Tag: SUWA

From 2007: “Brave New West”(The Amenities Boom & Meltdown) w/ 2024 Updates —Jim Stiles (ZX#103)

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I had been ranting for years about the impacts an Industrial Tourism economy could create. My pleas fell on deaf ears, especially with the mainstream environmental community. Organizations like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) embraced the change and even devoted an entire issue of its newsletter praising the amenities economy as a clean, non-polluting way to bring economic prosperity to areas that had previously depended on the extractive industries to survive. What they failed to consider was that while coal mining and oil and gas exploration and ranching could scrape bare the skin of the rural West, a massive monolithic tourism economy would eventually bare and destroy its very soul. 

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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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Flashback #2…From BRAVE NEW WEST: 2007– The ‘Greening’ of Moab..& Wilderne$$ Itself (ZX#80) — Jim Stiles

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I drift back to my days as a kid and my journeys into The Woods and realize I can still find that same mystical connection to the land when I’m picking through the ruins of an old mining cabin in the Yellow Cat, north of Arches, and I look up through the darkness to the exposed rotting rafters and find myself eyeball to eyeball with a Great Horned Owl, who never blinks, and out-stares me, and backs me out the door with his fierce glare. Isn’t that a wilderness experience?

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TO GLUE, BLAST, PAVE & MOB DELICATE ARCH: A HISTORY —Jim Stiles (ZX#45)

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Delicate Arch…the name sounds familiar. In its online literature the National Park Service at Arches National Park calls Delicate Arch “the best known arch in the world.” In years past, the State of Utah considered the arch “so iconic” that it stamped the arch’s image on all state license plates. Visitation to Delicate Arch has recently become such an event that it is virtually impossible to experience the arch alone, or even with a small group of fellow tourists…

…As far back as the late 19th Century, ranchers and cowboys and maybe a few sheepherders had come across the arch. None of them were impressed; tourism was still an industry that had only occurred to a few. Even the uniqueness of this sandstone span failed to attract many visitors.

John Wesley Wolfe moved West from Ohio for health reasons. His doctor thought the desert air might extend his life. He and his son Fred found their way to Southeast Utah, to the Salt Wash area below the arch and established a ranch there in 1898. He built a primitive cabin and eked out a living. When his daughter Flora Stanley and her husband Ed visited him in 1907, she was appalled at the living conditions and made him build a new cabin. At some point he mentioned the arch to his daughter who made the two mile trek and is credited with the first known photo of what was then called “The School Marm’s Bloomers.” According to early Park Service reports, the arch sported a variety of nicknames, from “Pants Crotch,” to “Mary’s Bloomers, to the less colorful “Salt Wash Arch.” It most likely depended on which name the various ranchers preferred.

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21 Zephyr Years Ago—“It’s Time to Look in the Mirror”— by Jim Stiles (ZX#12)

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How can we continue to condemn the irresponsible and unacceptable behavior of people that we believe are damaging our irreplaceable natural resources, while ignoring or playing down the ever-growing destruction caused by us! Non-motorized recreationists–hikers, group hikers, bikers, climbers, rafters, kayakers, runners, action tour groups!–all those enlightened sportsters who wrap themselves in the environmental flag and send money to the Sierra Club while wreaking their own kind of enviro-havoc?

But that is the route we took–instead of taking the noble route and simply stating that the designation of wilderness was the right and courageous thing to do, we tried to promote the economic advantages of wilderness. Wilderness Pays in Spades! Since then, the cumulative effect of billions of footprints and tire tracks, and the transformation of rural communities into ‘tourist towns’ from millions of ‘amenity migrants’ have left an indelible mark. In short, the natural beauty of our land was packaged and commodified and sold. By us. We’re not just talking “surface rights” anymore. This goes right to the soul.  

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