The American West Won’t Disappear Under Our Watch

I’m the first to endorse selfishness, but there’s a difference between good selfish and bad selfish. Good selfish is nabbing the fattest piece of pie. Bad selfish is paving over other species’ habitats for low-density housing. Good selfish is polishing off the last of the wine. Bad selfish is sacrificing open space for another strip mall. You get the gist. Good selfishness feeds the soul. Bad selfishness erodes the American West.

Now brace yourself for a statistic The Disappearing West came out with that’s more startling than Borat’s mankini: every 2.5 minutes, the American West loses a football field worth of natural area to human development. Excuse me while I go cry a little. 

But while Western man's too darn energetic in the development arena, what we must realize is that's not necessarily terrible. Our energy is valuable. It just needs to be redirected. Let's maybe stop channeling our inner beavers for a while. Instead, say hi to your sloth-self. Let the land be. 

The Disappearing West (spearheaded by the Center for American Progress and the Conservation Science Partners) looked into just how damaging our road construction, energy infrastructure, agriculture and timber operations, and urban sprawl have been thus far. Everybody and their grandma knows the verdict isn’t going to be all rosy, but here’s the numeric lowdown: between 2001 and 2011, approximately 2,300 square miles (that’s roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park) of natural areas disappeared across Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Shut the front door, right? And the shocks just keep coming: Wyoming — Wyoming! — lost the highest percentage of land to human development, primarily for energy extraction. Hard to believe when nine out of ten photos I send home are of pastures upon mountains upon cows upon horses, but hey, the scientists don’t lie. The analysis is real. Their datasets tell stories of change, and though I’m not usually one for charts, theirs had me gripped.

But you want to know what has wiped out more than half the natural land region-wide? Urban sprawl and commercial developments. Arizona takes home the prize this time with a 30% increase in land lost to urban sprawl. As contributors to land loss, energy infrastructure and road developments are second and third. Sure, newsflash, everything is rapidly disappearing, but that’s not the mentality we’re looking for. What we want is to recognize things are heading a little south, and stop the trend. This we can do. 

The worst part is that wildlife's currently having to pay the price. As per The Disappearing West’s analysis, “a bear walking a random path through natural areas in the West is an average of only 3.5 miles from significant human development.” Locals of the eleven states in question may think, “Dayyyuum, nature's so crazy out west bears are even hanging in my ‘hood,” but they’re there because tract housing has hijacked their open space.  

RELATED: 1 of 2 Remaining Coal Export Terminals on West Coast Denied

In the grand scheme of things, you may see the fact that human development in the West now covers 165,000 square miles of land (the equivalent of about 6 million superstore parking lots) as but a pimple on an elephant’s arse, but our patterns of development are steadily carving away at natural landscapes. In California, upwards of 300 plant and animal species near extinction. Clean water’s suffering too. All of this we can amend. 

Thanks to generations of impassioned citizens’ conservation efforts, the West still houses some of the most wondrous mountain ranges. The only issue is that the protections national parks and conservation easements enjoy are not the rule; they’re the exception. 

Time has not run out to protect what is left, but it is of the essence, and while we may be having a hard time figuring out who should use which restroom, we know how to stop further fragmentation. How? Private landowners can safeguard remaining natural areas through conservation easements and wise agricultural practices; cities can minimize their footprint by building up, not out, and by designing with nature, not against; governments can establish permanent funding streams for protecting open spaces, and land management agencies can guide logging, transportation, and mining to places with the least conflicts. Some would also argue to stop having babies. I’ll let you make the call on that one.