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While westerners are frequently caricatured as being either tree huggers or strip miners, they have complicated feelings about the land. Many conservationists have a libertarian streak, while ranchers and loggers can show a caretaker's attitude toward the land they work. Neither side likes being dictated to. That's why there is much lingering resentment across the West at the perceived high-handedness of the Clinton Administration-particularly the dash to bypass Congress and designate 16 national monuments in the last year of his presidency. Westerners have always resented Washington's reach-the Federal Government owns about half the land in the 13 westernmost states-even as they have enjoyed the benefits of subsidized electricity, water, grazing and mining. But Bush's muscular espousal of a supply-driven national energy policy and his appointment of conservative officials to top posts overseeing public lands have made the pendulum swing back to the other extreme, toward one of concern about how far the development push will go. "They just don't get it," says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "Their ideological base is so out of synch with ordinary people on this." Even Congress is uneasy about that momentum. With an eye to the polls and the 2002 elections, some Republicans joined Democrats in late June to vote down any new oil or gas drilling in national monuments, and the Senate has signaled it would not support drilling in ANWR if pushed to a vote.
Americans have long struggled to find the balance between the public good and private enterprise across the vastness of the Western range. For much of the 19th century the railroad, mining and timber barons ruled, fomenting tumultuous economic development at huge ecological cost. Capital conquered. When trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt came to power-100 years ago this September-the U.S. was recoiling from unlimited extraction of resources; Roosevelt added to the national parks, created the national forest service and championed the country's growing interest in outdoor activities.
Today, as the mountain states keep surging through one economic boom after another, conflicts have multiplied like subdivisions in once inaccessible mountain areas. But even as politicians and national environmental groups slug it out in public, the West is developing a more localized kind of problem solving. Environmentalists used to drive from San Francisco to protests in small logging towns to the north. Now many of them actually live in those towns-and they talk to their neighbors. The Quincy Library in northern California began to bring loggers and environmentalists together in a collaborative spirit in 1992, which set an example for similar groups in places like Applegate, Ore., where loggers, residents and government agencies have developed a community-based approach to conserving the Applegate watershed, and in the Henry's Fork Watershed Council in Idaho, where ranchers, timber companies and fishermen cooperate in managing water issues. "There has been a tremendous surge in collaborative conservation groups and watershed alliances in the past 10 years," says Patricia Limerick, a history professor at the Center of the American West in Boulder, Colo.
Consider this: Boise, Idaho, not the kind of place with much patience for high taxes, decided in May to increase property levies to protect its foothills. The same month, the city of Scottsdale, Ariz., cleared a major hurdle in its bid to preserve 16,600 acres of state land right next to some of the hottest real estate in the West, thereby giving up potentially lucrative development lots. "Westerners don't want to trash their lands," says Theodore Roosevelt IV, chairman of the League of Conservation Voters. "They just want some degree of say and some degree of respect when dealing with public lands."
Roosevelt's great-grandfather, the 26th President, was no radical conservationist. As a Republican he supported extractive industries-subject to balanced, sustainable yields that could provide for future generations. Roosevelt's vision was long term; his sincerity and charisma managed to sell it. Today, says Tom France, senior counsel for the National Wildlife Federation office in Missoula, Mont., "we again need a new paradigm for the West-and Norton and Bush are just propagating an old paradigm." But Bush has his supporters in the West, among them Dirk Kempthorne, the Republican Governor of Idaho, who strongly opposed the grizzly-reintroduction program. Says he: "I believe this Administration has brought balance back to environmental issues, giving states a voice."
Three million people will visit Yellowstone this year, a huge strain compared with the 36,000 in Roosevelt's day. Yet the forests are recovering from the catastrophic fire of 1985, and the wolf-reintroduction program has succeeded beyond anyone's expectations-some 170 animals in 18 packs roam the park's environs. T.R. would be happy with Yellowstone now, thinks Frank Walker, the acting superintendent, but he would be worried about threats to the surrounding ecosystem. "If Roosevelt came back today," Walker muses, "he would ask, 'What's the West going to look like in another 100 years?'"