New West Microcosm

Serving the world

Shauna Sudbury is the recent owner of Castle Rock Coffee in Torrey. Shauna is a "move-in," like Kirsten and me, and we like to go to her place for breakfast to say hi, grab a baked good, a couple of egg sandwiches and lattes--Kirsten always gets an extra dark roast coffee to top off the already large lattes--and sit out front with a view of Torrey and Boulder Mountain. Castle Rock sits at the junction of two of the most scenic highways in the world and in the summer the locals are outnumbered here by the tourists. As we ate a loud group of eight Harleys pulled up, many with a couple on board. As the painful roar subsided and the helmets came off German floated our way. A Boss 5.0 Mustang pulled up with the top down. Again German. In a few moments a BMW motorcycle with a sidecar pulled up. This time Italian.

The Europeans know what is here and come from around the globe to enjoy it. Perhaps they know it better than the locals. I mentioned us move-ins. In Wayne County there are move-ins and there are locals and between the two there is a deep divide.

The gravel pit I mentioned in the previous blog remains in Wayne County Commissioners plans in spite of fierce opposition and a backed up chain of lawsuits. To my mind, like all the move-ins, a gravel pit in our Torrey-Teasdale front yard is a bizarre and intensely unwelcome offense. That we take offense in turn deeply offends the locals. Gravel pits, and extractive industry in general they say, is their way of life, their custom, their culture.

The world does not come to gateway communities like ours to suffer gravel pits.

When I built my home in Torrey in 1999 I was concerned that I would be the leading edge of a flood of baby boomers like me doing and seeking the same thing. I figured that if too many moved in I would have to sell and go find another quieter place. Fortunately too many did not move in because I have grown deeply in love with this place. And now I am changing my tune about welcoming more move-ins. I can see we need more move-ins to protect the place from itself. And I have a vision for what this valley could be that would be a very good thing.

I see Torrey-Teasdale as a microcosm of the New West and the win-win way of what it could be.

More about that in upcoming posts.

NIMBY, better yet, nowhere

Red Rock gateway or "Gravel Pit Point?"

At the Bicknell Bottoms in Wayne County, southbound Utah Highway 24 turns west and passes through the Red Gate of the red rock Velvet Cliffs on the north and a toe of Boulder Mountain on the south. Here it enters the gorgeous Fremont River valley and the gateway communities to Capitol Reef National Park. I was at a gathering of friends and neighbors to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of the good man who built my home in the valley in Torrey. John came down from the city in the late 90's to build my home, fell in love with the surroundings, and never left.

It was there, talking about John and why he loved this place, and why we did too, that I learned that Wayne County is proposing to rezone nearby undisturbed land to allow the building of a gravel pit. Extractive industry like this is a good example of Old West thinking that is having a hard time going away. In the Old West the land was seen for the taking. Plunder and prosper. Mining, logging, grazing, drilling, road building, damming and stream draining, all were viewed as improvement and progress. In the New West we have learned, or are beginning to learn, that the land is often more valuable when left in its natural state. By value in this case I am speaking of economics. But there are other ethical and cultural values that are part of the New West way of seeing and being.

I changed my voting district years ago to go with my property in rural Wayne County primarily in order to vote against Mike Noel, a powerful political paragon of the Old West in Utah. If I told Mike I was against building a gravel pit in this gorgeous gateway valley he would ask me how I got here. Did I drive on a road? Where did I think the road came from? Mike talks in disingenuous ways like that but he is right, I drive here on a road. But does that mean we need another gravel pit, and a gravel pit in a paradise like this? When I point out to Noel that today in Utah all of agriculture, natural resources and mining, including oil and gas, add up to less than four percent of Utah's economy he simply denies the facts. He says something like, "Everybody has to eat." He is right, we all eat, but he is wrong on the state of the State. Extraction is a very small part of the modern economy. The woman on the bike in the tourist photo above is looking almost directly at where the gravel pit would be. She is very likely from somewhere in the other 96% of the economy that live and work and play in Utah because it is beautiful and she is not here to gaze at the destruction of extraction.

When I object to opening a nearby gravel pit am I just pushing the problem elsewhere by insisting "not in my backyard?" I don't think so. In economics there is a useful concept called comparative advantage. In this case it would say there are some places that are better for gravel pits and some places that are better as gateway communities to National Parks and that when each place is put to its highest use, and not to every possible use, the world is a better place. But the concept still assumes a gravel pit needs to be dug somewhere. But does it? Aren't there enough gravel pits? Are there better substitutes from existing resources, like the scrapings that come from existing road resurfacing? Building a gravel pit in the Fremont River Valley is a good Old West example of a private party, in this case a construction company and the politicians like Noel it supports, benefiting at the public's expense. It is a special interest wins, we lose proposition. A new gravel pit does not need to be here and in fact it does not need to be anywhere.