Where Buffalo Roam.(land policy in the western United States)(Brief Article)(Column)

Six years ago I set out with my family to discover the American West. Our covered wagon was a Subaru, and we were resettling from Washington, D.C., to Colorado, home of the ragged peaks and boundless skies of the Rocky Mountains. Out here, I found the myth of the Old West to be very much alive--often in the most jarring ways. In their mind's eye, Westerners still imagine themselves as the rough-hewn, self-reliant folk who tamed the land and whose Manifest Destiny is to live and use it as they see fit, the Devil take anyone who says different. Yet in fact they depend utterly on those they profess to hate--the government- -for everything from drinking water to the control of predators.

For those who live on these parched plains and blizzard-swept mountains, this ornery attitude makes perfect sense. With its grandeur and desolation, the land dominates a Westerner's psyche. For the price of a beer in any saloon in the Rockies, you can get an earful about this monumental legacy. I learned as much on my first story as a NEWSWEEK correspondent out West, covering a federal program to capture wolves in Canada and return them to their former habitats in the Lower 48. Environmental groups were gung-ho. But ranchers howled that the Feds were mucking about with their birthright: a West safe for wolf- free cattle ranching. They had been happy enough to take federal money to exterminate the wolves in the first place--but they'd be darned if "the guvmint" could tell them anything else.

Make no mistake. Americans revere this land--and its creatures. We love it so much that we fight over the question "What is it good for, anyway?" Once, near McCall, Idaho, a rancher told me that his spread--a river ran through it--was the perfect place for grazing cattle. A few hundred miles downstream, commercial fishermen groused that the cows were ruining the stream for salmon by muddying up the waters. The rancher, a good-hearted soul with whom I'd shared coffee and home-baked cookies, couldn't understand why anybody else would care about where he grazed his cattle, or how many he raised.

The rancher was staring right into a blind spot in the modern West's otherwise panoramic vistas--a blind spot that seems to be shared by the new Bush administration. Fact is, the West ain't as big as it used to be. Once the frontier was so sprawling and inhospitable that the federal government had to entice people to come: free land for homesteaders and railroads, massive water projects, subsidized grazing, logging and mining concessions. Those policies succeeded too well. We've long since bounced off the California coast and are rapidly filling the country's arid innards with strip malls, golf courses and 35-acre ...