AMERICAN SCENE: The Great Wild Californicated West

If votes were cast with feet and tallies read off odometers, the West would win the U.S. popularity contest in a landslide. The 1970 census figures show that the population of mountain and Pacific states has increased by 24.1 % since 1960. v. an increase on the other side of the Great Divide of only 11%. Horace Greeley’s advice, “Go West, young man,” is still being heeded by young and old alike, in spite of the fact that the “frontier” is now posted at intervals with taco and fried-chicken stands. Ecologists point out that the very nature of the West—little water and enormous stretches of arid soil—makes it impossible to support the continued migration. Legislators, scientists and citizens are now openly concerned about the threat of “Californication”—the haphazard, mindless development that has already gobbled up most of Southern California. TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton recently spent two weeks traveling throughout the West, taking the measure of Californication and the attempts being made to stop it. Her report:

IN a starkly beautiful New Mexico setting, a billboard catches the eye: UNDEVELOP! Undevelop? Out here in the middle of a desert where freeways lead only to mesas and mirages? Out here on the range where the skies are not smoggy all day? Minutes later, however, the message of the half-whimsical New Mexico Undevelopment Commission begins to make sense as the car whizzes past a transformer station. Utility poles grow stouter and taller, then pick up extra arms to hold more wires. The highway takes on another lane. Exit ramps and gas-station signs run closer together. The road cuts through the backyards of a hundred tract homes, passes the parking lots of the satellite shopping centers and suddenly rises above the city—affording a view of Albuquerque’s ugly urban sprawl. The city’s future and that of much of the rest of the once-wild West is written large upon a developer’s billboard dead ahead: TOMORROW FOR SALE, 36 MILES.

THEN TURN LEFT.

Even those still separated from their nearest neighbor by hectares of sage and pine are beginning to band together under the big skies to practice thinking small and muster the strength to resist or redirect the inevitable population growth. The old cowboys’ plaint, “Don’t fence me in,” is fast giving way to the environmentalists’ plea, “Please fence them out.” Conservation groups fantasy building one-way overpasses straight through to Canada to keep Californians out of Oregon, or constructing an adobe wall around New Mexico to keep the Texans from straying in, and worse, staying.

The concern over Californication has led to a reverse sell. After decades of come-hither promotion. Westerners are beginning to unsell their own states. Seattle Attorney Irving Clark Jr. passes through lunch-hour crowds flashing his THINK SMALL, LESSER SEATTLE

button. Oregon’s spoofing James G. Elaine Society* says of its own “Magnet” state: “You can always tell when it’s summer in Oregon—the rain gets warm.” Oregon Governor Tom McCall is even more hard-nosed. “The concept of earlier decades was population growth at all costs,” says McCall. “Well, that cost is now proving too much to pay, and we want none of that in Oregon.” McCall started to tell tourists two years ago, “Come visit us, but for heaven’s sake don’t come here to live.” Now he adds, “Soon we’re probably going to have to say ‘Don’t even visit.’ “

Colorado is also feeling the pinch of oversell. Through deliberate policy, Boulder has preserved the towering “flatiron” slabs to the west that give the city its name, but in all other directions it is bubbling over. Members of a Zero Population Growth chapter in Boulder, which once gloried in the title “Nicest Small Town in the U.S.,” recently proposed a charter amendment that would set a ceiling of 100,000 on the population (current pop. 72,000). Though the amendment was voted down, concern is spreading. Denver now has more cars per capita than Los Angeles, and many Denverites are looking forward with dread to the 1976 Winter Olympics. A proposal to withhold state funds for the Games will appear on the ballot in November. Says Colorado Democratic

Representative Richard Lamm: “We are beginning to overcome a whole heritage of mindless Chamber of Commerce promotionalism.”

The scare has even spread to Montana, which has grown only 2.9% in the past ten years. The signs are still friendly here: WELCOME TO BOZEMAN —15,000 FRIENDLY PEOPLE AND A FEW

SOREHEADS. But some already see the schlock over the horizon. One group of property owners is now suing former TV Newscaster Chet Huntley’s Big Sky of Montana, Inc., two federal agencies and a railroad to block a land exchange that they claim will allow private homes to be built on public forest land.

Entry Fees. Environmentalists have managed to turn one of the West’s chronic disadvantages, lack of water, into a means of fighting the developers. New Mexicans are now pushing for legislation that would give them the legal wrench necessary to tighten the faucet on their scarce water supply, thereby limiting expansion. Think-tank experts envision even more extreme solutions. Rand Corp. Demographer Peter Morrison believes that the Federal Government may have to adopt population-distribution policies; if not, localities may resort to residency permits and migrant entry fees to prevent being “loved to death.”

While the experts ponder, the current dilemma remains and can be read on the backs of the ever-multiplying automobiles that choke Western city streets. The license plates still brag about BIG SKY COUNTRY and LAND OF

ENCHANTMENT, but the bumper stickers inches away now plead SAVE THIS ENVIRONMENT—KEEP OUT or DON’T CALIFORNICATE COLORADO. The odds are good, of course, that the stickers were applied by people who recently immigrated themselves. As Brant Calkin, a Santa Fe Sierra Club official observes: “Everybody wants to be the last son of a bitch to move in.”

*The James G. Elaine Society’s sole purpose is to keep outsiders out of Oregon. Besides advertising the rain, it publicizes Portland’s high crime rate, cases of tick paralysis and an occasional quicksand alert. It chose its name because of its “antique flavor” rather than for any attributes of Blaine himself (1830-1893), a Republican Speaker of the House, Senator, presidential nominee and twice Secretary of State.