High Noon In The West

By Terry McCarthy

On the first evening of summer, a grizzly bear and her yearling cub foraged for roots and grubs high up on the western slopes of the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park. Farther up the valley, a group of visitors watched a pack of coyotes dispersing hurriedly after a wolf's howl pealed through the trees. As the sun lingered on the peaks, the valley took on a timeless quality, and the human visitors went quiet as they gazed at the landscape and the wildlife around them.

Few realized that 2,000 miles away, in Washington, a series of decisions were being made that could threaten the Yellowstone ecosystem. The previous evening the Interior Department had announced it was blocking a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Bitterroot Wilderness area in Idaho and Montana, northwest of Yellowstone, even though biologists say that such a reintroduction is ultimately necessary to maintain the genetic diversity of the bears in the park. The following week, Interior announced it was thinking about lifting a ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone that had been agreed upon last year. At the same time, the Bush Administration was increasing pressure to open the Bridger-Teton National Forest just south of the park for oil and gas drilling.

Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the first national park, has become a focal point in the latest chapter in the epic Battle for the West that has raged for two centuries. The Bush Administration is pushing hard to open up large tracts of public land to drilling, logging, nuclear-waste storage and off-road vehicles. Whether it means exploring for oil in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, easing up on Clinton Administration road closings that put a third of the national forests off limits to logging or suspending new listings on the Endangered Species Act, the message from the White House is clear: the West is open for business. "I believe people should make decisions about their own lives," said Interior Secretary Gale Norton in an interview with Time last week. "Decisions made from behind a desk in Washington seldom reflect the knowledge and love that people have of their own communities."

Last week that conflict between federal and local came to a head in Klamath Falls, Ore., where angry farmers forced open an irrigation canal that had been closed off by the Bureau of Reclamation to save an endangered species of suckerfish. Some 1,400 farmers in the Klamath River Basin have been cut off from irrigation since April and watched their land dry up because a federal court has said the water must be preserved for the suckerfish, protected under the controversial ESA. Local businesses are closing down, farm laborers are leaving and ranchers are selling off their livestock.

"People are angry," says Alvin Cheyne, 80, who farms 670 acres in the Klamath Basin. "What the government has done is unbelievable." Feelings are running so high in Klamath Falls that even the local sheriff, Tim Evinger, decided not to intervene as the protesters opened the head gates from the Upper Klamath Lake with a chainsaw.

In Washington, Secretary Norton called the Klamath showdown "a very difficult situation. Something I hope we can avoid in the future with more long-term planning." Norton also said that her department would be examining the ESA, which Republicans and some Democrats have begun to say needs revision. "We are looking at the science as to what the endangered species are so that we really have an understanding."

In the stories that follow, TIME explores how the new push for development has further stoked the fires of debate across the region as its citizens try to figure out how to make the best use of the West's natural resources. In Wyoming, wary ranchers are caught in the middle of a gas-exploration boom they can't control. In Colorado, a U.S. Forest Service plan to limit motorized access to the White River National Forest has angered off-road-vehicle enthusiasts. In Nevada, a proposed nuclear-waste dump deep inside Yucca Mountain has stirred up bipartisan opposition. In Oregon, Clinton's designation of the Cascade-Siskiyou forest as a national monument is being reviewed by Bush, setting off arguments over public and private land use by loggers, local residents and environmentalists.

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?'"