Tag: New West

BEFORE TELLURIDE & ASPEN WENT CRAZY: 1950-1980/Photos by Herb Ringer (ZX# 101)

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From Edward Abbey’s “The Journey Home”
“The town of Telluride was actually discovered back in 1957, by me, during a picnic expedition into the San Miguel Mountains of southwestern Colorado. I recognized it at once as something much too good for the general public. For thirteen years I kept the place a secret from all but my closest picnicking cronies. No use: I should have invested everything I had in Telluride real estate. In 1970 a foreigner from California named Joseph T. Zoline moved in with $5 million and began the Californica-tion of Telluride. Formerly an honest, decayed little mining town of about good souls, it is now a bustling whore of a ski resort with a population of 1,500 and many more to come. If all goes badly, as planned… 

… Men weep, men pray and kneel, but money talks. Money walks and talks and gets things done.
— EA

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The Irony of Glen Canyon Dam’s Eventual Demise —Jim Stiles (ZX#98)

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If you didn’t live through the 1950s, there’s a commonly held but false impression that ‘nothing happened’ during the decade… But the decade of the ‘50s initiated the groundwork, literally, for what was to come. After a decade of the Great Depression and four years of world war. Growth was inevitable, but the explosive growth was stunning…

In order for the arid Southwest to grow far beyond anything that could be called “sustainable,” proponents needed two rare commodities for the arid deserts — water and power. Projects like Glen Canyon Dam and the Powell Reservoir were planned and built with that goal in mind.

Damn sustainability…full speed AHEAD.

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AN ‘ANCIENT’ MOAB ALBUM: 1989? (Faces & Places #1) —Jim Stiles (ZX#93)

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One morning in December 1989, I went downtown to check out the Christmas decorations. After a fairly chaotic tourist season, which had started last March and wound down in mid-October. now Main Street was dead. Many businesses had put up signs that read “Closed For The Winter.” There wasn’t enough tourist traffic during the winter months to sustain the number of new businesses that had opened in the last couple of years.

I saw fellow Moab resident Lucy Wallingford appreciating the relative quiet and especially how empty Main Street was. To emphasize the point, I asked Lucy if she would lie down in the middle of the turning lane. Lucy quickly assumed a location at the pointy end of the arrow. (I should note that this was a staged photograph. Lucy was not lying there before I arrived.)

This is perfect, I thought. “The Way Life Should Be.”

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‘SELLING’ WILDERNESS LIKE A USED BUICK— 1998: When Everything Changed — Jim Stiles (ZX#86)

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I had stumbled upon a website called “The Wilderness Mentoring Conference of 1998.” The gathering had been assembled by a group of self-named “mentors,” professional environmentalists active at the time in organizations that reached from Washington DC to Alaska. This relative handful of New Environmentalists were frustrated by the movement’s lack of progress in pushing and passing wilderness legislation across the country.

A prominently displayed quote by Michael Carroll, later of The Wilderness Society, established the tone and direction of all that would come later:

“Car companies and makers of sports drinks use wilderness to sell their products. We have to market wilderness as a product people want to have.”

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