| Following a lively dialogue
about the idea of a regional primary here on Western
Perspective over the past couple of weeks, I'd like
now to take a step back from the discussion about the
primary and attempt to provide it some historical perspective.
In particular, I want to encourage discussion about
a phenomenon that seems to me to have been steadily
gaining strength over the past few years: the emergence
of Rocky Mountain regionalism.
I'm going to start by using Headwaters News itself
as a kind of case study, and in the process I want to
invite some of our loyal Headwaters' readers into the
discussion.
Headwaters began six years ago as an experiment, built
around a hypothesis. That hypothesis, roughly stated,
was that region matters, at least here in the Rockies,
and that there should therefore be a substantial number
of people who would find it useful to have easy and
reliable access to news stories from around the region.
Headwaters' numbers have borne out our hypothesis.
Every year – indeed every quarter – the
number of Headwaters' readers has continued to grow.
And these numbers mean something, given the competitive
nature of the Internet.
Even though Headwaters is a free service, there is
clearly a market at work since time is money, and people
won't invest their precious time in reading a regional
news service unless they are getting something there
that they can't get anywhere else.
So a useful question is: What is it that keeps our
readers coming to Headwaters? It helps us to clarify
our mission and improve our service if we know that,
of course. So here's a chance to tell us -- even if
you've told us before -- why you read Headwaters. Send
us your comments.
That feedback will help Headwaters. But much more important,
it will move us all a step closer to understanding the
dynamics, the limits and the potential of this emerging
Rocky Mountain regionalism.
In fact, Headwaters is only one among a
steadily growing number of Western regional initiatives
and institutions. Some of them cover smaller regions,
some larger, but a surprising number focus on roughly
(if not precisely) the same Rocky Mountain region served
by Headwaters News.
For example, one relatively recent addition to the list
of regional initiatives is the Report
Card of the Rockies, published annually by Colorado
College. This very promising undertaking covers
exactly the same eight states as those proposed for
the Western primary.
Wallace Stegner gave what I consider the classic definition
of this region, and its relationship to its neighbor
regions, in an essay in "Where the Bluebird Sings
to the Lemonade Springs:"
So--the West that we are talking about comprises a
dry core of eight public-lands states--Arizona, Colorado,
Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming--plus
two marginal areas. The first of these is the western
part of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and
Texas, authentically dry but with only minimal public
lands. The second is the West Coast--Washington, Oregon,
and California--with extensive arid lands but with
well-watered coastal strips and also many rivers.
This is the area that the grand-daddy of all the Western
regional centers – the University of Colorado's
Center
of the American West features on its Web site, and
to which it devoted its excellent Atlas
of the New West.
I may be mistaken about this, but it seemed to me that
the Center of the American West shrunk its borders a
bit when it published the Atlas – drawing in particularly
from the Pacific Coast. If so, then it only underscores
the possibility that there is something particularly
relevant about the West that Stegner describes, and
that institutions seeking to do the most meaningful
regional work will naturally conform to the most relevant
geography.
The opposite trajectory, but the same result, seems
to me to have occurred with the Sonoran
Institute. This outstanding regional resource began,
as its name implies, with a focus on the Sonoran geography
surrounding its base in Tucson, Ariz. But either desertification
has run rampant, or the institute has simply responded
to the quiet logic of emergent regionalism as its work,
and even its satellite offices, have spread throughout
the Rockies.
For years, the Sonoran Institute, the Center of the
American West, and Headwaters News itself have been
assisted in their regional work by the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
In fact, for some of those years, Hewlett worked through
the Center of the American West to bring together a
number of university-based centers throughout the larger
West of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast. That broader
circle of contacts proved very valuable, but in the
end, we found that the centers and institutes from the
Rockies gravitated to each other.
Those organizations include The
Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University
in Idaho; the Wallace Stegner Center for
Land, Resources and the Environment at the University
of Utah; The
Ruckelshaus Institute for Environment and Natural Resources
at the University of Wyoming, and the Natural
Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
These organizations share an interest in public land
and natural resource issues and have formed a variety
of working relationships and partnerships over the years.
It would be instructive to hear any reflections they
might have about the way in which their work is (or
is not) drawn in a regional direction, as well as what
geography is most relevant to their work.
There are a number of other centers, institutes, and
other institutions, also operating at a regional scale,
focusing on topics beyond public lands and natural resources,
whose experiences would also be instructive.
Such reflections, based on years of experience on the
part of these regional institutions, should help us
see more clearly the dynamics that are creating a stronger
sense of regional identity, and to identify, too, the
limits and challenges facing this emerging regionalism.
Then, as the discussion unfolds, let's talk
about the implications of this emerging regionalism
--for economics and politics, for state and national
identity, for how we see the past and how we shape the
future of the Rocky Mountain West.
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