Lasso the Wind by Timothy Egan Narking the Sparrow's Fall by Wallace Stegner edited by Page Stegner
Anderson, Chris
AN ARID LAND Lasso the Wind Away to the New West Timothy Egan Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 266 pp. Marking the Sparrow 's Fall Wallace Stegner's American West Wallace Stegner edited and with a...
...What defines the West is "the test of aridity," a test that we are always failing...
...Even the vast public lands of the West are now overgrazed and overcut...
...The mines are mined, the forests felled, and the only people who can afford to live on a ranch are stand-up comedians and Hollywood directors...
...Chris Anderson In Lasso the Wind, Timothy Egan chronicles his journey through the "New West" of hot tubs and espresso bars...
...Egan sees some signs of hope in his tour of eleven Western states...
...Wolves are howling again in Yellowstone, the Nez Perce have been welcomed back to the Wallowas...
...What Egan calls the "narrative" of the West hasn't been changed but fulfilled...
...People are everywhere and in trouble wherever they are," he wrote, largely because huge numbers of us insist on living in a desert that can only sustain a few, sucking up all the available water and then rerouting it from elsewhere 25...
...Marking the Sparrow 's Fall Wallace Stegner's American West Wallace Stegner edited and with a preface by Page Stegner Henry Holt $25, 359 pp...
...But occasional ecological victories pale beside a Las Vegas or a Phoenix growing out of control on the desert floor...
...If the reactionaries have withdrawn to the woods, if there are more computer chips than cow chips in the West, if 86 percent of Westerners now live in cities, it's because the habits of the past have played themselves out...
...What's discouraging, though, is how little has really changed since the '40s and '50s when the late Wallace Stegner began writing the essays that his son Page has collected in Marking the Sparrow's Fall...
...Stegner announced the problem years ago in his wonderfully dignified prose...
...For generations, the story of the West has been the story of exploitation and extraction...
...Whether by cattle or by soccer moms, the land has been steadily consumed ever since we got here...
Vol. 126 • February 1999 • No. 3
