WESTERN SKIES - March 26, 2005

*** COMMENTARY: STATE OF THE ROCKIES ***

ERIC WHITNEY: What does it mean to live in the West? What kind of place is this? Commentator Walt Hecox says that's open to debate.

WALT HECOX: No less an authority than Stanford University's new Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West convened a conference in February 2005. The bold agenda: initiating a conversation about the region's identity in the U.S. media and culture.

Here's what they came up with: while the region is a magnet for people in trade, it is Hollywood that they identify as the region's visible means of shaping popular culture.

Their American West lacks an intellectual, cultural or social presence within either the country or the continent.

Some of us here in Colorado see things differently. Beyond our Hollywood image, prominent observers struggle with more serious allegations that the eight-state Rockies region lacks regional sovereignty and has inland colony status.

In talking about sovereignty, observers are mostly referring to lack of participatory management for the Rockies. And without control of, or at least a significant say about the region's land, politics, and economy, Westerners do not dictate the region's destiny.

The harsh truth, according to Ed Marston, former editor of the High Country News, is that we live as southerners did during Reconstruction, occupied an often federal force, and for many of the same dismal reasons.

Because we have so far proven ourselves to be inadequate stewards of the region's vast public land holdings, the rest of the country does not trust us to control our own destiny. And, ads Marston, they are right.

At the center of the inland colony debate is the fact that forty-six percent of the land in the Rockies in publicly owned. This massive federal land base gives the government extraordinary political power in sparsely populated areas. We too often watch passively, as professional resources managers within the federal government craft policies to suit the needs of their lands.

Locals consistently complain about being powerless to make decisions in their own communities in the Rockies. But they do not often ask that federal subsidies be halted.

Washington's pen can lift communities to boom, or leave them to bust. Picking up the bait, the CC Rockies Project for 2005 has looked into these allegations. What we have found is that the closer to the ground we get, the more complicated are the causes and cures for topics we care about, such as the shabby conditions of our National Parks, the toxic waste in the Rockies, the civic health and vitality of Rockies communities, and the giant on the horizon: energy.

As one example, how healthy are our National Parks in this eight state region? Critics charge that nationwide, they are languishing with dilapidated buildings, trails, and roads, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Join us here on the Colorado College campus April five through seven, for the 2005 Rockies conference, and a lively exchange of views on these and other dimensions to the Rockies region that is so spectacularly beautiful and yet fragile.

WHITNEY: Walt Hecox is a professor of economics at Colorado College, and the organizer of CC's annual State of the Rockies Conference.

That's it for this edition of Western Skies, thanks for tuning in. Our associate producer is Stephen Raher, Jonathan Wilson is our intern, and Delaney Utterback handles the information technology. I'm Eric Whitney, thanks for tuning in.