The Interior West has long
regarded California as a sort of rich eccentric uncle whose
behavior is an embarrassment to the rest of the family. I have some
firsthand knowledge of this attitude, because I am a
fourth-generation Californian, who moved to rural western Colorado
in 1992. The sidelong glances I received from a few locals during
my first weeks in Colorado, and the long pauses that ensued when I
revealed that I’d lived in that den of iniquity called the Bay
Area, led me to urgently inquire: Exactly how soon could I change
my license plates?
I could sympathize with the locals’
viewpoint. Californians pouring into the Interior West were driving
up real estate prices, clogging the roads and changing the
small-town culture. But the knee-jerk reaction against all things
Californian seemed a convenient way to avoid looking at the whole
picture: The Golden State has also had positive impacts on the
Rocky Mountain region.
Take water, for instance. Over the
years, California, like other Western states, has ruthlessly
pursued fresh water supplies, even when doing so dried up valleys,
destroyed lakes and bulldozed the water rights of rural
communities. But today, California is showing the rest of the West
how to use water more efficiently through conservation; L.A.
residents use far less water than the people of Phoenix, for
example. And the state pioneered the controversial transfer of
water rights from rural areas to rapidly growing urban centers.
California has also long been a leader in air-quality
protection and the development of alternative energy sources,
including wind and solar power. The state’s decision in the 1970s
to implement tough air-quality standards forced car manufacturers
to make cleaner vehicles. The brown clouds of pollution that shroud
Denver and Salt Lake, especially in the winter, would be much
browner — and much more dangerous — without
California’s work in this area.
In recent weeks,
California has become a valuable ally to citizens fighting dozens
of proposed coal-fired power plants in Idaho and elsewhere in the
West. The partnership began last summer when Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger announced that California would no longer purchase
electricity from power plants that contribute to global warming.
This took away a huge market for coal-fired power plants, such as
the one proposed by Sempra Energy in Idaho’s Magic Valley.
It’s likely no coincidence that, just as Idaho?s
Legislature put a moratorium on the construction of new coal-fired
plants in the state, Sempra announced that it was getting out of
the coal-fired power business altogether. A hostile marketplace,
combined with strong-willed citizens who care about their quality
of life, makes a formidable opponent.
California’s
efforts to protect the environment are more than just wacky West
Coast idealism. They are a pragmatic acknowledgment that regulatory
innovation is essential for the state to accommodate millions of
people without destroying its natural wealth and, ultimately, its
economy.
The rest of the West, which is also enduring an
historic growth spurt, is moving in California’s direction, and
that even includes Idaho, perhaps the nation?s most conservative
state. Sempra Energy wanted to build its speculative coal-fired
plant in Idaho because of the state’s lack of regulations and
because, as Idaho legislator Laird Noh said, it may have perceived
that “folks here have fallen off the turnip truck.”
Idahoans proved much more savvy and concerned about the environment
than anyone could imagine. The coalition formed this year of
realtors, farmers, retired scientists and conservationists led a
grassroots campaign against the power plant and the pollution it
would generate that could have been the envy of Greenpeace. In late
March, the Republican-dominated Idaho Senate voted 30-5 in favor of
a two-year moratorium on new coal-fired power plants.
The
citizens’ uprising in Idaho and California’s environmental
pragmatism show that you can’t pigeonhole Westerners into
ideological camps, no matter how Red the map looks during
presidential elections. The tired notion that the role of
government is to clear the playing field is being replaced with the
belief that nothing is more important than the health of our land,
air, water and communities.
Sound like the kind of thing
a Californian might say? Maybe so, though maybe that’s not such a
bad thing after all. Maybe the Rocky Mountain West has more in
common with the Golden State than we like to admit.
Paul Larmer is a contributor to Writers on the Range and
the publisher of High Country News (hcn.org). He
lives in Paonia, Colorado, and can be contacted at plarmer@hcn.org.
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