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PUBLIC AWARENESS IS NOT THE PROBLEM Ed Marston Publisher, High Country News P.O. Box 1090 Paonia, CO 81428 (303) 527-4898 ABSTRACT When natural-resource professionals talk of "public awareness" they usually mean: "It is hard for us to get our message out because the public does not care and is not informed." I disagree. The public very much cares about natural resources, including streams. But the West lacks institutions that can inform them. The land-grant universities no longer carry out their land-bound mission and the state universities are not grounded in the region. The other major public institutions - the Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Reclamation - no longer have the vision, moral credibility or intellectual capability to speak to the public. "Public awareness, therefore, must begin with reform of the West's universities and land-management agencies, or with the creation of substitutes, such as Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute, the Poppers' New Jersey based work on the Great Plains, Marc Reisner's one- person effort on water reform, and some environmental groups. If the West can create credible messengers, media will arise to carry their message. Efforts to protect or improve the environment are like marriage, or undertaking a graduate degree, or perhaps even like running for public office. They are undertaken with great enthusiasm and high hopes, and with total, saving ignorance of what will actually be involved. That is especially true of efforts to keep water flowing in streams and rivers, or to put water back into them. These are unbounded efforts, at least in comparison with efforts to create a national park or a wilderness. To keep water in a stream is to grab an entire tiger by the tail. At first glance, it may seem like nothing more than getting a water right, just as getting married seems, at first glance, like saying, "I do." But ultimately, instream flow is a commitment, not to a few cubic feet per second flowing past a point, but to the health and intactness of the watershed drained by that stream. We environmentalists have gotten into our various efforts involving air and water and natural preserves and healthy rivers by telling ourselves that we were undertaking limited, bounded efforts. I was attracted to the West and to the environmental movement because the problems seemed so much simpler than those of my native New York City. Only gradually have I come to see that the West's environmental problems are every bit as daunting as those that confront New York, or Los Angeles, or Miami. My subject today is "public awareness," which is charac- terized as a tool for implementing instream flow. As a practicing journalist, I guess I'm supposed to tell activists and scientists in the audience how to tell the public about the importance of instream flow. Unfortunately, there is today no way to tell the Western public about instream flow because the West is bereft of mass print or electronic media that can communicate with more than a small fraction of the West's public. For the most part, Western newspapers cover political entities like towns and cities and have no sense of the West beyond their pavement. There is one major exception - the Casper Star-Tribune covers Wyoming from a natural - resource perspective. And the smaller Idaho Falls Post Register does an excellent job on its comer of Idaho. But the only true mass-circulation publication that knows the West exists as a region is the LA Times, and it provides this regional perspective mainly for Southern California readers. Moreover, we have no authoritative message to get out even if we had the media. We are lacking because the institutions that could develop this information and message-the land-grant colleges and universities and the land-management agencies-lack the will, the initiative, the sense of mission, and the credibility to develop the infor- mation and perspective that a Western mass media, if we had it, could deliver. Finally, to make the seeming hopelessness complete, we lack a public-interest movement that could create the climate for change. In place of the wonderful do-gooder, reform organizations that abolished child labor and established minimum standards for sanitation and educa- tion in our nation's cities at the turn of the century, we have the environmental movement. And the environmental movement is still in its early stages. To mature, the West's environmental movement must integrate people and economies into its vision and reject the romantic notion that we are dealing here with a land that must be protected and preserved. The wilderness vision is a workable fiction for some rocks, ice, and desert. But for most of the West, we are dealing with a working landscape. Or to put it more accurately, we are faced with a worked-over landscape that must be put back together. And before it can be put back together, there must be created Stegner's society to match the scenery. Unless we can rejuvenate the society, we will continue on our present 23