hat a century ago the Bitterroot Valley lay at the Rocky Mountain heart of a great, biologically diverse and rich continent.The IncredibleShrinking WestFor most of the past two centuries the West has been growing smaller before our eyes. Since the process gained its foothold literally 400 years ago when the first Spanish colonies were planted along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, the human inhabitants of the American West have been dismantling and simplifying the place piece by piece. Beginning 125 years ago, with the preservation of Yellowstone and Yosemite parks, and at an accelerated pace since the creation of the Wilderness Preservation System in 1964, the visionaries of our culture have checked the dismantling process by attempting to preserve some select pieces as vignettes of what we think the West once was.Parks and wilderness systems in two ways resemble great literature, art and music. While striving for high expression they rarely obtain it; nonetheless, they serve as cultural landmarks, tangible expressions of something good and noble in the human spirit. Writer Wallace Stegner thought of the West's wildlands as a kind of "geography of hope." In his late years, Stegner concluded that they were being assailed too rapidly, on too many fronts. His hope was that the West's great deficiency, its relative aridity and finite water sources, would ultimately serve to slow the assault and place limits on Western growth.Restoring the West was not a topic to which Stegner devoted much attention. But many of our conservation visionaries, who originally thought in terms of making Western resources a commons to be shared and managed by the federal planners, have turned their attention more recently to the theme of restoring the West.The idea of restoration is as old as the first great book of American conservation history, George Perkins Marsh's 1864 Man and Nature, wherein Marsh urged that mankind become a co-worker with nature in ...
