WHO’S WINNING THE WEST?
By Steve Hendricks
The New Yorker, December 13 , 1999

Nicholas Lemann, in “No People Allowed” (Our Far-Flung Correspondents, November 22nd), implies that the environmental activist Kierán Suckling is on the margin of sanity because he wants to end logging, grazing, and suburban development in the desert Southwest no matter the thousands of jobs it will cost. To the extent that Lemann gets away with painting Suckling as an extremist, it is because he omits the extreme problems motivating Suckling. To wit: The U.S. Forest Service, an agency that until recently had never seen a clear-cut it did not like, not only allows but encourages the destruction of public land by heavily subsidizing slash-and-run operations, letting marketeers make off with the profits, and sticking taxpayers with the environmental cleanup. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management manages ranch lands in a similar fashion. As for suburban development, better known as sprawl, all manner of government subsidies, from cheap roads to home-mortgage deductions, enable city fleers to chew up thrice the land per capita used by urbanites and to drive four-ton, polluting suburban assault vehicles while leaving to city dwellers, who are generally poorer, a disproportionately high share of taxes, smog, and traffic, and greatly reduced open space. Lemann calls Suckling “radical,” but the word better describes the reaction of anti-government loggers, ranchers, or soccer dads to suggestions that they pay anything close to market rate for the land and infrastructure on which they depend.

Stephen Hendricks
Helena, Montana

© 2009–2010 Steve Hendricks