"Hope and Gloom Out West"

Patricia Nelson Limerick writes the first in a series of guest editorials in the New York Times today on what I'm guessing is the nature of the Intermountain West. Good stuff - she came over to Moab a few years ago to present at a planning conference with Terry Tempest Williams here, and few are better at communicating the underlying character of the conflicts of the west:

...we live in an era in which we are told daily, if not hourly, about the intense and draining polarization of our political world, and the West has its own well-developed version. Environmental conflicts - energy production and consumption, water allocation, wildfire management, land-use planning, growth control - provide fine battlegrounds for the display of the rattier aspects of human nature....Could anyone have created better conditions for the production and proliferation of conflict, tension, bitterness, litigation and reciprocal demonization?

But now, as many of the various contenders look back at years of energy-draining contention, many of them yearn for a better code of conduct among opponents, a more productive manner of dealing with conflict and a more effective way to distinguish substance from noise in these under-refereed debates.

And with that yearning, hope returns home.