Remedies for a New West ─ Healing Landscapes, Histories, and Cultures

This wide-ranging collection of essays is intended to provoke both thought and action. The pieces collected here explore a variety of issues facing the American West?disappearing Native American languages, deteriorating air quality, suburban sprawl, species loss, grassland degradation, and many others?and suggest steps toward ?healing.” More than ?dealing with” or ?solving,” according to the editors, healing addresses not just symptoms but their underlying causes, offering not just a temporary cure but a permanent one.

The signs of illness and trauma can seem omnipresent in today’s West: land and soil disrupted from mining, overgrazing, logging, and farming; wildlife habitat reduced and fragmented; native societies disturbed and threatened; open space diminished by cities and suburbs; wilderness destroyed by roads and recreation-seekers. But as these essays suggest, the ?treatment program” for healing the West has many healthful side effects. Engaging in the kinds of projects suggested by contributors is therapeutic not only for the environment but for participants as well. Restoration, repair, and recovery can counter symptoms of despair with concentrated doses of promise and possibility.

The more ?lesions” the West has, this book suggests, the more opportunities there are for westerners to revive and ultimately cure the ailing patient they have helped to create. The very idea of restoring the West to health, contributors and editors contend, unleashes our imaginations, sharpens our minds, and gives meaning to the ways we choose to live our lives. At the same time, acknowledging the profound difficulties of the work that lies ahead immunizes us against our own arrogance as we set about the task of healing the West.

Patricia Nelson Limerick is the faculty director and board chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a professor of history. She is the author of The Legacy of Conquest, and many of her most notable articles, including “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose,” were collected in 2000 under the title Something in the Soil. Andrew Cowell is an associate professor in the Linguistics, French, and Italian departments at the University of Colorado, where he specializes in linguistic anthropology and anthropological approaches to literature and verbal performance. His work in French and Italian focuses on medieval literature and society, and he has just completed a book entitled The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred. Sharon K. Collinge is an associate professor of biology and environmental studies in the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado. She is a conservation biologist and restoration ecologist whose research focuses on understanding the ecological consequences of human-induced changes to natural systems.