8001

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8001
• Author: Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• Title: Proceedings, Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• USFW Year: 1992.
• USFW - Doc Type: Oct. 2-3, 1992.
• Copyright Material: NO

That is especially so because I think the federal govem-
ment will be less and less of a player in the region. Up until
now, the federal government-with our cheerful
acquiescence-has imposed an economy on the region. But
I believe in the force of the federal deficit. And I believe in
the decentralizing trends that are so dramatically visible in
Eastern Europe. More and more, the West will have to
make its own living, rather than yoo-hoo in federal dollars
for nuclear-weapons labs and test sites, BLM and Forest
Service offices, dams, below-cost logging, below-cost
grazing, "free" recreation, and the rest of the welfare
payments we have been collecting for so long that we now
see them as entitlements.
To summarize, I divide the West into three parts. The
urban, settled parts, such as the Denver Front Range,
Phoenix-Tucson, and the Wasatch Front. Those places will
have less and less to do with the West and more and more
will be part of a national or global economy. It is clearest in
the case of Denver, which is building an airport so it can
participate in the national and global economy, but which
will further alienate the city from the "Rocky Mountain
Empire" it once served and led.
Second is the pretty part of the West-the Yellowstone
ecosystem, the Bitterroot Valley, Bozeman and its environs,
much of western Colorado and central Idaho. These places
will be settled by people from cities looking for new lives in
"untouched" lands. The fate of these areas will be suburban.
The areas I am interested in are those that are neither
conventionally pretty ("majestic pines marching down to a
trout-filled lake) nor culturally hospitable to outsiders.
With the decline of federal funds and direction, these areas
will be thrown back on the land for economic and cultural
survival. It is here, I believe, that we are most likely to find
the restoration of land and streams that "instream flow"
means to me.
That does not mean we should give up on the Tucsons,
Aspens, or Jackson Holes. It means that the rural, undevel-
oped areas-thrown on their own by the weakening of the
federal government and federal agencies and ignored by the
people who will suburbanize other parts of the West-have
the best chance of showing us how to restore the land in an
ecologically and economically sustainable way.
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