Cities, sagebrush, and solitude

de Dennis R. Judd, Stephanie L. Witt

"Cities, Sagebrush, and Solitude explores the transformation of the largest desert in North America, the Great Basin, into America's last urban frontier. In recent decades Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City, and Boise have become the anchors for sprawling metropolitan regions. This population explosion has been fueled by the maturing of Las Vegas as the nation's entertainment capital, the rise of Reno as a magnet for multitudes of California expatriates, the development of Salt Lake City's urban corridor along the Wasatch Range, and the growth of Boise's celebrated high-tech economy and hip urban culture. The blooming of cities in a fragile desert region poses a host of environmental challenges. The policies required to manage their impact, however, often collide with an entrenched political culture that has long resisted cooperative or governmental effort. The alchemical mixture of three ingredients--cities, aridity, and a libertarian political outlook--makes the Great Basin a compelling place to study. This book addresses a pressing question: are large cities ultimately sustainable in such a fragile environment?"-- "This manuscript explores the environmental consequences and political conflicts arising from the urbanization of the Great Basin. It focuses on four major metropolitan areas on the Basin's rim--Boise, Reno, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas--to explore how these cities cope with the problems associated with rapid growth, when attempts to do so provoke conflict between urban residents and the people who live in the thinly populated desert outback. In the Basin, policies to address the environmental and resource limitations imposed by the desert may be incompatible with a rural political culture that resists all cooperation or governmental effort. Each chapter of the manuscript traces the way that the tensions between three ingredients--cities, remarkable scarcity, and a conservative political culture--inform contemporary policy debates and public policies of the region through an analysis of the environmental stresses connected to economic change, resource extraction, land management, and urban development"--