Despite vociferous opposition
from the California Chamber of Commerce, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, R, and Democrat state legislators cemented a deal
on Aug. 30 to pass the much-heralded Global Warming Solutions Act.
California is the world’s twelfth-largest producer of
global-warming causing greenhouse gases, and the bill commits the
state to cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.
The move is a tremendously hopeful sign: It is by far the
strongest commitment that U.S. citizens have made in attacking the
cause of global warming at its root. It may also signal the death
of the great myth of Western exceptionalism — the idea that
the West, somehow, is simply different.
For more than a
century and a half, those of us not native to the West have wanted
desperately to believe that the region was a place apart. We have
nurtured the myth because it makes us special. But Western
exceptionalism has always come with an insidious and largely
unacknowledged corollary: The belief that we are immune from the
problems of elsewhere, and of the world at large. Patricia Limerick
pointed out the problem best in her book Legacy of
Conquest, when she noted that the history of the West has
largely been one of people running away from their problems, only
to re-create them wherever they flee.
The environment has
stood squarely at the center of the myth: First, with the notion of
heroically testing ourselves against the landscape in the manner of
the cowboy. Its more recent incarnation is environmentalism, which,
regardless of whether you’re a Sierra Club stalwart or public-lands
rancher, has done more to shape the regional psyche than anything
else.
There was a time when the West really was different
from everywhere else, but the world that we set the West apart from
no longer exists. That outside world has become ever more like the
West, and the West more like it. We think of the West as rural
communities in the midst of wide-open spaces, yet we cluster in
urban areas more than in any other part of the nation. We think of
sprawl as a Western phenomenon, yet the Southeast sprawls worse
than anywhere else. We think of water as the limiting factor in the
West, yet four-fifths of the region’s water is used to grow food
and fiber — a valiant pursuit, until you consider that much
of it is surplus crops, like cotton, and feed for cattle, like
alfalfa. The West, in truth, is awash in usable water. Meanwhile,
the East Coast and the Southeast are — unbelievably, to us
— running out.
The paradoxes of water help lead the
way to the paradoxes of the exceptionalist view of the West. The
engineered abundance of water encourages growth, which creates
problems less characteristic of the frontier than of anonymous
metropolises anywhere on earth: air and water pollution, traffic
jams, sprawl, crime.
These days, survival demands that we
confront not the rigors of the landscape, but the consequences of
our own societal metabolism. No place has proven that better than
Los Angeles, which, in the 1980s and 1990s, disappeared under its
brown cloud of smog and bullets. Rather than attempt to solve the
problem, a wave of Californians sought refuge in that great Western
promise — a new start, somewhere else.
But there is
another paradox: Our vast landscape — the very thing that we
in the West have always insisted sets us apart — ties us
together with the rest of the world. And ultimately, a
deteriorating environment erases the notion that refuge can be
found anywhere. This is not a particularly new idea. But we in the
West, particularly, may do well to consider it again. For global
warming has finally rendered the myth of Western exceptionalism
obsolete. If we continue to insist, even unconsciously, or
unthinkingly, that our cherished exceptionalism confers immunity to
not only the effects of, but also responsibility for, global
warming, the myth could undo the place we love.
That is
why California’s taking the lead against global warming is such a
hopeful sign. The great Western writer and historian Wallace
Stegner once wistfully dreamed of Westerners laboring to create a
society to match the scenery. Yet California may have done
something that goes far beyond. The state may be ill able to afford
it, yet it is — in defiance of the impulse that has driven
the past century and a half of Western history — moving to
solve a problem whose causes lay largely at home, but whose effects
are truly planetary.
Matt Jenkins is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is the paper’s Northwest
editor, based in Oregon.
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