|
|
June 20, 2003/Sivan 20 5763, Vol. 55, No. 43
Publisher prods West to 'grow up'LISA JONES
Ed Marston, dressed in jeans and a corduroy shirt, leaned back from his plate of pasta and said, "One of my theories is, what the interior West lacks is a middle class reform movement." He can't help it. Elevating the level of discourse in the West is just what Marston does. With a doctorate in physics, an affinity for deep reading and a Cassandra-like compulsion for telling it exactly like he sees it, Marston has been prodding the West for years. Provoking it to think. Ultimately, to grow up. Marston has been publisher of High Country News since 1983. Based in Paonia, High Country News is a biweekly newspaper reporting on the natural resources, public lands and communities of 11 western states. In September, he demoted himself to "senior journalist" so he could spend more time writing and less time fund raising and managing his growing staff. He's 62 years old, slim from forsaking meat and cheese and from taking long hikes on weekends with Betsy, his energetic wife of 36 years. He doesn't wear boots; he wears loafers. He's from New York City. Queens, to be exact. He is Jewish. He was in his mid-30s when he moved west, and he looked at the mountains, deserts and sun-blasted little towns with the wondering eyes of a latter-day deTocqueville. Since then, Marston (along with Betsy, who was editor of High Country News for 18 years) has become a Western institution. "They've served the West in as valuable a way as anybody has since World War II," says Charles Wilkinson, a University of Colorado law professor and a High Country News subscriber since the 1970s. "What the West needed was to create a sense of itself, and I think High Country News was a major factor in that happening." How does one begin to understand Ed Marston? He can be compared to the brooding social critic like an early '60s Bob Dylan. Marston and Dylan both saw change and urged its acceptance. Their powerful writing won them admiring audiences, and they both shook up the faithful when they changed their style (in Dylan's case, when he started playing the electric guitar; in Marston's, when he started consorting with ranchers). In the early 1980s, the environmental ethic in the West was simple. "Don't drill there!" recalls Marston. "Don't mine there! Don't log there!" In the months before Ed and Betsy Marston took over High Country News in September 1983, it ran stories with headlines like "Pipeline threatens bighorns," and, more compellingly, "Rancher fights missiles with six-shooter." "In the late '70s and early '80s, there was almost no environmental coverage in the West by any mainstream media," explains Dan Whipple, who was High Country News' managing editor back then. "So we considered it our role to fill this gap." When Whipple and his crew moved on, High Country News moved to Paonia. The Marstons hired a typesetter, and, like their predecessors, slugged merrily away at the usual environmental suspects. Within three months of taking over the paper, the Marstons ran a story on Glen Canyon Dam, which, after a record snowfall during the winter of 1982-83, had spent part of the year in peril of collapsing from the weight of a swollen Lake Powell. If the dam and its underground spillways had failed, the property damage "would have made Sept. 11 look like a one-car roll-over," said Marston. High Country News scooped the story, getting the details from the inside - author T.J. Wolf's father had designed Glen Canyon's power plant. The Marstons ran the story in December 1983. The national media's response was a deafening silence. "The West hadn't really registered yet," says Marston. That has changed. These days, the national media watches High Country News like a hawk. "They always seem to be on top of the trends and ahead of the trends," says Jim Carlton, the environmental reporter for the Wall Street Journal. In 1990, People magazine picked up a story Marston had written on Don Oman, a U.S. Forest Service range conservationist who was being harassed by ranchers who didn't like him insisting they manage their cattle in accordance with environmental regulations. The story changed Oman's career. It also changed Marston's. It led to his meeting a pair of Oregon ranchers - Doc and Connie Hatfield - who told him their story, a story that sent him reeling away from the accepted environmental take on Western ranching, which took its most brusque form in the bumper sticker "Cattle Free in '93." The Hatfields didn't only manage their cattle herd to make sure it didn't impinge on coyotes; they managed it so it didn't disturb their resident ducks, either. "I realized that all ranchers weren't the same. That some of them cared about the land." With the Hatfields holding open the door to possibilities he'd never known existed, Marston lost his taste for hard-liners. "Ed to me has been the most persistent articulate voice ... arguing for healthy rural human communities and healthy natural communities," says Richard Knight, a professor of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University. Marston wants to see the West become a more tolerant place - a place of ideas, not a place where you shoot (or dam, or log, or sue) first, and ask questions later. He attributes his desire for civility in part to his Jewish background. "I worry about the stability of a society," he says. "Because I know what happens to people like me when a society disintegrates." The West, to Marston's delight, is not currently disintegrating. Although the Bush administration is eyeing the Rocky Mountains for energy development, the pressure has produced a new kind of opposition. Using a nonconfrontational approach, a couple of dozen locals, Marston included, persuaded the all-Republican county commissioners to say no to the proposal this summer. It was the first time this had happened in Colorado history. Marston is now the president of the year-old opposition group, which is called the Grand Mesa Citizens Alliance. He's not a recorder of events this time, or an analyst; he's a player, an insider in a collaborative effort in the kind of West he has articulated for years in the pages of High Country News. Lisa Jones is a freelance writer from Paonia, Colo. Contact her at lisejones@aol.com. This article first appeared in the Nov. 25, 2002, issue of High Country News. |
