| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Rediscovered Frontier: Land Use and Resource Issues in the New West. By Philip L. Jackson and Robert Kuhlken. Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, Toronto, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006. xv + 265 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. Paper $29.95.

Another homestead movement is underway in the West. The recent settlers are not filing their land claims to raise crops or livestock, but rather to reside within eyeshot of the region's scenery and to build a home (often a second home, leisure estate, or corporate retreat) near its recreational amenities. While the West has always attracted more than its fair share of adventurers and retirees, the sweeping economic and technological changes of the past two decades have freed recent arrivals from urban support systems, thus opening up previously remote or seasonally inhospitable rural locations and small towns to fast-paced, unplanned residential and commercial development. The unfortunate result is wasteful and unsightly sprawl and the retreat of a working landscape. Another outcome is the uneven distribution of economic benefits, seen in the loss of affordable housing and the multiplication of socially exclusive (and water-profligate) golf communities and resort destinations. On this rediscovered frontier, the contemporary consumer's search for authentic experience facilitates invidious new forms of resource extraction. One hardly requires a sophisticated postmodern sensibility to appreciate the irony of a residential development in southern Utah featuring faux concrete waterfalls and streambeds colored to match the red rocks of the arid canyon country.

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