Customer Reviews

Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a GREAT book.

Tracing the growth of Moab, Jim Stiles has the huevos to take a long, cold look at what is happening in the Great American West. He has watched Moab (and, by extension, many other small Western towns) sucumb to carpet baggers, dirt pimps, speculators and, the cruelest irony of all, hoardes of nature-loving tourists encouraged by the "amenities economy".

Stiles takes on his friends as well as his enemies, and accuses enviromental groups of rolling over and playing dead while thousands of mountain bikers ride over their limp, unprotesting bodies on the way to Adventure Paradise. Stiles is neither a whiner nor a lamenter, and he shakes his fist at what he calls "enviropreneurs" out to make big bucks off public land. Commercialized nature theme parks are the future of the West, Stiles claims, reminding us of the debt we owe Edward Abbey when he coined the phrase "industrial tourism". Abbey was Stiles' mentor and friend.

Jim Stiles is a lively, accomplished writer, so this bitter pill is not too hard to swallow. Just be careful you don't choke while laughing out loud. Stiles is a very funny man and that's a good thing in these circumstances.

I met Jim Stiles years ago, when he was still rangering at Arches. I was one of those Abbey-seekers who had made a pilgrimage to Moab and Arches after reading Desert Solitaire ( this was September 1980, just before Reagan was elected and Everything changed ). I had found the site of Abbey's trailer, and his rusted septic tank and drainfield pipe. I had taken off my clothes and stood atop a rock to salute, as I recall, the spirit of everything Ed had written about. Ranger Jim came across this scene and said, understandably, "What the hell are you doing?". Well he was very civil and decent about it all. He confirmed I had found the sacred trailer site - heck, he even gave me a t-shirt with his infamous "Glen Canyon Damn" picture ( I still have it!).
Over the years I have enjoyed Jim's writings, and it is great to finally see him put it all in a book. Stiles definitely has the burr under his saddle that Abbey had, and it powers his prose better than most other "nature" writers in the 18 years we've been without Ed. I wish he'd write a novel, because I think he could bring the Monkey Wrench Gang into the 21st century, something we badly need.
I was in Moab, like I said, in 1980, and then again in 2003. Both times I ventured there in a VW Squareback ( Tradition!). I will admit that Moab was a LOT different 23 years later, though my teenage son and I still had a great visit. Christ it was hot! ( It was July, after all, with daytime temperatures as high as 116 degrees.) We explored Arches in the early-morning hours, swam and rafted in the hot afternoon ( and if that wasn't Pure Bliss I don't know what is ) and enjoyed good food and drink and an air-conditioned motel room in the evening. Moab is still a great place to visit, even if you are a low-impact non-biking non-jeeping old Abbey fan like me. Even on this second visit in 2003 I visited Ed's trailer site and easily found the septic tank and rusted pipe again, pretty much exactly as I had found it 23 years earlier. This time, however, I didn't take off my clothes, but instead read aloud the first chapter from Desert Solitaire to the land, to the place that inspired Ed to write his great book so long ago. No one was there ( in body at least ) but me. The timeless beauty and power of that place was - and, thankfully, still is - a real presence in the absolute quiet of that early morning.
Thanks for the great book, Jim. I hope it does well. Write on, brother. Write on.

Anyone who lives in a small, rural Western town, or anyone contemplating moving to, or, worse yet, just buying property in a small, rural Western town, definitely needs to read this book.

Stiles paints an unflinchingly accurate picture of how the tiny town of Moab became a crowded tourist town filled with fast-food joints and chain hotels. Longtime small business owners were forced out by the giant chain stores and T-shirt shops catering to out-of-town mountain bikers, Jeepers and ATVers. Alfalfa fields and orchards were sold to developers, who slapped up condos and luxury homes for mostly absentee owners, and conservative locals swamped by lycra-clad city dwellers. It's a sad and harsh reality, but Stiles manages quite a few laugh-out-loud moments: comedy is usually funny because it is so true.

The reason the book is important is that this phenomenon is repeating itself throughout the Western United States. Often local residents who may only make about $20,000 a year can no longer afford to live in the towns occupied by their families for generations. City dwellers take the equity from their city properties and invest it in rural land, driving prices out of sight, then bring their sharply different lifestyles to rural towns.

Most environmental groups have been completely silent on these issues, even as millions of new hikers trample the scenery into oblivion. Why? Perhaps because those same hikers and even some developers contribute hefty dollars to enviro groups. So while oil and gas companies contribute to the Bush administration, which then allows drilling on sensitive lands, environmental groups are running afoul of the same money trap--an ironic twist.

Of course the agent driving these ever-growing problems is our ever-expanding population, and Stiles is one of the few to tackle this problem publicly. Why can't our leaders even talk about this?

If you live in a small Western town, read this book, discuss it with your neighbors, and work with your local government to try and prevent this from happening to you.

If you are a city dweller contemplating a relocation or second-home purchase in a rural town, read this book and rethink your move. If you must move there, then stay there, work there, live there, don't build a giant mansion, be sensitive to the locals, try to get to know them. If you want their way of life, then LIVE IT, don't push your lifestyle onto them.

Brave New West
Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed
Jim Stiles
2007 University of Arizona Press
paperback 260 pages

"A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth." -Will Rogers

Events since the publication of Jim Stiles' Brave New West, remind us that the truth does indeed hurt. From the not yet deflated real estate bubble to the ongoing commercialization of public lands and now the awareness of global scale capital influencing our favorite environmental organizations, we're challenged to rethink much about ourselves.

Unaffordable real estate and property taxes, the loss of a small town and rural ways of life, adventure tourism on public lands, the loss of wildlife and wilderness, and perhaps most worrisome, the loss of our ability to value the natural world as it is, and for what it is, are all documented in Brave New West as impacts of an amenities boom that swallowed Moab, Utah over the last 20 years.

Along the way, we're inspired by the story of what happens when one man seriously questions the worldview that everyone else around him has staked their livelihood on.

Brave New West takes us on a journey back to Stiles' long ago adopted home town, at the end of an era. Old West Moab's uranium bust hit bottom just about the time Jim left the Park Service after a decade at nearby Arches National Park. Jumping through his only window of opportunity, he scraped together a down payment on a tiny house in town that would become his "ringside seat for the knockout blow to come".

Less than two years later, on the very day that his friend and mentor Edward Abbey died in 1989, Stiles' alternative view Canyon Country Zephyr was born. As it happened, economically desperate Moab was just entering into its love affair with amenities and endless growth, and from the start the Zephyr was there, reliably raising the red flag.

Now almost 20 years later, National Public Radio and High Country News recently produced separate features on the amenities economies of northern Arizona and western Colorado. While those stories gave wider audiences a chance to think about how skyrocketing real estate tears communities apart, we don't have to imagine the perspective of the man still holding his tattered red flag:

"New Westerners claim that the uncontrolled growth of the amenities economy is out of their hands, that market forces and the whims of American culture are driving the New West, not them. As one Utah environmentalist said defensively, 'It would have happened anyway.' In effect New Westerners now refuse to take credit for the extraordinary success of the very economy they claimed would save the West. They actually distance themselves from the solution they continue to promote. Every ATV rally, every new convenience store, every condo development, every golf course, every four-star restaurant in a town with a population of 5000 is an extension of the amenities economy."

For its first decade, the Zephyr was effectively the voice of environmentalism in Moab. Each issue contained at least one article authored by a member of SUWA or the Sierra Club. But as the impacts of "millions of those well meaning amenity clients" and resource damage from hundreds of thousands of bicyclists per year ("and it wasn't just the bikes, it was the vehicles that brought the bikes") began to literally change the landscape of Grand County, Stiles began to wonder when "someone from our side was going to speak up". He is still waiting.

Could it be that environmentalists were finding it hard to criticize the activities of their own supporters? When a company selling climbing tours in Arches National Park promoted itself as a "Proud business supporter of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance" it became clear that the enviros would remain silent on the impacts of too many recreationists.

Brave New West highlights the late 1980's change in environmentalists' wilderness strategy which aided and abetted the birth of the amenities economy and the New West. They advocated for the transformation of rural economies towards services aimed at upscale migrants seeking to live near wilderness. In the process, wilderness values became human-centered and economic rather than intrinsic and environmental.

As long as professional environmentalists sell their ideas using economic rationale, we are reminded of the political reality of the "death of environmentalism". (What public values make up that reality?) But we could also take a much harder look at the boards of directors of these groups. Since the publication of Brave New West, the resignations, securities fraud convictions, and prison sentences for multi-millionaires Bert Fingerhut and Mark Ristow, long time SUWA board members (Fingerhut was also on the Grand Canyon Trust board) make us wonder what is going on here.

More recently, Stiles' Greening of Wilderne$$ Part 2 (www.canyoncountryzephyr.com) exposed the influence of mega-capital on environmental boards large and small. For example, global venture-capitalist David Bonderman sits on the boards of The Wilderness Society and the Grand Canyon Trust. Mr. Bonderman's 2007 acquisition Luminant Energy, the Texas utility green-washed by the participation of the NRDC and Environmental Defense in the buyout, is right now building 2,300 MW of capacity from three new lignite coal-fired units. (What public values drive the need for more and more power?) How can a man with two 15,000 square foot homes lead the way either in reducing our consumption of energy or in the opposition to new coal-fired power plants on the Colorado Plateau?

Stiles' lament in the conclusion to Brave New West says it all:

"I wondered if Moab could have turned out differently...Could we have come to appreciate the life we had there, in terms that bankers, accountants, politicians, and chambers of commerce can't measure? Absolutely. We humans are a tragic lot, not because of our malevolence and greed but our indifference. It's never the bad guys that diminish our species, our culture, and our lands--their numbers are insignificant. We good guys empower them with our apathy. Our willingness to submit to things we know are wrong is always our undoing. It doesn't have to be that way."

Amen to that, Jim.

Great book. Well written. Very relevant to the protection and preservation of the Colorado Plateau and all of the arid Southwest. Although I didn't agree with every point made by Stiles in his book, there was a lot to think about and consider in the complicated issues of Western development. Ranks up there with the writings of Edward Abbey.

This review could have run anywhere from three to five stars. But, with nobody but worshipers at the shrine of St. Ed reviewing this book so far, this winds up being one of my context-based ratings, and so it gets three stars, not four.

First, let me say I agree with much of Stiles' take on the New West. Many environmental movements are getting a bit full of themselves, or a a bit full of strings-attached cash, at least.

Rationing of the West goes hand in hand with his commodification of the West. Witness how just about everything at Mesa Verde can only be seen by guided tour these days.

And, in some places, Stiles doesn't go far enough; he could have called for the Park Service to require a written test or something to get a permit to hike in many places, for example.

That said, Stiles is too good, or too much, at building up straw men. I don't think every mountain biker wants to ban cattle from national forests, or even thinks every cattleman is evil. Of course, Stiles might say such folks don't fall into his definition of the New West; I don't know.

Besides that, Stiles' version of Abbey's anarcho-libertarianism isn't the answer, either. (I take Abbey at face value on his own claim that he was neither an environmentalist nor a naturalist. Any man who remained unapologetic 30 years after pushing a tire into the Grand Canyon is neither.)

And, even if the New West is an evil, even if it is a new form of extractive industry, I still think it's the lesser of two evils when compared to the Old West.

Beyond that, Stiles didn't read Abbey himself carefully enough; he overlooks Abbey's own comment that "the desert always wins." Someday, commodified nature tourism will play out, too. More likely sooner than later, if continued drought and global warming turn out bad enough in the Southwest.

Then, it seems, Stiles is a bit black-and-white; I think there's plenty of people in Moab worried about the future but with a different take than him. (I talked to a couple of bookstore managers when in Moab most recently, mid-August 2008, and specifically asked about Stiles and this book.)

Finally, Stiles' book is long on problem and short on solution.

It's provocative, but it's more that than it is thought-provoking, and it's not "all that."

Of course, neither was Ed Abbey.

Not only informative about Moab but about the patterns and tensions of growth in all towns, especially in the West. Stiles is not only an expert on the subject but he is a writer who leaves you wanting more. A must-read for all Americans everywhere!

Stiles gives an accurate overview of how we loved this great Western town to death. Anyone who has spent time in one of the Western tourist towns over the past 30 years will be able to relate to his recent history of Moab, UT. And anyone who actually lives or lived in one of these towns will really be able to relate. Brave New West is very entertaining and at times pretty darned funny. But, at the same time, Stiles provides some great insight into some important environmental issues, how our love for our scenic spaces of the west can at times hurt more than help, and how sometimes the need for economic growth in these small towns can hurt more than anything. I appreciated Stiles' insight into the many sides of these issues, and how he was not afraid to agree with differing views on all sides. A great, quick read that for me brought back a lot of memories of my time in Moab. Recommended highly.

Having previously lived in Moab and some of the time reviewed by this creative reader, I enjoyed reading his take on the slow destruction of the quiet and seldom visited area, that has become a nightmare of tourist traps and consumption. He is right on and wish everyone from Moab or fans of the area would read.