Dear HCN,
Thanks for Jon Margolis’
piece exposing the West’s new menace (HCN, 4/27/98); for far too
long, the recreation/tourism industry has been treated with kid
gloves, wrongly presumed environmentally benign. Yet, while I
applaud questioning the motives of the American Recreation
Coalition, there is hidden in Margolis’ analysis a seriously flawed
and potentially destructive assumption, one which too many would-be
environmentalists are depending on.
In the
telling passage, Margolis suggests there is an emerging conflict
between “two New Wests,” one with the backing of ARC types and
conservative legislators, and the other composed of “high-tech
industry and nature-friendly recreation …” ; unfortunately, there
is nowhere near such a good-bad polarity in the
region.
There seems to be a persistent, shallow
perception among most of these “New West” environmentalists that if
and when Western cities and towns shift from resource-extraction to
high-tech economic bases, they suddenly come to exist in a vacuum,
no longer impacting the local environment as a consequence of
belonging to the “information age.” In reality, they simply impact
it in new ways; the high-tech industry perpetuates other extractive
economic activities which are equally as destructive as the old
ones. Some are fairly intuitive – witness Intel sucking the life
out of the Rio Grande, or Peabody raping more of Black Mesa to
serve burgeoning regional utility demands. The most insidious,
however, is more slippery, shrouded in the nauseating tripe of
real-estate ads: extracting hip, “90s lifestyles from the
intangible ecological, scenic and spiritual values of the public
lands.
I have yet to see a single instance in the
West where some benevolent high-tech industry relocated in some
former backwater, or even a regional-center cowtown like Denver,
and then committed to relying solely on the local population for
its workforce – nor do I expect to see this ever
occur.
On the contrary, high-tech industry is
conscious of the marketing benefits of “outdoor recreation” in the
West, and wields it as an enticement to help attract the skilled
workers it wants from remote urban centers. Why do we suppose Nike
considered locating a new tech facility in Golden, Colo., as
opposed to Tulsa, Okla., or Hoboken, N.J.? With the celebrated
arrival of allegedly “clean” industry like software programming
comes significantly enhanced opportunity for the industry’s
developer cronies to exploit the non-existent or antiquated
(formerly unneeded) land-use controls typical of the
West.
Suddenly, the previously vital and often
ecologically productive private land located within the sphere of
influence of public-lands recreation is replaced with innumerable
iterations of a dead, formulaic “Western outdoor lifestyle” for the
high-tech newcomers. Recreation, specifically the fashionable
lifestyle image its pursuit and its trinkets convey, helps keep the
industry’s workers in the area, and motivates continued new
arrivals to meet the job growth demands accompanying industry
expansion.
The big loser is nature, which, while
perhaps retaining a few protected islands of wildness, sacrifices
its soul to the developer, the marketer, and the shameless whim of
fashion, ensuring there can never again be a true, healthy, local
connectedness between people and nature in the West – for it would
bring down property values. (Working in a cubicle 60 hours a week
followed by climbing on Sundays does not, in my mind, connote a
connection with the land.)
High-tech and
recreation in the West are mutually reinforcing, and that implies
not “nature-friendly,” but nature-menacing recreation. The result
of this supposedly happy marriage in the “New”
West?
The worst environmental threat the West has
yet seen: overpopulation.
What is going on here
is neither, as Margolis suggests, a conflict of two “New Wests,”
nor even a conflict between “New” and “Old.” The New West of
high-tech and gratuitous recreation is the same beast as the Old
West. Though the means are different, the West of the 1990s is
characterized by the exploitation of remaining natural resources
and the willful displacement of the local population by righteous
newcomers, just as it was in the 1880s. The weapons of this
generation are no longer obviously aggressive ones like rifles,
steam shovels and chain saws, but “mainstream” ones: computer
chips, software, telecommuting, RVs, mountain bikes, pitons; and
accommodating it all, “1” acre lot, full services, year-round
access, spectacular mountain living …”
Mark
Adams
Boulder,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The same beast stalks the West.
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