Dear HCN,
We offer the following
comments in response to Ed Marston’s cultural critique of our
recent book, Post-Cowboy Economics: Pay and Prosperity in
the New West (HCN, 12/17/01: Economics with a heart, but
no soul).
Healthy natural landscapes do not
merely provide “playgrounds” and “pretty” amenities for “soulless”
in-migrants. They provide a broad range of environmental services
that are crucial to our physical, cultural and spiritual health.
Water quality, wildlife, open space, biological diversity,
wildlands, ecological stability, clean air, stable climates, etc.,
are not mere “Barbie Doll” accessories.
Actively
developing natural landscapes for commercial purposes is not the
only way in which to productively and safely relate to those
natural landscapes. For instance, a miner engaged in tearing off
the top of a mountain, soaking the crushed rock with cyanide, and
then dumping the toxic remains into a valley does not necessarily
have a superior cultural or spiritual relationship with the
mountain than a hunter, poet, hiker, mountaineer or environmental
geologist. Similarly, a farmer who plows up natural prairie and
drains wetlands in order to plant a monoculture crop does not
necessarily have a deeper respect for the prairie than a
birdwatcher, an artist, a waterfowl or upland bird hunter, or an
urban resident struggling to protect our remaining natural
prairies. To assume that the past economic relationships to the
land are the only appropriate relationships is to surrender to
nostalgia.
Play, recreation, the appreciation and
celebration of beauty, and the contemplation of the mysteries of
the natural world and our intimate relationship with it are not
spiritually inferior to work, commercial enterprise and the
utilitarian development of the natural world. We have broadened our
spiritual horizons beyond those of our fundamentalist Puritan past
and the Protestant work ethic that evolved from
it.
Ed Marston admits that only a tiny and
shrinking fraction of the West’s population can engage in his
culturally blessed activities of ranching, mining, logging and
farming. This, he assures us, does not condemn the rest of us to a
soulless existence. He uses the analogy of 100,000 fans in a
stadium taking inspiration from 22 football players on the field.
But a society in which the vast majority passively cheers a tiny
minority of cultural heroes is unlikely to be very rich culturally
or spiritually. Individually and socially we need to be far more
engaged in our world than the mobs screaming at gladiatorial
combats or the Super Bowl. We cannot count on an ever-shrinking
number of ranchers, miners, loggers and farmers to give meaning to
our lives, the larger society and our culture. We have to do that
ourselves in our daily lives, in how we relate to each other, how
we work, how we play, and how we contemplate and seek to understand
the mysteries of our world and of our
lives.
Substituting a cultural argument for the
more familiar economic argument for why we must continue to
uncritically extend special privileges to a particular powerful set
of economic actors is unlikely to fulfill Stegner’s vision of a
society whose quality matches the spectacular natural landscapes we
call home here in the West.
Thomas
Michael Power and Richard N.
Barrett
Economics Department, University of
Montana
Missoula, Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Post-cowboy economy not a Barbie Doll world.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
