Under siege, the West's public lands vanish or become fragmented
Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America
By Stephen Trimble
University of California, 319 pp., illustrated, $29.95
"Bargaining for Eden" is a book that starts slow, as it reports on a story so familiar to even a casual student of the exploitation of the West's once-bountiful and vibrant natural resources that there's not a lot of suspense in the telling. Self-made millionaire Earl Holding, in Utah, very much a product of his Mormon heritage, set out to develop a hidden little valley, high in the pastoral glacier-carved cirques of the Wasatch Range, known as Snowbasin.
It is country with which I am familiar, having had the good fortune to explore it, as a young man attending college in northern Utah, for the primary purpose of skiing. It is country I have not been able to return to, unwilling to witness any longer the diminishment, the eradication of character. For this reason, perhaps, I read the section on Holding with the self-preservation of detachment - somewhat in the manner of the avid sports fan who merely skims the next day's newspaper with its box scores enumerating drily the consequences, the logistics, of an exceptional loss.
The doggedness with which Holding pursues his goal - spanning parts of three decades - of constructing a massive ski resort where once only a few locals skied is neither a new story nor, to my thinking, an admirable one; it reveals simply the unimaginative relentlessness of the commercial mind.
Trimble, to his credit, takes pains not to caricature Holding as mindlessly greedy, and seems instead to do a good job of portraying him as a man interested in quality - though the portrait feels a bit flat due to the fact that Holding refused to ever meet with Trimble, leaving Trimble to compose his profile from afar, and from secondhand testimonies. (About that keen commitment to quality: There is one particularly troubling description of Holding's inspection and choice of "each of the fifty-thousand-pound blocks of Bethel White granite that would sheathe Grand America" - the hotel he built in Salt Lake City - "and shipped the lot of them to his favorite stonecutters in Spain. Earl favored the Vermont source, in part, for its proximity to Joseph Smith's [founder of the Mormon church] birthplace; the [Mormon] Church also favors Bethel White for its new temples. The dressed granite slabs returned by boat via the Panama Canal to Los Angeles, from where they were trucked to Salt Lake City - along with cherrywood furniture from France, crystal and bronze chandeliers from Austria and Italy, English wool carpeting, and marble from France, Italy, and Portugal."
Not new either is the chronicling of Holding's buttonholing of Forest Service officials and the US Congress, and of the not-so-clever machinations to link the further development (by using public land) of Snowbasin with Salt Lake City's securing of the bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics. It's just business, after all - not literature, and not really an unexpected or illuminating cant upon human nature.
Far more interesting and appealing to me, then, is the second half of the book, which comes as a welcome change in direction, moving from the gone-by, after-the-fact abstract to the in-the-moment personal and specific.
Trimble's second narrative involves his and his wife's purchase of land in the desert of southern Utah, as a second home. The 47 acres they fell in love with were more than they could afford, but by agreeing to sell part of them - technically, subdividing them - they could finance their dream. "The parallels and the ironies" of this transaction, Trimble writes, "taught me to see the Snowbasin story in a new light." Suddenly, Trimble finds himself - like Holding - paying attention to minute details and desiring quality. He also chronicles with successful detail and accuracy the social learning curve for newcomers to small rural communities in the West, particularly for activists who wish to become involved in civic activities. In one instance - proposing protection and long-term planning for public lands in the area - Trimble makes an understandable mistake of trying to accomplish too much too fast without enough local involvement. Through it all, he remains clear-eyed about the ironies, complications, and paradoxes of his situation. "I would be happy to slow the very development I've just accelerated," he writes, and "We are acutely aware of just how privileged we are." This second part of the book is also more instructive to the issue - "the fight," in Trimble's words, "for the last open spaces in America." I would prefer the dry tale of Holding's power play, at more than 200 pages, to be half as long as it is, while the author's moral dilemmas and real-world adjustments could easily be twice their 50-page length.
The book concludes with a credo by the author, a two-page summation of Trimble's values just past century's turn, which, like his travails in southern Utah, are interesting, intelligent, and well voiced; but again, I think they would be stronger with less of the asymmetry that precedes them.
Whether buttressed by the description of Holding's development of an entire valley high in the snowy mountains of Utah or of Trimble's own modest home, "Bargaining for Eden" convincingly asserts that the protection of the wildest country on our public lands is necessary to preserve that quality of America so famously described by the great Wallace Stegner as "the geography of hope." The case Trimble makes is well illustrated, and also troubling testimony to the speed with which a birthright is now slipping away.
