All Hail the New West!

High Country News [Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428, www.hcn.org] recently celebrated Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck's successful challenge to the "road-building ethic that holds large chunks of the agency and its congressional supporters in thrall."

HCN attributes Dombeck's success to the fact that "congressional politics has shifted away from the timber industry."

Logging on national forests is down from 122 annual billion board-feet a decade ago to four billion board-feet today, livestock has dwindled from 20 million head 100 years ago to two million head, and there are now fewer than 2,000 oil and gas wells on public and private lands in the west. Until 1983, there were 8,500.

"Broad changes are transforming the economy that made the west, where for 150 years, loggers, ranchers, miners and oil and gas workers brought home the big paychecks," reports HCN Associate Editor Peter Chilson.

But the decline of traditional extractive industries does not necessarily mean that there's a change for the better brewing out west.

"As the old economy fades, growth booms. Since 1982, urban growth has eaten up more than 2 million acres of western land. In numbers of people, the west has been the nation's fastest-growing region for a decade." The wide open spaces now face a future of urban sprawl.