Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region

An atlas for our times that makes sense of the fast-paced transformation of the American West. The West. Americans hold dearly to old ideas of it as a unique, wild place of majestic space, ranching and mining, small-town life, and opportunity. And so it can still be -- but rarely. The West's central reality nowadays is that it is new. This newness has never been so well presented in this book's forty-six full-color, three-dimensional, computer-generated maps; its two brilliant essays; its informative sidebars; its boxed information (for example, how the first seven wolves introduced into Yellowstone died); and its dozens of charts and graphs, highlighting: -- The New West's fortunes now ride on tourism and a postindustrial, high-tech economy. -- The West is America's fastest urbanizing region. -- Rodeos, dude ranches, and open range now abide with sprawling cities, ski resorts, plugged-in telecommuters, micro-breweries, and mountain biking meccas. -- Illustrations show old Western battles taking new forms -- who owns what land? who controls what water rights? and how much development is too much? -- Gold-medal trout streams, nuclear-waste sites, jet ports, regional writers, reintroduced wolves, Rocky Mountain and Sierra Nevadan economies ... All are here -- and much more -- in this valuable, beautiful, and eye-opening examination of life as it is now in our Western states.

The American West looms large in the national imagination as a place of coyotes, cowboys, and wide-open spaces. But with more Americans moving there each year than to any other region of the U.S., the reality of the new West has become somewhat different. What happens when the West of loggers, miners, grizzly bears, and greasy spoons gives way to that of "extreme" recreation, telecommuting, psychic vortexes, and espresso? A group of historians, geographers, and other intellectuals at Boulder's Center of the American West maps these and other transformations in the Atlas of the New West, a stunningly comprehensive look at a region in the grip of tumultuous change.

From irrigation to infrastructure, lifestyle to literature, the Atlas of the New West considers almost every aspect of life in the intermountain West, uncovering some surprising facts along the way. Who would have dreamed, for instance, that a higher percentage of westerners than northeasterners live in cities--or that, if evenly distributed, each resident of Nevada's Eureka County would stand alone on 3.5 square miles of land? Statistics like these come paired with essays, photographs, and beautiful full-color maps depicting everything from brewpub distribution to water consumption to Superfund sites. This handsome and thoughtful book is of vital interest to anyone who cares about this beautiful, fragile, and complex region of the United States.