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Vail, Colorado, is an environmental disaster.At least, that is how many people see it today. An overgrown corporate megaresort, it has turned a scenic alpine glen into an ugly jumble of towers and condominium blocks, crowding the valley floor and clawing up the slopes on either side. It has metastasized westward down the Eagle River, spawning several more urban tumors, cluttering once-glorious expanses of ranchland with golf courses, gated subdivisions, box stores, and trailer parks. It now sprawls more than twenty miles from end to end—nearly forty if you count the growth still farther down valley, around Gypsum and Eagle—and stretching longer each year; a giant waste of scenery, energy, water, and habitat. And along the interstate highway that forms its spine, traffic roars incessantly, dirtying the air, shattering the mountain quiet, exacting a murderous toll on wildlife, and clogging rivers with sandy, oily runoff. Vail is, in the words of one recent documentary,“the epitome of mountain development run amok.”1 But there was a time, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when many saw Vail as just the opposite: an environmental ideal. Attractively designed, Vail kept development to a human scale and complemented the high country’s alpine beauty. Carefully planned, Vail integrated transportation and recreation, efficiently accommodating masses of vacationers in a compact space.As a full-service resort amidst one of America’s most scenic landscapes,Vail made it easy for people to escape the city and get back to nature. And as a highly profitable enterprise in the “clean” industry of recreation, Vail showed that there was economic value to outdoor beauty, creating an incentive for Coloradans to take better care of their mountain landscapes. Far from reviling Vail, many people thought the best thing that could happen to the mountains would be to have more places just like it. Stand by Your Brand Vail, Colorado, and the Consumer Roots of Popular Environmentalism w i l l i a M p h i l p o T T [ 225 ] [ 226 ] c i T i e s a n d n aT u r e Some might wonder,“What were they thinking?” But if we posit that these people were sincere in idealizing Vail this way, we open a new window on popular environmental thought after World War II. In particular, Vail’s experience focuses our attention on a powerful but largely unnoticed influence on Americans’ environmental thinking: the business practice, increasingly pervasive in the postwar era, of packaging and marketing places.2 Vail’s case shows how promoters made places: how they constructed settings to attract and accommodate consumers, and how they encouraged consumers to envision and enjoy these settings in certain ways. Vail also demonstrates how, when consumers bought into the qualities of place that tourist promoters sold them, it could kindle in them a fierce desire to guard those qualities against perceived threats. In short, what began as a product could become a popular environmental cause. Vail’s creation story has become a big part of the resort’s mystique.3 It begins in the 1950s, when a local man named Earl Eaton “discovered” a sprawling mountain just west of Vail Pass, recognized it as prime ski terrain, and revealed it to Pete Seibert , the manager of the ski area where Eaton worked. Seibert, a former ski racer and veteran of the army’s famed Tenth Mountain Division, then hatched the“vision”(as the creation story always calls it) that became Vail. He got Forest Service permission to develop the mountain for skiing, and with help from well-connected Denver friends, he bought the ranchland at the mountain’s base and recruited more investors to finance the building of a full-scale resort village there. Vail, he and his partners named it, not just because it was the name of the nearby pass, but because they thought it crisp and catchy. In other words,Vail, more than a place name, was a brand name, the land’s very labeling chosen with marketing in mind.4 Seibert’s investment pitch stressed Vail’s “natural competitive advantages”: its dazzling snow conditions and ski terrain, and its readily accessible location, right on U.S. Highway 6, a direct link to Denver and the recently designated route of future Interstate 70.5 The creation story tells how a whole new town appeared almost magically,in this quiet Rocky Mountain valley where only a sawmill, sheep pasture, and lonely twolane road had once...

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