I knew it was going to be an interesting evening when
the folks in the audience began bending my ear before the event got
started. On May 15, High Country News convened a
panel discussion on western Colorado’s red-hot energy economy.
Shirley Adams told me point-blank that she had come because she had
“something to say.”
Indeed she did. During the
question-and-answer session, Shirley, who hails from Battlement
Mesa, Colo., stood up and said that the gas boom has ruined her
“lovely community of retirees.” Since the drill rigs and trucks
arrived in 2003, she said, many of her neighbors have fled, selling
their homes to the roughnecks. The result is a diminished
community: The volunteer-driven activities that once held
Battlement Mesa together — from picking up trash along 1-70 to
driving ambulances — have come unraveled because the new residents
“don’t have the time or energy to do these things,” she said.
Civic-mindedness isn’t the first quality one associates
with us Westerners. Individualistic or unsettled, more likely. For
centuries, Westerners have been blown from place to place by fickle
economic, environmental and social winds. And yet, despite our
nomadic ways, social cooperation has been essential to our survival
in this land of physical extremes. Every spring I am reminded of
this, when the local irrigation ditches are opened and the waters
again fill the veins of the landscape. Most of these ditches were
dug by hand by teams of men and women and horses, working to make
western Colorado’s sagebrush country bloom with food and fodder.
In this issue’s cover story, Wyoming writer Jeffrey
Lockwood suggests that we might do a better job of coping with the
gas boom — and the other issues facing us — if we brought back
some of those old-time frontier ethics. Many people believe the
Cowboy Myth is at the root of our problems, but Lockwood concludes
that the modern West, with its intense battles over growth,
recreation and energy, could use more cowboy philosophy, not less.
He writes: “As candidates aspire to public office, we
must ask if they ride ‚’for the brand’ — for the people.
Leaders must be autonomous and possess a sense of duty to craft
programs, laws, and policies on behalf of the public rather than
leaving mineral companies or real estate developers to define and
(maybe) solve the problems.”
Sometimes, however, it’s
difficult to know what brand to get behind. In California, the
Austro-cowboy governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is trying to wean
his state from fossil fuels. But in order to bring geothermal and
solar power from the desert to the coastal masses, he says, new
transmission lines will have to be stretched across some of the
state’s most fragile wildlands. In this issue’s other feature
story, Judith Lewis explores the ramifications. Some
environmentalists are balking at the price the desert is being
asked to pay for green power. For his part, the governor is
flummoxed: “If you can’t put solar panels in the Mojave Desert,
then where the hell can you put them?”
Back at the
HCN panel discussion, former Colorado Wildlife
Commission member Rebecca Frank might almost have been responding
to Schwarzenegger. “Before you get on that feel-good green
bandwagon,” Frank warned, “remember that those solar panels take up
acres and acres … of someone’s habitat, and that wind energy …
is a Cuisinart for migratory birds.”
What’s a governor —
or any Westerner — to do? As Louis L’Amour’s cowboy hero,
Conagher, muses, “It sounded easy, but it was not that easy …”
The West is facing tough problems today, and none of the solutions
are likely to be simple.
Still, it’s worth the struggle.
As Conagher also reminds us, “This here’s a hard country. But it’s
a good country.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Cowboy up to the energy boom.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
