DeVoto’s enemies argued that the land was vast and that taking what the vast land had to offer was a westerner’s birthright. They also said that by doing so the people could strike it rich. That was, and remains, a hard argument to fight against.
DeVoto didn’t care if it was hard. He had watched too many places be cored out. Too many places where the citizenry was suckered in by the dream of riches, only to be left empty in the end. Locals might convince themselves that it was a mutual commitment, a marriage of sorts. We each other. But despite the companies’ promises, despite the vows they made, there was never any true commitment to the places they were emptying of fuels or minerals. Of course, it wasn’t just the land that would be emptied out but the towns.
DeVoto could point to history and ask a simple question: Can you show me a single example of a time when a company didn’t leave after taking all it wanted? A single time when a company took care of a town it had left?
Here in five words is his summary of the extractive industries:
“All mining exhausts the deposit.”
DeVoto shared with Stegner an ability to see the big picture. But he shared plenty with Abbey, too: a tendency toward overstatement, a willingness to bloody noses, a love of tweaking the overly proper and accepted. Stegner once called DeVoto the “Lone Ranger,” and one can easily imagine DeVoto standing alone in the 1940s and ’50s, keeping a mob of vigilantes (politicians, developers, ranchers, oil men) at bay as they clamored on about taking back “their” land. Stegner joined DeVoto in the fight, but it wasn’t until Ed Abbey came along that anyone took to the fight with anywhere near the same cantankerous spirit.
Abbey, coming later, witnessed the plundering of the West in full force, the mines and coal-fired plants, the roads and smog, the damming of every wild river, the burgeoning population. His overall “platform” might not have been quite as thought-through as DeVoto’s or Stegner’s, but he had read and subsumed those who came before, and his reading mixed with his evolving anarchism. He was enraged by what others shrugged at, and saw the plunderers for what they were. And like DeVoto he wasn’t about to back down from a fight.
An example is a speech that Abbey delivered at the University of Montana in Missoula on April 1, 1985. In the heart of cattle country, and to increasing boos and jeers, he told the crowd: “Western cattlemen are no more than welfare parasites.” After a childhood of romanticizing cowboys, he had come to see them as what they were: a highly subsidized special-interest group—a group of about 35,000 individuals who controlled 400 million acres of public land, land that after it was used was left “cowburnt” and useless. The cows did “intolerable damage to our public lands” and went about their job of “transforming soil and grass into dust and weeds.”
Abbey’s solution to the problem was a characteristic one: we should open hunting season on all cattle on public lands. But the joke hid the real point—that instead of cows those lands could be inhabited by wild creatures, elk and wolves and bear and deer.
LARGENESS OF THOUGHT does not come naturally to most of us. It isn’t easy to see the big picture. Many don’t even try.
But there are times when the big picture is hard to avoid, and my second day in Vernal was one of those. On Monday, July 12, I woke early and drove over to the Vernal airport to meet Bruce Gordon of EcoFlight, a nonprofit organization that sponsors flights over the western landscape. I would now have the chance to see Vernal from above, and by that I don’t mean snootily.
Soon we were up in the air in Bruce’s small plane, looking down at the land laid out below us like a map. It was a startling experience: what was theoretical became actual. These were the places, the oil fields, that I had until then just been thinking about.
“For most people who are driving through this area they just see a few sites from the road and have no idea,” said Bruce. “But from up here you can see the extent of it.”
I thought of a friend of mine who had just moved west, a former stockbroker who knew a thing or two about booms. When I told him what I was writing about, he was mystified.
“How can you worry about the West? There is so much land. And so few people. How can they possibly hurt it?”
He was apparently as-yet unschooled in western aridity, and therefore western vulnerability. He didn’t understand: scar this dry landscape and the scars remain.
We saw evidence of this not ten minutes outside of Vernal. The land quickly rose and grew wilder, the Green River twisting beautiful and snakelike through a landscape of purple and yellow. At first glance I could almost believe my friend was right. All that great empty, unpeopled space, still looking like “the geography of hope.”
But on second glance you could see the rectangles, the straight, squared lines that didn’t quite fit in nature, and that turned out to be the hundreds of drilling pads and evaporation ponds and holding tanks dotting the area. This was where the white trucks all went during the day before coming back to rest at night in front of the hotel rooms.
My traveling companions in the small plane, along with Bruce, were a documentary filmmaker named John McChesney and two members of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Ray Bloxham and Steve Bloch. I pointed down. The land below was scarred so badly that in places it looked as if someone had taken a knife to a beautiful woman’s face.
“They used to say that the vegetation would eventually reclaim the sites,” Steve said through the headset. “But scientists no longer think so. Not enough water for the vegetation to regrow.”
Not enough water. Stegner’s and DeVoto’s refrain. There is nothing new under the sun, you could say, except of course that there is something new here: fracking. Which requires water, millions and millions of gallons of it, while also directly threatening aquifers.
“Not Enough Water” could have been the whole country’s motto during that summer of brutal drought, but it had been the West’s motto forever. Native people had built civilizations adapting to this fact. The conquering Europeans, for the most part, tried their best to deny it. One thing that still made this denial possible, in the several decades before the last one, was that we were, unbeknownst to us, experiencing one of the most flush periods the region has ever experienced. Not anymore. The twentieth century was one of the three wettest of the last thirteen. The twenty-first is something quite different.
The river below us, the Green, wending its way through the oil lands, would soon join with the Colorado and help water the West. Three-quarters of that water goes toward agriculture or, more accurately, agribusiness, turning previously brown lands green through irrigation. Millions of gallons from these rivers are also destined for Phoenix and L.A.
The history of the West, Stegner said, has been a history of pretending. But in a land of so little water, even less water from either the sky or melting snow tips the balance and reveals the place for the desert it is. Some argue that this year, the hottest on record so far, is a freak year. Remember, they say, that the year before gave us one of the largest snowpacks ever recorded.
But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change.
And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of wat
er, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil.
One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.”
The plane banked south, down toward the Book Cliffs and Goblin Hills and Desolation Canyon, and we saw a few hundred more rectangles. Rectangles up in the high forested mountains, where the highest concentration of black bears in the state roamed. Rectangles near the Sand Wash, where rafters who put in to retrace the journey of John Wesley Powell were now serenaded by an industrial hum. Rectangles near the unique Ute defensive armaments on rock spires near the river, cliff towers that are unique to the region, and rectangles near the largest known Ute petroglyph panel in upper Desolation Canyon.
Rectangles were not all we saw, of course. For the rectangles would have been lonely if they didn’t have the big white trucks to keep them company. And to get from rectangle to rectangle the big white trucks needed roads. So what had once been roadless wilderness was now a spiderwebbed wilderness. The roads were everywhere, including one being built that would lead to the new tar sands right below the beautiful Book Cliffs. This particular road, called Seep Ridge, would be forty-nine miles long and paved, the land scraped a hundred feet wide to provide for a fifty-five-mile-an-hour freeway in the midst of this formerly raw wilderness.
The geography of hopelessness, were the words I scribbled in my journal.
And this is what I thought: We are a short-term people, hungry for now. But the West is a long-term place. A place where the stones in an Anasazi cliff dwelling sit just as they did a thousand years ago, and where nothing rots and decays. Here you can see the scars cutting across the dryness. And here you will see the same scars in a hundred, or a thousand, years.
I thought of how Stegner and DeVoto understood that water was the most precious resource of all, and how below me the Green and the White Rivers, the only major water sources for miles, ran through what was now an industrial hive.
Near the end of our flight, I asked Steve a question: who owned the land we had been looking down at? He told me that part of it was Indian Reservation land. A small part private. But most of it was public land, including Bureau of Land Management land and US Forest Service land. In other words, the short answer to my own question was: We do. It belongs to all of us, our American land, our heritage.
I knew it would not be wise to make that case too loudly back in the hotel lobby in Vernal. I wouldn’t have wanted to walk out of my hotel room last night and announce loudly from the balcony that this land is my land, our public land, that the oil companies are coring out for profit. “Your land?” most of the people of Vernal would respond incredulously. “Your heritage? Your birthright?”
It is our land, they would counter. Our birthright. And, they might add, if we want to trade our birthright for a fancy rec center then we damn well will. It is an argument that is hard to counter, and I have no doubt it will ring out here forever. Or at least until the wooing is over, and Vernal, along with its deposit, lies exhausted.
IT WAS ON the Green River below us that Major John Wesley Powell began the epic journey that would lead him through the Grand Canyon in 1876. Powell fought heroically in the Civil War, losing his right arm, but became famous by leading the first group of Europeans, and possibly the first humans, on rafts down the Green River and then the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
Wallace Stegner’s breakthrough book was a biography of Powell, and it was Bernard DeVoto who gave Stegner the necessary nudge to tackle it. DeVoto, who had failed at writing serious fiction but then turned the fictional techniques he’d learned to his Pulitzer and National Book Award–winning history books, provided a model, a cheerleader, a nag, a noodge. Stegner had met many challenges, personal and professional, always wading into deeper intellectual waters as he moved from Salt Lake City gradually eastward to Harvard and then back west to Stanford, and his great mental capacity, and gift, was for expansion, for growth. But it was by turning toward Major Powell as his subject that his instinctive grasp of the West turned into something much larger and more comprehensive.
Why Powell? Because he was, in a word, perfect. Perfect for Stegner as subject, man, and model. Though Powell’s celebrity had faded by Stegner’s day, what made him appealing as a subject went far beyond his river adventures. In fact, what drew Stegner in was what came after the trip through the Grand Canyon: Powell’s work as the head of the Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region and then as director of the US Geological Survey. It was in those roles that Powell articulated his ideas about the American West, ideas that were at the time radical and that now seem prophetic. They were also, for Wallace Stegner, a kind of confirmation. Here was a wide-ranging thinker who saw the West as he did: a fragile desert landscape that should be regarded and treated differently from eastern lands.
While Stegner still defined himself as a novelist, it would be by bringing novelistic tools to Powell’s life that he would tell one of his most compelling stories. Like Edward Abbey, Stegner in mid-career would be surprised to find himself cast as a nonfiction writer, specifically a writer of biography, history, and memoir, and it was in this new role that Stegner would mine a deep vein of western history. Writers have plans, we have said, but sometimes the world turns us in unexpected directions and the smart writer, the alert writer, listens to where the world is telling them to go. Stegner’s movement began with One Nation, a book about race in America that required that he drive all over the United States and report on what he saw. What he saw was injustice everywhere, and he reported this honestly. It was a serviceable book, admirable. What it led to, by turning the author toward nonfiction and research, was something greater, perhaps Stegner’s greatest book, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. On the surface a biography of John Wesley Powell, it is really much more. It is the first time, to my ear, that Wallace Stegner sounds fully like Wallace Stegner, a masterful storyteller and historian and biographer, effortlessly moving between these various modes of writing, ranging from a history of the western frontier to a study of water in the West with, as if Stegner were just showing off, some astute art criticism thrown in. The book is, Stegner insists from the start, a biography not of a man but of his career and, more important, “of ideas.” Powell’s overarching vision of the American West, filtered through Stegner, was of a place where individuals are left to fail if left to their own devices; where only an honest assessment, not a romantic dream or an overlaying of eastern notions on western land, can make the land livable.
But if Stegner’s book is so idea-driv
en that it might be a manifesto, it begins as a boy’s adventure story with Powell and his nine companions rafting down into an unknown canyon world. The adventure story is brought alive in scenes by a writer who at that point had published eight novels and who knew the waters, both figurative and literal, having taken more than a few river trips himself. This allowed Stegner to both aptly describe the one-armed Powell steering the wooden boats through deadly rapids, and to say of him: “Losing one’s right arm is a misfortune; to some it might be a disaster, to others an excuse. It affected Wes Powell’s life about as much as stone fallen into a swift stream affects the course of the river. With a velocity like his, he simply foamed over it.”
When Powell made it back to civilization he found he was a national celebrity, but not being the type to bask, he immediately parlayed his fame into an impressive career. For others the exploration of the Colorado might have been their life’s climax, but for Powell it was just the beginning—in particular, the beginning of his understanding of western lands. While he would always be best known for running a river in a wooden boat, it was what he did in the years from 1881 to 1894, in his role as director of the US Geological Survey, that would place him, in Stegner’s eyes, right at the top of the pantheon of western environmental thinkers. What he did was wade into the halls of Congress and consistently, unflappably, stubbornly, but reasonably place scientific fact before a body of politicians who practically wallowed in irrationality, self-interest, and superstition. During that time he continued to fly the flag of reason and fact, putting the public good over private interest, despite those who tried to tear him down. And he put forth a vision of the American West as an arid to semi-arid land where humans, if they were to inhabit it at all, would need to understand certain facts, facts specific to that particular place.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 13
