New West Microcosm #2 - a fundamental divide

I am proposing with these "microcosm" posts that the Torrey-Teasdale Fremont River valley is a microcosm of the divide between the Old West and the New West. The area is a microcosm for the economic strain between the Old West and New.  It is also a microcosm of the whole country ideologically and politically. There are elements in tiny Wayne County of the pervasive and archaic practices of the extraction industry versus the modern information economy and of the non-economic political divide between Trump followers and progressives. The polarization in the county around the proposed gravel pit brings the divide into stark relief.

SITLA land in Wayne County

One would be forgiven for assuming the question of the gravel pit proposed by Wayne County commissioners for the front porch of residential Teasdale in Wayne County was one of economics. Again, its a microcosm example of the greater strife in the entire nation. Matthew Yglesias at Vox argued recently that Trump supporters are not primarily motivated by an "economic anxiety" as is commonly assumed. Instead Yglesias suggests they harbor a racial resentment and are understandably upset about their declining white privilege. Just as Trump people face that the social and cultural clout of nonwhite people has grown in the United States, locals in Wayne County are facing changes in their custom and culture of living off the land by extraction (mining, logging, irrigating, damming and draining streams, and grazing, grazing, grazing).  Locals' values are being challenged by the clout of move-ins who value the land for its natural, intact, spiritual and wild beauty. The fundamental divide over values and cultural identity is surprisingly deep and wide, like the canyons in this country. The argument over the gravel pit is a case in point and is not a simple matter of economics. Economically, locals are often their own worst enemy. An intractable sense of "way of life" and "custom and culture" gets in their way.

The Wayne County move-ins tend to have urban, cosmopolitan backgrounds and worldviews. They are often highly educated and progressive politically. They prize diversity, tolerance, pluralism, and most of all, here high on the relatively intact Colorado Plateau, environmental protection and conservation. Locals, on the other hand, tend to divide the world into us vs. them and are intolerant of anything perceived as a threat to their existing lifestyle. As the conflict over the proposed gravel pit in our front yard reveals, there is a bitter, acrimonious divide characterized by fundamental and irreconcilable difference in worldview between the average local and the average move-in. Much the same as for the average Republican and Democrat today. Wayne County is a microcosm of the political divide in the West and in the nation.

In upcoming posts I want to create a vision for a win-win approach to protecting the National Park gateway community of Torrey-Teasdale. What to do with the SITLA land? What are possibilities for annexation? Of improving and growing the tax base? Of utilizing the airport? The scenery? Our dark skies? Of getting two of three county commissioners to have a more progressive point of view?

And what to do about the fundamental divide?