What is the role of a good small-town newspaper in the 21st century?
Is it to cheerlead and protect the status quo of conventional local thinking or is it to, when necessary, challenge deeply-engrained assumptions that might be wrong?
Is it to be a blow-horn for only those who wield influence and self-interested power or offer a voice to underdogs, the disadvantaged and occasionally the invisible people in a community?
Is it to tell only sanguine “good news” stories or, by demanding accountability, make people squirm?
Is it to simply document life in the here and now as it happens or promote visionary thinking for the future?
Or is it a mixture of all of the above?
My good friend in Jackson Hole, Paul Bruun, once bestowed this insight on me half my life ago:
“Young man, soon you will discover that Jackson Hole, despite its quaint appearance, is one of the most cosmopolitan small towns in America and it needs to be approached that way if you’re a journalist.”
Bruun and I first became acquaintances in the mid 1980s when I moved to Jackson from Chicago, where I had been a violent crime reporter. At the time, Bruun, whose father himself was legendary local newspaperman in Miami Beach, was then penning his regular outdoor column for the Jackson Hole News. Bruun was best known as a respected fishing guide and soon was about to launch a successful bid to serve on the Jackson Town Council.
Jackson Hole was a lot different in those days. Bruun was right in his assessment and his observation now holds ten times the gravity that it did then.
Teton County, because of the number of uber-wealthy individuals who call the valley home, is one of the richest, per capita, in the country. Yes, while most job holders would beg to differ, the fact that Jackson Hole functions as a place to which affluent people escape skews the way socio-economic statistics are calculated.
If one denies that a chasm exists between haves and have nots, apply for a job, peruse the local real estate listings and then try to rent—or buy—a home.
Although Jackson Hole is often portrayed as a sort of outdoor Mayberry in the middle of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, just beneath the veneer of this projection is a far more complicated visceral truth.
After years of traveling widely, I can attest: this valley is spectacularly unlike most other communities on Earth and the reason is the novelty of its setting, the health of regional wildlands and, most importantly, the uncommon diversity of wildlife inhabiting them.
Amid the dance between humans and nature, Jackson Hole has become a bellwether. The challenge is how to covet it, how to capitalize off its natural resources and how to maintain the high quality of life for all of its denizens.
I believe in the power of journalism to explore that conundrum. While the prevailing local newspaper would like to pretend that Jackson Hole is a kind of Shangri-La where everyone can come, take what they believe is theirs and live happily ever after, each of us knows this is not the case.
The uniqueness of Jackson Hole is finite. It’s a verity not only along both sides of the Tetons but festering at the northern end of Greater Yellowstone, too. Bozeman, Montana, largest city in the region, is currently bursting at its seams with explosive population growth and a rapidly expanding development footprint.
Between Jackson Hole and Bozeman is Yellowstone—the world’s first and most iconic national park. Next to her are remarkable neighbors—Grand Teton National Park, several national forests, a major national wildlife refuge, and a collection of astounding natural wonders.
Together they are the foundation for an annual multi-billion-dollar economy based on nature tourism, which, in turn, is fueling unprecedented visitation, bringing rising outdoor recreation pressure and development.
Today, we find ourselves caught in a whirlpooling feedback loop where more people equates to more development and more development is firing the engine of more people.
While we might like to delude ourselves with the quaint conceit that we’re just another version of small-town America, we have globally-significant treasures under our care and unless we consciously choose to avoid the patterns of degradation that have destroyed wildness in other places, the same is going to happen here.
Should it occur, we will only have ourselves to blame.
Some 30 years ago, I began penning a column for the then-Jackson Hole News which I called “The New West.” Today, it could easily be dubbed “The New New West” for things are happening now that were barely recognizable in the late 1980s.
The impacts of human-caused climate change are deepening, Yellowstone and Grand Teton are increasingly becoming overwhelmed by summer visitation, development is transforming the rural character of our landscapes, and while “traditional resource extraction” is mostly a thing of the past, economies driven by tourism and outdoor recreation bring their own sets of serious problems.
With this column, The New West returns to Jackson Hole and will appear every week on Tuesdays. I will always consider Jackson Hole my first home in the West. What is happening here is worthy of more than just small-town reporting. How we interact with nature holds lessons that ripple around the globe.
