The Nature of Western Resource Disputes

The Klamath Basin situation is a dramatic illustration of the type of disputes common throughout the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A quick scan of any local newspaper or one of the West's regional news media, such as High Country News or Headwaters News, provides a bird's-eye view of an endless parade of disputes similar in tone to the Klamath debate. Despite the variety of natural resource issues, and the vastness of the West, these disputes tend to share a number of common characteristics. But to understand the interplay of these characteristics, it helps to first understand something of the nature of the West itself.

Nature of the West

Wallace Stegner, one of the more astute observers of the region, said that the two most compelling factors shaping society in the West are its aridity and its high concentration of federal public lands. With the exception of a few areas along the Pacific Coast, most of the region receives less than twenty inches of rain each year, making it a semi-arid to arid environment.

Ongoing concerns over the chronic drought seem to forget this basic fact of physical geography. The history of the region's settlement and development, however, makes it clear that the West is a "hydraulic society," dependent on a vast network of dams, reservoirs, and canals to move water from its source to where it is most needed—for mining and agriculture, and increasingly for urban centers and instream environmental values. In the West, conflicts arise over water in part because so many different users rely on common waterworks.

While the lack of water (and generally poor soils) in the West has determined mining, ranching, and agricultural practices and shaped urban growth patterns, it is the region's landscape that most impresses and captivates people. From high plains to rugged mountains, from deserts to rain forests, the West is defined by its wide-open spaces, abundant wildlife, and unparalleled scenery. The landscape has shaped history, inspired myths, and attracted people from all walks of life. It is also the focus of many public policy debates, largely because so much of the West is common ground.

More than 90 percent of all federal land is found in the eleven westernmost states and Alaska. The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management administer about 34 percent of the western landscape, including 83 percent of Nevada, more than 60 percent of Idaho and Utah, and more than 45 percent in four other western states (Arizona, California, Oregon, and Wyoming). The region also holds most of the nation's tribal lands, constituting about one-fifth of the landscape in the eleven westernmost states. Finally, these western states also hold about 45 million acres of "school trust" lands—federal land grants given upon statehood to help fund education. Taken together, these public and tribal lands dominate not only the physical geography of the region but also its politics.

Since the 1990s, the West has also been the country's fastest-growing region. The five fastest-growing states of that decade were Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. Between 1990 and 1998, the region's cities grew by 25 percent and its rural areas by 18 percent, both significantly higher rates than elsewhere in the United States. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Americans on the move are turning once-quiet suburbs in Arizona, Nevada, and California into the fastest-growing cities in the country. Some of the people moving to these suburbs left larger nearby cities, but much of the growth comes from the continued migration of people from other regions. The West is also one of the most urbanized regions of the country, with most people living in cities and with rural areas averaging fewer than ten people per square mile.

Historically, disputes over natural resources in the West have changed along with the demographics of the region. The first conflicts were between settlers and natives over land ownership. Once this issue was more or less established, conflicts emerged among settlers wanting to use the same resource—minerals, grazing lands, and water—for the same purpose. As people started moving into the West in the 1960s, more and more disputes arose over the use of common resources for different purposes. Debates over consumptive versus nonconsumptive uses of the land, commodity versus noncommodity uses, the economy versus the environment, and visions of the "Old West" versus the "New West" have been driven in large part by the changing demographics of the region.

Some of the West's fastest-growing cities are not job centers but residential, large-scale communities, revealing that not everyone who moves to the West is looking for work. That said, some of the region's growth is due to "footloose entrepreneurs," people whose work (computers and software, biotechnology, telecommunications, and so on) allows them to locate anywhere. Such people are increasingly attracted to both urban and rural places in the West. This shift in demographics, along with changes in the global economy, means that the region has slowly moved from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. Many western politicians continue to promote the myth that the economy revolves around the extraction of natural resources, but there is an emerging consensus among economists of all stripes that the region's future will revolve around a knowledge-based economy, not the traditional industries of farming, ranching, mining, and logging. Today, the West's natural assets—open space, forests, rivers, and vistas—add more economic value by attracting footloose entrepreneurs than can be gleaned by developing the raw materials.

As the demographics and economies of the West diversify, the region's political geography appears to be seeking its own gyroscopic balance. After the 2002 elections, the West's 117 congressional districts were split: 59 Republican, 58 Democrat. Similarly, of the eleven governorships, five were Republican (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah) and six were in Democrat hands (Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming). The 2003 recall of Democrat Gray Davis in California, and the subsequent election of Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, though widely seen as a contest of charisma rather than partisanship, shifted that ratio to six Republican, five Democrat. During this same period, Democrats controlled only two of the eleven western state legislatures (California and New Mexico). Republicans controlled both the house and senate in seven states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho,...