Regular readers of the Zephyr may have noticed that I have been a frequent contributing writer for the past year or two. For the past few months, Jim and I have thrown around the idea of turning my musings into…
In The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith suggests that the field of Economics has not sufficiently evolved to account for widespread material abundance, which is itself a recent condition anywhere in the world. Galbraith argues that the affluent society is…
As I have written about before, at stake in the Bears Ears controversy is the nature and pace of rural restructuring in San Juan County. As the residents of the county continue to grapple with their predicament, it becomes clear…
In large part, my personal opposition to a large new national monument in San Juan County was always based on a straightforward risk assessment of the likely consequences under “monument” versus “no monument” scenarios. On the one hand, it seemed…
This is the conclusion of a two-part essay on New West gentrification and the designation of Bears Ears National Monument (part one here). In this part two, I will more closely examine the concrete ways in which New West colonization…
A two-part essay on the process of New West gentrification and the future of San Juan County, Utah after the designation of Bears Ears National Monument. Part one will provide historical context and define certain conceptual terms in order to…
Bluff Goes Big The most attention-grabbing fact of the incorporation is its size: 38 square miles, which is more than 60 times the size of Bluff’s present developed footprint. The scale of the new boundary is fairly hard to contextualize,…