The Backbone of the World:
A Portrait of the Vanishing West Along the Continental Divide
By Frank Clifford
Broadway Books, 274 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Kurt Opprecht

for the New York Sun, June 3, 2002

It’s a bitter surprise when city folk discover the depth of the disdain so many country folk have for wilderness protection. Not only does familiarity breed contempt, it seems to breed a sense of entitlement as well, even when the land in question is public property.

Why is it so difficult to preserve wilderness in a democracy where 80 to 90% of the population say they support more environmental protection? The profit to be made in timber, oil, and mining is a major factor, but at ground level, the battle over federal lands is enmeshed in the stories of those who cling to the last vestiges of a way of life that never was easy in the first place. It is in the name of these locals that the status quo is allowed to continue.

Most of those characters don’t have much respect for the arrogant visitors who come hiking through land they need for their livelihood and fight tooth and nail for the right to use or abuse the land as they see fit. In "Backbone of the World," Frank Clifford masterfully brings out the contradictions in the struggles of the people who live and work in the public lands along the Continental Divide while compassionately and fairly giving us their perspective on the battle.

The Continental Divide spans the United States north to south along the Rocky Mountains, through the states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, demarcating the raindrops which will make their way east toward the Atlantic or west toward the Great Basin or the Pacific.

Mr. Clifford is the environment editor at the Los Angeles Times and spent a season participating in the work of the people he covers. In each of ten chapters, Clifford has painted a vignette of one life in the lands along the divide.

In the course of the book, the author helps with branding, birthing, herding, policing, and generally spends a good deal of time on horse- or muleback. The background narratives are engaging and down-to-earth. One chapter begins, "An autumn wind gusts up to fifty miles an hour. The trees come down along the trail at a rate of forty per mile. Often, they announce their fall with a crack as sharp and loud as a rifle shot. Just as often, they keel over noiselessly. Those are the potential killers." Another begins, "Art Weems won’t speak to me. He only glares when I try to make conversation. I have done him wrong in his own home."

Charting the web of land use and wilderness protection issues for the uninitiated should be as dull as a dry wash, but Mr. Clifford weaves the points of view and countervailing forces into his narratives in a way that covers all the territory but never feels like a political awareness lecture.

In one of the most finely crafted prologues I have ever read, Mr. Clifford sets forth the situation today. In 1995 the Intermountain West became the fastest growing region of the country, with less than 5% of its employment still in farming, ranching, or mining. Population growth carried with it the competing demands for more development and also more wilderness. As Mr. Clifford puts it, this has been "a period of bitterness and blame, of selling out and forting up."

His book is a compassionate portrayal of the throwbacks to the time "when recreation and real estate were not the twin turbines of the Rocky Mountain economy." It will be most valuable if it increases the level of awareness among the "hikers, bird-watchers, butterfly hunters, and sheep counters" who raise the hackles of the locals while trying to cherish a vanishing resource.

Mr. Clifford provides practical arguments, "Wilderness is the swamp we drained to build a mall before we understood that swamps absorb our waste water and filter out the toxins. It is the urban forest we cleared away before we learned that its root system held the city’s watershed in place. Wilderness is the unquantifiable, unfungible asset, the one the accountants scratch their heads over when they are trying to value the estate."

But the defense of wilderness must ultimately depend upon its numinous values, which trump any and all practical considerations. "The Backbone of the World" is not a rant or a wilderness manifesto; Mr. Clifford does his job with coolness and evenhanded judgment. But when he does cut loose, his prose is like a naturalist poet’s.

On the penultimate page, he writes, "We took this land from people who believed that the mountains were the realm of gods, who came here for divine inspiration. Today, as we watch the grandest buildings disintegrate in fiery clouds, is there not some reawakened impulse for simple sanctuary, for the places that remind us of what God first wrought?"

Mr. Opprecht is an aspiring novelist in New York City who dreams of moving all the people out of his home state of Utah and setting it aside as wilderness.