Hikers near Lake City, Colorado. Although hiking is a low impact form of recreation, it can damage the land through habitat fragmentation, erosion, and exotic species introduciton. Photo by Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project.

It's time to look in the mirror

by Jim Styles

It’s about time that both sides—the rural west and environmentalists—come to grips with their own culpability and their own contribution to the ongoing degradation of wildlands in the West.

In the spring of 1990, environmentalists squared off against the Bureau of Land Management on a high mesa near Moab called Amasa’s Back. The BLM proposed to chain more than a thousand acres of old growth pinion-juniper forest for “range and habitat improvement,” but many saw the project as just another government agency catering to the needs of a local rancher. There to defend the BLM and the rancher was an assortment of men and women from Moab—the old timers you might call them—miners and cowmen who had lived in the West for generations and who saw the environmentalists’ efforts to stop the chaining as so much obstructionism.

I knew one of the miners and said, “You know, I’m sure there are a lot of issues that we’ll never agree on, but I’ll be damned if I can understand why you guys would support this chaining.”

“Say what?”

“Well,” the miner continued slowly, “mostly I don’t agree with you on just about everything. But sometimes we do have some things in common—but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be called an ‘environmentalist.’”

Fast-forward a decade. Last fall, some of my enviro friends and I were discussing the recent confrontation between ranchers and the BLM on the Kaiparowits Plateau. Drought conditions had forced the BLM to restrict the use of its cattle allotments, and many ranchers were having a tough time getting their cattle out

My friend noted that a complicating factor was the recent closure of a dirt road by the BLM that the ranchers used regularly to access the area. “Was it a road that you guys wanted closed?” I asked. “Not really,” he replied. “It wasn’t even near the top of our list.”

I encouraged him to pass that information along to the BLM and maybe even to the ranchers. “Do you realize how much goodwill this could generate between the two sides?” I implored. “It could have a remarkable effect.”

He nodded, but I knew his candor would never get out of that room. And it didn’t. Now in 2001, the polarization between the Rural West and the New West could not be more profound. Or more counterproductive. If it gets much worse, the consequences for the land—the wild country that both sides claim to cherish and revere—is destined to be the true and everlasting loser of this hopeless fight. And it’s about time that both sides come to grips with their own culpability and their own contribution to the ongoing degradation of wildlands in the West.

Enough blame to go around

And yes, I’m talking about Environmentalists. Eco-Warriors. Non-motorized recreationists. It’s time we take a long hard look into the mirror and acknowledge our own sins. This is no longer the “us versus them” moral war that we have attempted to promote for the last twenty years. We cannot continue to insist that the environmental movement represents the knights on the white horse, here to save our wilderness from the Rural Americans we portray as ignorant at best, downright evil at worst.

We are now contributing our own kind of destruction to the last remnants of the Wild West. Our recreation, our money, and our sheer numbers are poised to do the kind of long-term damage that should be setting alarms off in our heads. The changes we’re making may be harder to detect and more insidious. But in the next fifty years, we are poised to re-create the Western landscape in ways our cowboy cousins could never imagine.

Ultimately the greatest failing of the environmental movement may prove to be its self-imposed isolation from everyone else and its inability to listen to a different opinion with an open mind. Its vision is so specific that it cannot see the bigger picture.

Both sides have become victims of their own rhetoric and their own ideology. They are so entrenched because they have no contact with each other. If environmentalists only talk to other environmentalists, and cowboys only talk to cowboys, what chance is there for anyone to learn something? It’s a self-inflicted stalemate on both sides.

I become particularly discouraged when I see Rural Westerners, who should know better and who are better, failing to condemn the actions of the foolish few who give all of them such a bad name. But then how can we expect any different behavior from them when we do exactly the same thing ourselves?

And isn’t that the point? How can we continue to condemn the irresponsible and unacceptable behavior of people who we believe are damaging our irreplaceable natural resources, while ignoring or playing down the ever-growing destruction caused by non-motorized recreationists—all those enlightened sportsters who wrap themselves in the environmental flag and send money to the Sierra Club while wreaking their own kind of enviro-havoc?

Snowmobiles in the Colorado mountains. Land managers have recently realized that the compaction from snowmobiles may dramatically affect the survivability of the endangered lynx. Photo by Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project.

Death by tourism

The West has changed dramatically in the last decade, and a good argument could be made that the New West is at least in part a product of the environmental movement. More than ten years ago, Rural Utahans produced a document called the Leaming Report, which argued that wilderness in Utah would destroy the rural lifestyle, bring an end to the extractive industries in the West, and cost rural counties millions of dollars in lost revenues.

Environmentalists countered with their own observations. Among them was the claim that tourism, linked directly to wilderness designation, would create a new industry in the Rural West and would bring enormous benefits to the region. “Designated wilderness,” one environmentalist said, “acts like an advertisement that says: ‘Here is a treasure house of environmental amenities!’ ... This ‘advertising’ attracts people that economists call ‘amenity migrants,’ causing twice the growth in rural areas with designated wilderness than in areas without wilderness.”

These pro-wilderness comments from eleven years ago could not have been more prophetic. But that is the route we took—instead of taking the noble route and simply stating that the designation of wilderness was the right and courageous thing to do, we tried to promote the economic advantages of wilderness. Since then, the cumulative effect of billions of footprints and tire tracks, and the transformation of rural communities into “tourist towns” for millions of “amenity migrants” have left an indelible mark. In short, the natural beauty of our land was packaged and commodified and sold. By us. We’re not just talking “surface rights” anymore. This goes right to the soul.

It’s been difficult for environmental groups in Utah to acknowledge these facts. Why? Because these recreationists and “enviropreneurs” represent a significant portion of the environmental groups’ membership. They will privately acknowledge the threat, but they don’t want to say it out loud. “Look,” one of my friends explained to me recently, “We already get accused of wanting to ‘lock up’ the land for the few. If we now come out and express opposition to these guys, we’ll be accused of being against everybody.”

But I don’t agree; nothing knocks the stuffing out of credibility like hypocrisy. How can anyone take us seriously when we turn a blind eye to our own contribution to the destruction? If we’re going to criticize an irresponsible rancher, then what about the irresponsible tour guide? Why don’t we discourage overuse of pristine places by hikers and climbers?

Some environmentalists argue that the fight over non-motorized damage will just have to wait until we deal with these other threats. But that’s like the captain of the Titanic saying, “It’s too dark to worry about icebergs now; wake me in the morning when I can see the damn things.”

Whether or not we finally admit to our own sins, the idea of extending some kind of open hand to the rural Westerner causes most professional environmentalists to recoil in horror. While many in the environmental community will argue that a hand was extended in the past, it’s a pretty thin argument. But why should it really matter in the first place? Because there are a lot of those rural Westerners, the ones who understand the need to be better stewards of the land, who are appalled by the poor behavior of some of their peers, but who, like my miner friend at Amasa Back, find no good reason to align themselves with us. And that is because we give them no reason to trust us.

After twenty years of being an equal-opportunity antagonist, I’ve now experienced corruption, dishonesty, and deceit from both sides of the aisle. I’ve observed the crooked politics of dishonest Good Ol’ Boy politicians, and I’ve swallowed a big dose of arrogant, elitist yupster enviropreneur dishonesty as well. But because we’ve drawn these lines in the dust—trenches is more like it—many of us feel obligated to defend our ideological peers, even when we know we’re wrong. We refuse to acknowledge just how stubbornly similar the two ends of the spectrum have become.

Rural Westerners look at the damage caused by oil and gas and overgrazing and logging and shrug and say, “So what?” Then we look at the impacts from tourism and condo developments and the urbanization of rural communities and we shrug and say, “So what?” How can we mock the insensitivity of the other guys when we do exactly the same thing?

Perhaps consensus between the environmental community and the Rural West is being too optimistic—consensus calls for a conclusion and a resolution of differences, and I can’t imagine such a feat in the near future. But dialogue is not only possible, it’s essential, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that we’re all human. What do any of us have to lose?

Sprawl in the Colorado mountains. Photo by the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project.

To hell with labels: the real enemy is money

It’s time for a new line in the dust, one that makes sense and recognizes the common bond that many of us share but try to deny because the labels don’t fit. To hell with labels. Environmentalist versus anti-environmentalist. Liberal versus Conservative. Urban versus Rural. These labels are just getting in the way and preventing any kind of united front against the one true threat that all of us who love the West should unite against.

To me, that threat is Greed.

Follow the money. It has been like this forever, and if we don’t acknowledge our common adversary—the voracious and insatiable quest for material wealth by the few—we will indeed transform the Rural West into the money machine they want it to be. But all of us who have come to live in the Back Blocks of the West, simply because we love to be here, must find a way to speak together against those who simply see the beauty of the West as a way to make another buck. To these people, you can never have too many bucks, and they’re using us to reach that goal.

If we ever could put aside the acrimony, what could we hope to accomplish? We have to understand that respect for all public lands, regardless of their specific designation, is critical to the survival of the West. We can’t create islands of wilderness and abandon the rest of the land to the reckless and destructive whims of the foolish few. And that is exactly what our side is doing. We are so specifically tied into this wilderness battle that we’ve abandoned the rest of the land.

Finally, the only way we’ll ever be able to have an honest exchange with our environmental adversaries is if we can be honest with ourselves. Some might call these comments divisive and counterproductive at a time when President Bush seems determined to wreak havoc on environmental ethics, responsibility, and justice. But we weaken our own position if we speak less than candidly—the unvarnished truth is a powerful ally.

Jim Stiles publishes The Canyon Country Zephyr in Moab, Utah. The “long version” of this article can be read on The Zephyr web site (www.canyoncountryzephyr.com).