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"THE ANGRY WEST REVISITED?"

Richard Lamm, Colorado Water Workshop, July 27, th 2005

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Thank you so much for your invitation. It was a trip down nostalgia lane to review what we had written 20 years ago. It was like visiting an old lover, you can still see what you were so passionate about, but both of you have gone different directions, and your views and opinions have changed subtlety over time. It is entirely appropriate that this is so: public policy is a kaleidoscope that time changes, and constantly presents us with new and different patterns.

THE ANGRY WEST was a cry of pain. I hated to see what was happening to my West. The rest of the nation was using our resources and not paying for the impact. We were already using our natural resources and our limited clean air to generate California's energy and much more was on the way. The M-X missile system was in final stages of planning, and it would have been one of the largest construction projects in U.S. history. Oil shale, with the then planned methods of extraction and production, was the mother of all environmental disasters. Colorado was told to get ready of a half a million newcomers to work that industry and the industry wanted us to issue bonds to pay for the needed infrastructure. The environmental impact was gargantuan; there is less than a barrel of kerogen in a ton of mined shale and we would have to dig a new panama canal every six months if we were to produce the hoped-for million barrels a day production. The coal and molybdenum industry was taking our natural resources and not paying any severance tax and precious little corporate tax. I challenged the President of Climax Molybdenum to show me that they had paid a cent of taxes to the state (as opposed to the local) and they refused my request. All of these impacts were taking place simultaneously, and on top of it, many of them were outside state control. We quoted Bernard de Voto who lamented that the westerner has never “been able to borrow money or make a shipment or set a price except at the discretion of a board of directors in the east.” Let me read to you from THE ANGRY WEST:

“All oil shale companies operating or planning to operate in the state are non-Colorado companies. All of the major coal companies are as well. Colorado's major uranium production is almost exclusively by out of state companies. So is its molybdenum production. The Denver Post is Los Angeles owned and the Rocky Mountain News is Cleveland-owned. Eight of ten of Colorado's major newspapers are owned from out of state. Non-Colorado companies own all of Denver's major commercial television stations. Nine public televisions stations exist in Colorado, six and a half of them owned from a distance in other states. Of Colorado's ten largest employers, only four even have corporate headquarters in the state… (Colorado) will grow. Perhaps it will prosper. But, as in the days of the Guggenheims and Rockefellers, it will not belong to itself . It will not control its own destiny.”

 

Where are we 23 years later? I fear the thrust of the book is still true. The M-X missile system that we (let me acknowledge my co-author, Michael McCarthy) wrote so passionately against is dead and buried. The name “Sagebrush Revolution” is dead, but the idea is very much alive and actually in power in Washington. The idea of giving states more power over federal land, has even converted some environmentalists like Dan Kemmis, but I think that is a serious mistake. I couldn't imagine what this state would look like if our state legislature (or local governments) had more control over disposing and developing federal lands.

Oil shale has been dormant, but like Frankenstein, oil prices are giving it the dynamics to become one of the environmental monsters of our future. On the issue of water, we were just dead wrong when we said that the west “must stand aggressively against federal ‘reforms' in water law.” and to preserve the state's right to establish its own water policies and allocation system. Though politically I could do no different, I am embarrassed to think how aggressively I fought against President Carter's hit list.

So let me use the “colonialism” issue to reflect part of my ANGRY WEST odyssey. I think we were largely correct in our analysis and our solutions. Tragically, the life and death issue of sustainability has now replaced these serious issues. Today our writing sounds too parochial. Let me illustrate this point by using the metaphor of river issues and boat issues. River issues are the large issues that involve the sweep of history: capitalism vs. communism, democracy vs. Authoritarian philosophies, the role of religion of society, etc.

Boat issues would be issues like we were writing about: energy impact issues, who pays for growth, energy impact, oil shale, how do we work out our relationship with the federal government who owns 50% of the west, how/should we economically control our own destiny. I me tell you three parables to illustrate my thinking on the river issues facing America and the west.

First parable: the Archbishop of Lima. (Story not included) We warned in our book about the avalanche of change that was hitting the west. We underestimated the magnitude of that change. No society in history has ever had to think about and make decisions about such things as –

•  The global economy,

•  The Internet,

•  The ethics of transplanting a baboon's heart in a human being,

•  Cloning and asexual reproduction,

•  Global warming,

•  The question of how do you raise sextuplets?

Modern day life is a rock rolling downhill gaining momentum and speed. We are sailing on uncharted waters moving at unprecedented speed. Our navigational instruments are all old-fashioned and out of date. We have lost our anchor and we are not sure that everything we learned about sailing in the past is applicable to the future.

And however fast it has been moving, it will move even faster. The rate and pace of change itself has become a river issue. Ray Kurzweil says the 20 th century wasn't 100 years of progress at today's rate of progress, it was only 20 years. At today's rate of progress, we will see change equivalent to all the 20 th century in 14 years, and then 7, and the pace will continue to accelerate because of the explosive nature of exponential growth. The 21 st century will see 1000 times the change of the 20 th century, which was no slouch for change. History is a rock rolling downhill and there is a real question whether our institutions, or even the human mind, is equal to the challenge to manage or even adapt to change this fast.

 

Second parable The Housekeeper. (Story not included) Let me state unequivocally my concern. Our book is filled with history lessons from the West. But I believe that history has become of significantly reduced usefulness for human wisdom and for guidance in the management of the future. We constantly referred to this history of the West in our book. Boom and bust cycles, exploitation, environmental pillage. I believe today that many of the great and wise sayings concerning the importance of history, like Santayana's statement that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” or Harry Truman's quote to the effect that the only surprises in the future are the history you don't know --while perhaps still true for human events, do not give us guidance on our major environmental public policy challenges and can be downright dangerous as we face the next generation of public issues. In some ways history has become a trap because it prevents us from recognizing the full seriousness of the problems we are faced with. An Old World is dying and a New World in which history is of limited use, is struggling to be born. Heretical words but let me make my case.

History does teach us much about human nature, about humanities, ambitions, cruelties, follies, about the seduction of power, the temptation of riches and lust. We enlarge our know-ledge and enrich our soul by the study of history. History has been an important part of my life.

But history does not teach us about Mother Nature; it does not allow us to properly evaluate something like global warming, environmental degradation, or the growth of human numbers. It is likely that we are entering into a new era of sustainability. A study of history would not have predicted the renaissance, or the industrial revolution, and I don't believe it is of much help in the search for the new world of sustainability or what may exist on the backside of the Hubbard curve.

The past gives little guidance to the next generation of problems because we are living on the upper shoulder of some unprecedented and dangerous geometric curves.  We ignore Al Bartlett's wise words that the greatest human failure is our inability to understand the exponential function.  I believe the next sequences of geometric growth in human numbers and environmental impact are unsustainable, and are thus by definition without precedent.  The relentless cascade of geometry is giving us a world beyond historical precedent. History teaches us of human limitations, but not of nature's limits. History gives us little guide to a world that needs to turn from “growth” to “sustainability.” some guidance, of course, but not where it really counts. We are sailing on uncharted waters.

I believe that we are surrounded with evidence that increasingly shows that something is fundamentally wrong with our historic ways of looking at the world. Yesterday's solutions have become today's problems, and these problems are of a different scale and coming at us with increasing velocity. The growth paradigm that allowed us to create wealth, reduce poverty, and increase living standards is becoming obsolete. Those human traits which allowed us to prevail over the ice, the tiger and the bear -- in a time of an empty earth continue to operate long after we are no longer an empty earth. 

 

Reg Morrison in his book, The Spirit Of The Gene, suggests that those genes that saved a species now are on course to destroy us.  We are hard-wired by survival traits that now, unless controlled, will drive us into oblivion. Evolution moves too slowly to correct the dilemma that evolution put us in by its past slow progress.

Our globe is warming, our forests are shrinking, our water tables are falling, our icecaps are melting, our coral is dying, and our fisheries are collapsing. Our soils are eroding, our wetlands are disappearing, our deserts are encroaching, and our finite water more and more in demand.   I suspect these to be the early warning signs of a world approaching its carrying capacity.  We cannot call upon the lessons of history to help us evaluate the seriousness of these problems because it is an entirely new paradigm.  Ecologically we are sailing on uncharted waters while moving at unprecedented speed. We have lost our anchor and our navigational instruments are out of date.

When I entered high school in 1950, there were 2.6 billion people on earth, and there were 50 million cars.  Now there are over 6 billion people on earth, and our car population has increased ten-fold to 500 million; and within 25 years it is projected there will be 1 billion cars on the world's roads. (Youngquist)

Nothing in our past prepares us for the environmental problems that we are faced with.  We cannot grow our way out of these problems; we cannot use history to put them into perspective.  The lessons we have learned living on an empty earth teach us the wrong lessons.  We are still trying to “be fruitful, multiply, and subdue” an earth that now needs saving. Contemporary life is a rock rolling downhill, gathering speed.  It presents us with a series of problems of nature, for which the lessons of history are not only useless, but teach us the wrong lessons.

Kenneth Boulding said that the modern human dilemma is that all our experience deals with the past, yet all our problems are challenges of the future.  The lessons we have learned in the past do not help and in many ways are counter-productive in solving the problems of sustainability. Our economic models have become ecologically unsustainable.

But the burden of persuading people of this is gargantuan. We live with a frontier mentality. In the rest of the world frontier means finitude. You go until you get to the frontier and then you stop. Only in America does frontier mean absence of limits and constant growth and movement. My love affair with the west teaches me the wisdom of the second culture. Modern growth curves are not sustainable. No trees grow to the sky. No growth can be expediential for long.

 

3 rd parable: the Kaufman diamond. (Story not included) Is growth a diamond or a curse? We warned of the growth pressures on the west. Again we understated. But we did try to demystify “growth” as an unmitigated good. I believe the environmental movement is committing “public policy malpractice” by not taking on the issue of population growth. I am proud that we had this one exactly correct.

The argument about growth around the country, and particularly in the west, is a dialogue between the blind and the deaf. One group still points to Colorado state university where they are developing salt resistant rice so countries will be able to grow rice in salt infested land and that group says confidentially "technology will save us."

The other group goes a little farther north to Wyoming and says, "Look, you can still see the wagon wheels of the Oregon trail." They are still there 140 years after the wagons have passed. They point out that we live in a desert. We are an oasis civilization that must come to grips with limits . Now if history is a teacher, what is the lesson we are to learn from the history of the west? Both sides find support for their sides in the history of the west.

Civilization has triumphed in the west because it refused to accept limits and our ancestors overcome a myriad of obstacles. This area was called the great American desert on the early maps. Our ancestors pushed aside the doubters and made it a garden. The culture of “full speed ahead” teaches that ingenuity and imagination can prevail over any obstacles and that there are no limits -- only lack of creativity. As one author put it, "the world is full of things patiently waiting for our wits to sharpen."

This is the west of irrigation canals, transmountain diversions, pivot sprinklers and other adaptations that allow us not only to live in a semi-desert, but also to enjoy green lawns and prosperity. The culture of the infinite suggests the future is a logical extension of the past, that all problems have achievable solutions: “go forth and multiply and subdue the earth” and “go west, young man.”

It is the optimism of “Not to worry: God gave man two hands and only one stomach.” It reflects a devout belief in limitless economic development, progress and the perfectibility of the human condition. It is the world of green revolution that has given us the potential to eliminate hunger, and of technology that some say has repealed the law of supply and demand and discovered seemingly endless and unlimited wealth. This is the world built around unlimited people and unstated consumers.

The supporters of this viewpoint may be modern prophets or may be modern alchemists -- but to date they say they have been stunningly successful in solving the problem of population and poverty. And in their minds their approach will continue to be successful. Desalinating oceans can solve aridity, and wealth (computer chips) can be created out of sand.

The second culture is the culture “slow down and change”. The west also teaches that we must adapt to nature, and be acutely aware of nature's fickleness and limitations. It teaches us that there is such a thing as “carrying capacity” and we must respect the fragility of the land and environment. It argues that nature teaches us that we never can or should rely on the status quo, that climate is harsh and variable, and that the price of survival is to anticipate and prepare. It questions the proposition that growth, population or economic, can go on forever. This is the world of conservation, national parks, wilderness legislation, crop rotation, Planned Parenthood, Malthus, Aldo Leopold, the great naturalist who says the west should teach us “intellectual humility.”

Only one of these cultures can ultimately prevail. They didn't conflict when the west was young and even when I was young. But your generation must make a choice between these two cultures. My generation could mourn Glen Canyon while we kayaked the Green and the Yampa. We could endlessly brag, “Watch Us Grow” and still maintain our quality of life and fragile landscape. But even though the west is no longer young and unsettled, we are still acting as if it were.

Our industrial civilization is built upon the assumptions that there are no limits, technology can solve all, and that the world will not reach any sort of carrying capacity. It assumes infinite resources, where scarcity is caused by want of imagination. Civilization in most of the world supports this assumption of the infinite.

The “go slow and become sustainable” culture, with fewer adherents, but equally passionate, contends that the first culture is making “empty earth” assumptions that cannot be sustained. They want to move now to stabilize U.S. population and help the rest of the world do likewise. They do not believe that there can be endless and unlimited consumption.

They feel that we cannot and should not have a Colorado of eight or ten or twelve million people, or an America of 500 million living our consumptive lifestyles. They contend that we live in a hinge of history where society must rewrite the entire script. If they are correct, then our basic assumptions about life, our great religious traditions, and our economy are conceptually obsolete. So far, those who sing this song are failed prophets.

But what if -- just what if -- the culture of sustainability was only a temporary victor? What if nature bats last? What if the real lesson we should have learned in a place with only 13 inches of rain was the need to appreciate that limits could be pushed and extended but never eliminated? What if the rain forests, the dying coral, the rising temperatures are trying to tell us something? What if shrinking fisheries melting ice caps, eroding soils were harbingers of a planet approaching carrying capacity?

The lessons I have learned from my love affair with the west support this second culture. I believe that we wrote a good book for the time, but that some new issues have hit us in the face which trump those issues for my limited time and efforts. I believe we have to stabilize the population of the U.S. and reduce its consumption. I believe we need to transform society from an earth-consuming technological civilization to a sustainable and more benign civilization. I'm impressed with Aldo Leopold's “land ethic” which teaches that human fate depends on our ability to change the basic values, beliefs and aspirations of the total society. My life's experience confirms Charles Darwin's belief that “it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

 

I believe that the fate of our children and grandchildren depends on our ability to know when to abandon the growth culture, and shift to the sustainability culture.