Belsky and a number of her colleagues, including Robert Ohmart of Arizona State University, now predict that if livestock grazing in the West isn’t severely cut back, restoration will become impossible. They estimate that this will happen within 30 to 50 years.

Consider the facts: Already, 80 percent of the streams and riparian ecosystems in arid regions of the western United States have been damaged by livestock grazing. That’s from the U.S. Department of Interior, circa 1994. This damage isn’t just from way back in frontier days. A 1990 EPA report on grazing based on extensive field observations in the late 1980s revealed that riparian areas throughout much of the West were in “their worst condition in history.”

Although Belsky works for a conservation group, the tiny, Portland-based Oregon Natural Desert Association, she said she made an extra effort to seek out papers that would buttress claims by grazing supporters. These include the idea that the hooves of a 1,000-pound animal act like rototillers, helping promote plant growth by churning up soil. Au contraire, said Belsky.

“We looked very hard for papers that showed benefits and couldn’t find any,” Belsky said. “There were papers that showed no effects. Usually the authors themselves pointed out that something had gone wrong, either with the research methodology or an unusual event, like a flood. Every paper that cited a positive or neutral effect, we cited.”

Given this data, it’s easy to understand why the overwhelming majority of Western salmon and trout are threatened or endangered and why native and neotropical migratory birds are losing ground almost as fast. Yet Belsky’s paper also cites statistics indicating that the number of cattle in the West have more than doubled since 1940.

Poking at Sacred Cows

Telling people that the cowboy has no chaps is less popular than ever. Luckily, Belsky, a native Texan, is bulletproof. As one of the pioneering women in her field, she has always needed to be twice as rigorous as her male counterparts. She’s also better-trained than many of them, with a master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her decade of research into grasslands ecology in East Africa received consistent National Science Foundation funding.

Voices like Belsky’s are usually drowned out by national environmental groups focused on land acquisition, like the Grand Canyon Trust, Sonoran Institute, and Nature Conservancy. These groups are propping up ranching in the West, gambling that they can rein in the worst grazing practices. Privately, their staffers have told me they’re well aware of the destructive effects of grazing. But that’s not what they tell ranchers or even news reporters. If you read reports issued by these groups or articles in the New York Times or most of the big Eastern papers in which they’re quoted, you’d think that a cattle ranch is really just a big, beautiful park.

The dirty truth is that most of these groups have been acting like real estate wheeler-dealers for so long, their people are starting to think that way. All that land just gets them salivating. So they’re not being straight with the American public about the risks involved.

Who’s the David and who’s the Goliath? Sometimes it’s confusing out here in the New West. Just like in Washington, D.C., the best sound bite wins. That’s not Belsky’s lookout. She’s not going to ramble on about the cowboy myth, even though she grew up in Abilene, Texas.

“Oh, years ago that was all stripped from me, adjectives and things,” she laughs. “I’m a scientist. This is as popular as I’m going to get.”

This doesn’t sound hopeful, but who knows? A good old girl from Abilene is probably the only one with the, er, prairie oysters to take on the good old boys.

I hadn’t meant to pry. I had just called to remind her of her daughter’s peewee basketball practice that night. But in a small, western town, you can’t help but run into the lives of your neighbors.

Like everyone else in town, I had heard about the fire in one of the underground coal mines, about the high levels of carbon monoxide that forced an emergency evacuation. And I knew people were worried the company might shut its operation down permanently, putting the top breadwinner in more than 100 families out of work. But that voice made it real. It suddenly registered that nearly half of the girls on my team had parents who worked in one of the three local mines.

I’m a slow learner, but I have my excuses. I moved here to Paonia, Colo., seven years ago, fresh off a stint with the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental group, based in San Francisco, Calif. There, I was one of dozens of people working feverishly to protect the country’s air, water, and last wild places. We rarely discussed the people who worked the land and lived in small rural towns, and when we did it was not in flattering terms. We also talked a language of superlatives: Old trees were “ancient forests;” the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, under threat of oil drilling, was the “American Serengeti;” and the forces aligned against our last wilderness areas were all BIG: Big Oil, Big Timber, and Big Mining, just chomping at the bit to plunder the public lands.

Of course there was a kernal of truth in our words. Corporations and wealthy industrialists have frequently grabbed for resources in the West with little regard for the health of the environment. The landscape has in places been irrevocably changed for the worse. And opportunists are still out there scheming new ways to make a profit off the public domain, though today the ski and off-road vehicle industries — Big Recreation, if you will — seem more a threat than the traditional bogeymen.

Back on the Ground

But the world of environmental politics left me feeling disconnected from community, which is one reason I left the city and moved to this small town. Still, I was a little apprehensive about settling in a coal mining town. Those miners were “big tough guys” who probably chewed up environmentalists for breakfast.

Reality, of course, is more interesting than fiction. The first miner I met was my neighbor, Bob, a tall, affable, sandy-haired father of two. Within a week we were regularly chatting over the fence about gardening, fishing holes, and the weather. He gave us some of his garlic crop; we gave him a young apple tree we didn’t know what to do with. Then there was Louis, the retired mine electrician who could talk you under the table about everything from how life has gone to hell since the unions left the valley to “those damn kids” who race their pickups down the alley between our houses. Under his feisty exterior, Louis has a warm heart. On more than one cold winter’s night, he has fixed our aging coal furnace.

Not all coal miners are sweetness and light, of course. Some are rough and violent. Coal mining is a difficult occupation, even in these modern times. Twelve-hour shifts, six days a week can take a toll on miner and family. Miners also fear constantly about their jobs. I caught a glimpse of this two years ago on a tour of another coal mine owned then by the giant ARCO mining company. We drove deep into the blackness of the mountain until we came to the massive longwall machinery. There a great blade shaved chunks of glistening coal onto a belt that ran like a swollen, lumpy river out of the mountain to the railroad tracks.

Someone asked about the company’s commitment to the local community. “Oh, we’re not going anywhere,” said the mine engineer. “We’ve got another 20 years worth of coal down there, at least.”

“This is one of the most productive underground coal mines in the country,” the company executive seconded.

But the next morning, a small story in the Denver Post announced that ARCO had just put all of its North American coal mine operations up for sale. So much for stability.

Those miners kept their jobs because the new owners didn’t signifcantly change the mine’s operation. But it could have been hit-the-road time, just as it might be later this year for the families of the fire-stricken coal mine, should the owners decide to cut their losses.

Life isn’t black and white in the rural West. You can like miners and dislike the dangerous and capricious nature of their business, just as you can want to protect the environment, but still value mining and agricultural communities over exclusive ski resort towns.

The week of the mine fire, a few more fathers brought their girls to practice, including the husband of the woman I called on the phone. He seemed in good spirits and stayed for a while to shoot hoops with his daughter. I hope he’s back working underground soon.

The woman in the barber shop was prattling on about the charms of Missoula, Montana, my hometown, her new hometown.

“It’s just like a little San Francisco.”

I baited: “So is that where you’re from?”

“No, L.A., but it’s like a little San Francisco here.”

“Well, actually, no. It’s all white. No ethnic diversity, and San Francisco is nothing if not diverse. This place is all white.”

“I know. Isn’t it wonderful.”

Photo: Photos To Go, © 1999.

Did I mention the newcomer was white? Of course not. Didn’t need to. They almost all are.

I offer here another name for the migration of coastal urbanites into the mountain towns of the Rockies and Cascadia: white flight. Writing in March in the New York Times, California journalist Dale Maharidge offered this observation: “California is now essentially one large urban core, with the intermountain West as its suburb.”

He says that’s how it feels from his end in Palo Alto, and that’s how it feels from mine in Missoula. A majority of Californians now are not white. As immigrants grow wealthy enough to afford suburban homes, the white flight that built the suburbs in the first place flees on.

So now we have a name for it, what does it mean? Folks who analyze the primary changes of America during the last decade mark them by the impoverishment of both cities and rural areas, then talk about a rural-urban split. The poverty is right, but the split is wrong; this analysis misses the point, and it misses more than half of the U.S. population, which is neither rural nor urban but suburban. This majority is a new one; its emergence the dominant factor of American politics in this generation. Suburbanites gave us Ronald Reagan and his spawn. The same force erased John Kennedy’s question about what we can do for country and replaced it with the legitimized greed present in Reagan’s pivotal question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

What Maharidge believes this portends for mountain towns like mine is increasingly conservative politics. My state, for instance, once the most Democratic of the intermountain West, can no longer seem to elect a Democrat. True enough, there has always been a large conservative element in the state, like Washington’s and Oregon’s, based in its eastern agricultural half, ranchers and farmers, not newcomers. But as of the last elections, there was not a single Democrat in Flathead County in any elected office, and Flathead is among the three fastest growing in the state, on the west side, a glitz county, a magnet for immigrants. Maharidge is right.

I worry about what this new conservative, suburban force portends for environmental politics, as opposed to pure partisan politics. Remember, we were counting on the newcomers for some help. So what sort of help might they give? It depends on what one means by environmental politics.

What I mean by environmentalism is the growing understanding that the earth is finite and intricate, that it supports our existence here only to the degree we respect its limits and preserve its intricacy. Pondering this fundamental can quickly bring the conclusion that life will be grim indeed for most of the world’s 6 billion souls if a few go on consuming resources at literally 20 times the rate of the rest.

Suburban America is not about respecting limits.

The rubber-stamped chain malls have begun to ring my city, monuments to the founding fact of suburban existence, which is consumption. The sport utes stream down the valley highway that flees the city to the gridlock of new trophy homes with arched windows craning to steal a vantage of the horizon’s unspoiled peaks. All of this seems to say: “I got mine.”

Where is the recognition of limits here that will bring on the real sacrifices necessary to preserve the very wilderness and wildlife those arching windows want to see?

Of course, there is another view of environmental politics, one evolved from the legitimate fear of poisons, but one that eventually distills that fear to the point it can only be understood with the subject “I.” This explains why so many of those gas-guzzling sport utes can be found parked at the local health food store. The acronym that covers this branch of environmentalism is NIMBY-ism, a belief that a problem is not a problem unless it occurs in my backyard. But it’s okay if the effects of my consumption foul someone else’s. This is the companion sentiment to “I got mine.” I expect to hear a good deal more about it.