Salt Lake City writer and photographer Stephen Trimble has published more than 20 books on Western wildlands and native peoples including: Bargaining for Eden: the Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America; Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography; and The People: Indians of the American Southwest.  His website is www.stephentrimble.net

This essay was adapted from one originally written for Portland Magazine.

Excerpt:

… New professions, new skills supersede Old Western wisdoms. Men and
women no longer need to know where to cut a ditch to bring runoff to alfalfa
fields, when it’s worth following a vein of ore into a mountain, or how to fell a
200-foot western red cedar. Now, it’s more important to have a flair for cooking perfect omelets at the SkyRidge Bed and Breakfast. Or a knack for teaching freshly retired baby boomers to fly-fish the Rogue River. Or a gift for pairing ranchette properties with the dreams of refugees from the San Fernando Valley.

The professionals around the log table at that bed-and-breakfast wear
cell phones in their holsters. They ride sport-utility vehicles with bumper
stickers that say New York, Paris, Aspen, Moab. The regional economy
depends more on the Dow Jones average than on the price for beef calves at
the autumn auction in the county seat.

Newcomers start here, on their first giddy encounter with the West. Later,
they may come to understand the deeper souls of these places. They may even
learn enough to move comfortably to the dry plains of eastern Montana or
the moonscape Dakota badlands, to sagebrush valleys in Nevada filled with
silence, or to slickrock alcoves of Zen simplicity on the Colorado Plateau.
When they reach these rural corners of the West, they encounter places
that skipped the twentieth century, where the twenty-first century overlays
the nineteenth century. In the language of geologists, the New West lies
unconformably over bedrock—the mythic Old West and the arid land itself.
The New blankets the Old—with a gap, a disruption of continuity.
This is the future, where dissonant, unconforming western identities
begin to blur and blend, where New Westerners energized by espresso join
with ranchers and Indian people to create new stories—twenty-first-century
stories. And where everyone learns that they depend, ultimately, on spring
snowpack in the local watershed.

Change has become our political mantra. In the West, change is more
than a slogan. Drought tempers our dreams of booming growth. We can no
longer take the land for granted. As the climate warms, as forests move up
mountainsides, alpine ecosystems and species move with them—pushed off
the summits, with nowhere to go.