If votes were cast with feet and tallies read off odometers, the West would win the U.S. popularity contest in a landslide. The 1970 census figures show that the population of mountain and Pacific states has increased by 24.1 % since 1960. v. an increase on the other side of the Great Divide of only 11%. Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West, young man," is still being heeded by young and old alike, in spite of the fact that the "frontier" is now posted at intervals with taco and fried-chicken stands. Ecologists point out that the very nature of the West—little water and enormous stretches of arid soil—makes it impossible to support the continued migration. Legislators, scientists and citizens are now openly concerned about the threat of "Californication"—the haphazard, mindless development that has already gobbled up most of Southern California. TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton recently spent two weeks traveling throughout the West, taking the measure of Californication and the attempts being made to stop it. Her report:
IN a starkly beautiful New Mexico setting, a billboard catches the eye: UNDEVELOP! Undevelop? Out here in the middle of a desert where freeways lead only to mesas and mirages? Out here on the range where the skies are not smoggy all day? Minutes later, however, the message of the half-whimsical New Mexico Undevelopment Commission begins to make sense as the car whizzes past a transformer station. Utility poles grow stouter and taller, then pick up extra arms to hold more wires. The highway takes on another lane. Exit ramps and gas-station signs run closer together. The road cuts through the backyards of a hundred tract homes, passes the parking lots of the satellite shopping centers and suddenly rises above the city—affording a view of Albuquerque's ugly urban sprawl. The city's future and that of much of the rest of the once-wild West is written large upon a developer's billboard dead ahead: TOMORROW FOR SALE, 36 MILES.
THEN TURN LEFT.
Even those still separated from their nearest neighbor by hectares of sage and pine are beginning to band together under the big skies to practice thinking small and muster the strength to resist or redirect the inevitable population growth. The old cowboys' plaint, "Don't fence me in," is fast giving way to the environmentalists' plea, "Please fence them out." Conservation groups fantasy building one-way overpasses straight through to Canada to keep Californians out of Oregon, or constructing an adobe wall around New Mexico to keep the Texans from straying in, and worse, staying.
The concern over Californication has led to a reverse sell. After decades of come-hither promotion. Westerners are beginning to unsell their own states. Seattle Attorney Irving Clark Jr. passes through lunch-hour crowds flashing his THINK SMALL, LESSER SEATTLE