Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed by Jim Stiles (review)

4 4 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 8 lives of everyday people— small farmers, minor actors, plumbers, and clerks. A recurrent theme is growing up, especially in a bicultural context. Hecho en Tejas is an ambitious, diverse, and enjoyable anthology that ful­ fills Gilb’s goal of providing a comprehensive “celebration, a literary pachanga” covering some five hundred years of Texas Mexican writing (xix). Brave New West: Morphing M oah at the Speed of Qreed. By Jim Stiles. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 260 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by James M. Cahalan Indiana University of Pennsylvania A resident of Moab since 1975, Jim Stiles has been Edward Abbey’s closest suecessor there since Abbey died in 1989— on the same day that Stiles’s remarkable alternative newspaper, The Canyon Country Zephyr, first appeared. His great illustrations have continued ever since, in the Zephyr and on the cover of this book. Among the countless “how I met Ed Abbey” stories, his is the best. After he read The Monkey Wrench Gang ( 1975) hot off the press, he leapt into his VW in Kentucky and headed for Wolf Hole, Arizona. The novel’s jacket assured him that Abbey lived there. When he got there, he did not find Abbey— or anyone else. This uninhabited spot north of the Grand Canyon served Abbey as a diversionary tactic, and the name sounded good. In Moab, Stiles finally met Abbey, who had heard about his journey and his drawing of a would-be cracked Glen Canyon “Damn” (later gracing the cover of T heJourney Home [1977]). Hearing that Stiles was following in his footsteps at Arches, Abbey remarked, “Good! We need more radicals in the park service” (48). Stiles eventually had to put up a sign on his own Arches trailer: “This Was Not Edward Abbey’s Trailer” (49). As a federal employee, he sometimes found himself in paradoxical situations: “It still bewilders me how I was ever able to pen a hideously disgusting caricature of the secretary of the interior called ‘The Day All the Birds Crapped on James Watt’ and then provide security to Watt as one of his park service bodyguards during a 1983 visit to Arches” (53). This book would be worth reading just for its entertaining tales of the no-longer-wild-enough West. But its core is a precise, slashing critique of ecotourism . Stiles criticizes the anti-mining environmentalists whom Abbey (and Stiles) used to praise— because times have changed, with ecotourism turning Moab into a boomtown at a more exponential rate than the uranium barons ever triggered. Abbey enjoyed riding a bike near Moab in 1985, but he could not imagine the mountain biking craze of the 1990s that transformed it into the “mountain biking capital of the world.” Hundreds of thousands of bikers have driven to Moab in their gas-guzzling SUVs so they can ride their bikes on the Slickrock Trail, damaging animal habitat and flinging themselves along the trail with their eyes rivetted on the rock beneath their tires rather than the B o o k R e v ie w s 4 4 5 beautiful vistas. Stiles controversially criticizes the well-funded Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUW A) for keeping quiet about ecotourism, a mush­ rooming new form of industrial tourism, so as not to offend other “eco” types. He has been spending more time in Australia’s outback than Abbey ever did. Stiles develops his critique in compelling historical detail— far more than I have space here to describe. He mistakenly writes that Arches was proclaimed a national park in 1929 (31), whereas in fact it was set aside as a national monument in that year and subsequently promoted to national park status in 1969— but that inconsequential error is the only one I found in the entire book. This is a major contribution to western history and environmentalism. Order it for your university library— but be sure to buy your own copy too. You’ll laugh a lot, and you’ll think even...