Ed Marston’s call to save the West (HCN, 12/26/94)
was a well-intentioned plea for protecting the population and
communities here from the larger forces at work upon them. Sadly,
it lacks a historical context and appears to invoke the same type
of preservationist mentality that is often damned when it is
wielded by environmentalists.
Implicit in every
editorial and wire-service feature on the debate over the future of
the rural West is the assumption that every community is worth
saving – that every population must stay in place. Yet 150 years of
history demonstrates that the West has not only survived
depopulation in the past – witness our ghost towns – but that it
may well have benefited from the dislocation of
populations.
Since the frontier period, rural
populations have shifted and fluctuated. Now, urban-generated
wealth has fueled an influx of retirees and vacation-home owners,
and ranchers, losing their children to the lure of distant jobs
with good pay and no physical labor, are selling to
subdivision-land developers. Viewed within a historical context,
the recent changes wrought by heightened environmental concerns are
insignificant when compared to the juggernaut of the
marketplace.
What is new is the almost universal
public demand that life be free from hardship and insecurity.
Welfare state policies tend to rob us of any sense of self-reliance
in exchange for the comforts of stability. Today it is someone else
who is responsible for our problems, and another someone else
(usually government) who must come to the rescue of struggling
individuals, families, industries and
communities.
One consequence of this national
dependency is manifest in the rural Westerners who failed to accept
this place for what it has always been: a land of trade-offs with
beautiful surroundings and lousy pay. As a boy I was told that if
money were paramount, you headed for the cities of the
East.
This demand for security goes beyond
ranchers insisting on predator control and expecting everyone else
to build fences for their livestock. It’s more than new roads for
log trucks driving at race-car speeds and overloaded haul trucks
that “customize” our Western windshields. It’s also people who
demand compensation for damages when a bear chews on their hot-tub
cover, parents fearful for their children because cougars still
live in their new-found mountain paradise, and commuters who whine
about the lack of asphalt on their corduroyed
roads.
The West threatens to become a land of
opportunity without responsibility, where people insist that their
dogs be allowed to run loose (though they may join a pack of
similar pets that attack wildlife and livestock). Similarly, remote
subdivisions of 2- to 5-acre micro-ranchettes often provide
hideaways for social misfits who seek to slip the bonds of
civilized society and end up a burden on overextended sheriff’s
departments. Undeveloped lands, both public and private, are
increasingly trashed and trampled by the “grocery store” mentality
that demands unrestricted access for every form of diversion and
pastime.
In a West where neighbors once helped
each other, self-described “property rights’ advocates use public
intimidation, telephoned death threats and gun-toting militias to
drive away those who disagree, forcing them out of their homes, off
the land, and out of the communities. Save today’s West and you
save all this in the bargain.
For a look at the
West that might have been, pick up a map or guidebook to the ghost
towns of any Western state and try to imagine every one of those
long-gone towns as a bustling community full of untrammeled
property rights, employment opportunity and social justice.
Suddenly the West we take for granted begins to look a lot like New
England, the Great Lakes region or southern
California.
Why lament the shortage of low-cost
housing? Will the West be a better place with a larger minimum-wage
work force to further facilitate the growth of the “leisure
economy’? In simple mathematical terms, what happens to the “rural
lifestyle” and “small-town atmosphere” when every high school
graduate is insured a local job and a new home just down the
street? Why must we be sensitive to third and fourth generation
Westerners who spit the word “newcomer” while selling off chunks of
their inheritance to land developers?
How big a
burden are those empty “trophy” homes whose owners pay massive
property tax bills while not imposing a daily burden on schools,
roads, aquifers and the like? Why does the empty “trophy” home only
become a liability after the last construction worker has spent the
last dollar from their last paycheck? Try standing up in a public
hearing and demand a building permit moratorium: You will be
instantly vilified as a threat to some of the better-paying jobs in
the community.
As a high school graduate with no
marketable skills or credentials, and whose employers never offered
more than minimum wage plus 10 cents, I have struggled all my life
to enjoy the privilege of living in the rural West. Because of
this, I have little sympathy for those who insist on receiving a
helping hand.
From such a background, I suggest
that the hand-wringers take two aspirins, that the Archbishop of
Denver get a real job, and that those truly suffering from meager
paycheck to meager paycheck seek their opportunities elsewhere.
Leave the rest of us to endure our privations in the land we
love.
John Walker
Coaldale,
Colorado
The writer is a
painter.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Why bother to save the West?.
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