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After a long weekend at the annual Headwaters Conference in Gunnison, where the beer and the misanthrope roam, I returned with a few observations:
· Cowboy poets have saved poetry, as a medium of popular culture, from the stifling embrace of the academy.
To wit, the serious poets of this great Republic are generally Poets in Residence at universities, and they write to impress each other with obscure metaphors, convoluted metric schemes and profound insights into the human psyche.
Cowboy poetry is the stuff my college teachers taught us to disdain: rhymed metrical doggerel about daily life, laden with sentiment and humor.
It also happens to be the kind of poetry that Americans loved a century ago, when poetry was a popular art, rather than an academic discipline.
· Anecdotal evidence suggests that the best tools of economic development for depressed rural communities are flower beds and house paint. As soon as the people who live in a town are willing to invest some sweat and money in it, then so are other people.
However, no one has figured out a way to control the rate of influx of People of Money (we were on a campus, after all, and that's the best I could do for a politically-correct locution for Californicators, LaLas, etc.).
You need some inflow, but you don't want to be
overwhelmed and thereby lose important things like sense
of community,
hanging out
and affordable
housing.
· Everybody wants a sustainable
rural
economy and nobody wants stagnation. But nobody was able to
tell me the difference between sustainable
and
stagnant.
· Ranchers and environmentalists in the Gunnison Country just worked out a new management plan for public-land grazing. Ranchers realized they are no longer the ones with an abiding interest in public-land management, and environmentalists and recreationalists decided that a few cow chips are better than chip-board condos.
Both sides have also been declared anathema and excommunicated by their national lobbies. This apparently means that neither the Sierra Club nor the National Beef Council wants us to learn to live together out here; instead, they want us to fight with our neighbors. Divide and conquer, maybe?
It was also instructive to hear the Nature Conservancy
and the National Wildlife Federation described as
multinational corporations.
· When we heard from Ken Frost of the Ute Nation, I expected a passionate denunciation of the treaty-breaking genocidal white eyes.
Instead, he said words to the effect of You won the
war. The mountains, plateaus and valleys that were once our
home are your responsibility now. We hope you fulfill that
responsibility.
That's a far more disturbing and challenging statement than any dozen recitations of the inequities of the Brunot Treaty, and I wish he'd stuck to the usual stuff.
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