How the West Won—Nature and Cities, Side by Side

"The big story of the West today is how the urban and the wild have produced a unique lifestyle — a new-century ecosystem. Each depends on the other. And the lands, though badly scarred during the last century, are being restored, showing the power of people to mend places they love," writes Timothy Egan.

"This is not to say there aren’t endangered plants and animals, drought-shriveled grasslands, oil-plundered prairies or entire forests killed by a surfeit of beetles in a climate-changed West. But another narrative is more compelling."

Egan cites the example of Seattle, with a metro area of 3.7 million people, access to three national parks, and, recently, the largest dam-removal project ever. Also cited is the example of Tucson, with access to Saguaro National Park, and Las Vegas, with the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

Then there is this gem of a passage, among many more: "The modern West is the most urbanized part of the United States. About 90 percent of Westerners live in areas defined by the census as urban. Utah, where most people live along the Wasatch Mountain Front, is slightly more urban than New York State, with its empty reaches in the north. Ronald Reagan was probably the last of the costume cowboys to fool Easterners into thinking that everyone who lives here is saddle sore. Sure, Cliven Bundy, the deadbeat rancher with the 19th-century racial views, was a hero to the clueless indoorsmen of Fox News. Everyone else was appalled."