, for instance. In the past few years, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in local, grass-fed, organic, and ‘natural’ food among the public, thanks to authors such as Michal Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver. The number of CSA farms and Farmer’s Markets has grown steadily, as have the number of ranchers who are supplying local meat to new customers. The reasons for these changes include concerns about the industrial food system, individual health, local economic development, ‘food miles,’ and sustainability – and rightly so.

In the December 2009 issue of SRM’s Rangelands magazine, Dr. Jerry Holechek, a respected range scientist at New Mexico State University, describes the issue this way: “There are now compelling reasons to believe that the era of cheap and abundant food may be ending. They center around depletion of fossil fuels, limits to the green revolution, depletion of water resources, losses of farmland to development, global warming, changed farm policies by the US government, the return of inflationary monetary policies, and continuing human population growth.”

These concerns registered hardly at all when I became active in rangeland issues in 1996, especially in the context of public lands. Few of them were even raised at the SRM event in Boise last month.

That’s unfortunate. As Dr. Holechek notes, they’re coming fast. And they’ll involve public lands. If we’re serious about developing local food systems, for example, then we must engage the federal estate. Half of the West is publicly owned, which means federal lands are local to someone. Local food means public lands. That means ranchers. And livestock. No viable local or regional food system in the West can be created without them.

The so-called ‘New West’ wasn’t just lattes and golf courses, it was the ‘range wars’ too. Creating a “society to match the scenery” requires a sense of community, with shared values, common goals, and respect for one another. We didn’t do that.

But we need to do it now.

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.

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.

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