In West, Conservatives Emphasize the 'Conserve'

There has been widespread change, too, in state attitudes toward the Clinton-era roadless rule, a broad land-protection measure that put nearly a third of the national forests off-limits to most development. The 2001 rule, which was overturned by the Bush administration but reinstated by a federal judge in September, initially had almost no public support from state fish and game agencies or from Western governors.

Now, fish and game agencies in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Montana all support protecting the forests from roads, as do the governors of those states.

Even in Idaho, probably the most conservative and solidly Republican Western state, the Fish and Game Department advocates keeping wild areas roadless, and Gov. James E. Risch (R) said he intends to manage 8.5 million acres of the state's roadless forests in a way that is consistent with the conservation spirit of the Clinton rule.

"Idahoans care about how these roadless areas are managed," Risch told a panel in Washington, D.C., this week. "These are places where they hunt, fish and hike."

Like many politicians across the West, Risch is responding to changing public attitudes, said Rick Johnson, executive director of the Idaho Conservation League.

"It used to be that the West was big enough that you could pretty much do anything you wanted," Johnson said. He lives in Boise, the largest city in Idaho, a state outpaced in growth by only Nevada and Arizona. "The natural surroundings are now being lost, and we sit in traffic like everyone else. We want to protect what's left," he said. "We just don't like Washington, D.C., telling us how to do it."

While it remains the most rural part of the country in terms of land use, the West has also become the most densely urban in terms of where people live. Compared with new neighborhoods in the East or South, houses in new developments in the West tend to be planted much closer together.

"The New West is best understood as islands of urban economics in a rural setting," said Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a think tank in Bozeman, Mont. "They are made possible by a combination of environmental amenities combined with the presence of transportation, especially good airports."

Newcomers with deep pockets populate many of these islands. Retirement and investment money accounts for about a third of total personal income across the Rocky Mountain West, according to federal figures. In some states, this money dwarfs the personal income from mining, forestry, farming and energy extraction.

"What had been seen as a 'war on the West' by outside forces is not seen that way anymore," said Thomas Michael Power, chairman of the economics department at the University of Montana in Missoula.

"It is more visible to everyone now that the economy has changed fundamentally," he said. "The people who are ranching and farming know these things, and that is why they are willing to be bought out, why they are willing to sell part of their water rights."

There is widespread agreement among economists, demographers and politicians that the region's moneyed newcomers tend to be conservative when it comes to government involvement in their lives. But they also want government to protect and preserve the natural beauty that lured them to the Rocky Mountain West.

"Folks don't want a whole lot of government, but they want things like clean water, and they want us to be careful," Jon Tester, the Democratic senator-elect from Montana, said in an interview before the election.

A final key piece in the long-awaited emergence of the New West as a place inclined to support land and water conservation has to do with how environmental groups work with local people.

In the 1990s, environmental groups rarely bothered to listen to the concerns of farmers, ranchers or business leaders, according to Chris Wood, vice president for conservation programs at Trout Unlimited.

"We thought we didn't need to, that we could ride these demographic changes to a better regulatory outcome for the environment," Wood said. "Now we are recognizing that we can still achieve good outcomes by sitting and listening to people, without landowners feeling like we forced it down their throats."