I was recently invited to a
seminar at a university whose thesis might be considered insulting.
The American West, said the invitation, “lacks an
intellectual, cultural or social presence within either the country
or the continent. Eastern publishers, Eastern intellectual centers
and agencies, public and private, based in Washington, D.C., still
provide the authoritative voices on Western matters.”
In
other words, if the American West were slightly more advanced, it
might qualify as a backwater.
If this is true of the part
of the West that includes Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle,
imagine how true it is of the interior West of Wyoming, Nevada,
Arizona, Montana, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.
These
big-box states are, in many ways, worse off than other out-of-it
places like Oklahoma, Arkansas and West Virginia: Half of the
Western states are federal land administered by agencies based in
the East.
It is usually said that the interior West is a
colony of the federal government. Unfortunately, our former
colonial master has lost interest in the West, and is now chasing
new colonies in Iraq, the “Stans” and the Ukraine. That we are a
cast-off colony — a first-wives’ region — means
the feds no longer subsidize our dams or the logging of our
matchstick-sized trees, or the building of nuclear weapons here.
Therefore, we should be in an economic depression.
Instead, even in a five-year drought, this once-rural region is
booming. I think that’s because we have glorious national
parks such as Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and Glacier. Visitors
get a taste for these landscapes and then find that they can own
their own little national park, or at least a national monument. So
it is our fate that millions of Americans are moving here, bringing
equity and pensions to this aspiring backwater.
As a
result, the pretty West is making do. But will this transfer of
wealth halt when the last “unspoiled” valley is spoiled?
Of course, lots of places don’t even have this much of a
future. But sometimes, no-account regions rise up. According to
Joseph Ellis’s “His Excellency,” a biography of George
Washington, the American revolution really started when Washington
realized he was keeping himself in poverty by aping the British
nobility’s pricey way of life.
Washington urged his
countrymen to produce their own goods to free themselves from
English imports. In the end, of course, the scorned, culture-less
colonies triumphed and came to dominate the English-speaking world.
They succeeded because the colonists had, in addition to several
million square-miles of land at their backs, aggression, pride and
a genius for politics. Might the land-rich and culture-poor
interior West also be the seed of change that ripens within the
current American empire?
There are signs. This spring,
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson organized an international meeting
on energy for western Canada, western Mexico and the western United
states. Richardson wants to weld the western portion of North
America using our common stores of energy — both the fossil
kind and the renewable kind — to bring us together.
I don’t know if the governor was asked by John Kerry to be
his running mate. But if Richardson was asked and turned Kerry
down, it might be because he thinks putting together the western
chunks of three nations is more important than becoming vice
president of a declining imperial government.
This is not
about revolution, of course. It is about the filling of a vacuum
created by the federal government’s decision to ignore a
large chunk of the nation in order to go off on foreign adventures.
Patriotism will carry those adventures for awhile. Yet in the end,
the United States is a very practical, bottom-line nation.
The correction to this adventuring should have come from
the Blue States, but despite the presence in their midst of
Harvard, The New York Times
and herds of
intellectuals, they have proven more tone-deaf to America than the
present administration.
So it is up to the West, whether
led by Richardson, California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
or Nevada Democrat Sen. Harry Reid, to figure out what’s more
important to America — nation-building far from home or
building energy independence.
Ed Marston is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org) where he lives
and writes.
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