Robert Frodeman is a scholar of environmental philosophy and public policy. He’s also an editor of a recently published collection of essays where he’s one of four Teton County residents testing a theory: does the West have a carrying capacity?
The new book, “A Watershed Moment: The American West in the Age of Limits,” was released in 2024 and is now on tour.
Frodeman has lived all over the West, and accordingly, his anthology takes readers from the deserts of Sedona, Arizona to the alpine town of Telluride, Colorado. But, topics also stay close to home with chapters on conservation and affordability obstacles in Jackson Hole.
County Commissioner Luther Propst writes about the “costs of growth” in Jackson. Teton Conservation District Director Carlin Giraud covers management challenges on the Snake River and Jackson-based researcher Hilary Flint explores innovative solutions on private lands along Wyoming’s Absaroka Front.
KHOL’s Jenna McMurtry caught up with Frodeman to learn more about his inspiration for the book and how other Teton County residents are navigating the changes — and limits — of life in the Mountain West.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jenna McMurtry: Can you explain how you came to this project?
Robert Frodeman: I’ve been hanging out off and on in the West for many years. I lived in Durango [Colorado], Flagstaff [Arizona] and in Boulder [Colorado]. When I was young, I spent a lot of time backpacking in places like the Grand Canyon and Southern Utah, so it’s been an ongoing fascination for me.
When I went off to get educated, I ended up with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State, and then later a master’s degree in paleoclimatology from CU Boulder, my focus was on the future in the American West.
I had read Wallace Stegner’s book “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” a long, long time ago and that deeply influenced me. He argued in that book, or rather, he shared with the reader John Wesley Powell’s argument that you needed a different set of institutions, social, political, economic for the American West.
And as my thinking has evolved, I’ve been struck by the fact that the models or the paradigms and the institutions that we have for life in the West probably need to be greatly modified.
JM: There’s several themes in this book that cover some of these modifications that are really timely right now and so many of them are relevant to Jackson. We have the affordability crisis in some chapters. We have forest fires, conservation. Could you talk about your own experience living in Teton County and how much these issues resonate?
RF: The central idea of the book, the red thread that runs through the 25 chapters is the idea of limit. Americans have been in love with this idea of infinity, infinite horizons, infinite growth, infinite population, infinite money. And the West offers a really striking counterexample to this.
Teton County, which is 97% publicly owned national forest, national park, the elk refuge. Growth is simply not possible beyond a certain point. Even if we violated the three or four story limit on buildings, you start putting in high rises, 10 or 20 stories, the traffic would end up being totally gridlocked.
We already see this in the summer when you try to drive out on Highway 22. It’s impossible trying to come back down from the parks in the afternoon. And so Teton County exemplifies the challenge that you see in Flagstaff and Telluride [Colorado] and lots of other places where we’re going to have to change our institutions to recognize that there are inescapable limits to what we can do, how many people can live here and what we can build.
JM: One of your chapters is written by someone who actually has some power or sway over how we respond to these issues, County Commissioner Luther Propst, who is also one of the book’s co-editors. Could you give some context or preview what our own elected official has to say in his chapter?
RF: Not only was Luther a lawyer and the founder of the Sonoran Institute some back in the early 1990s, but he must, on a day-to-day basis, take in scientific information and balance it with ethical issues, with questions of justice and equity.
His chapter focuses on what he calls the ‘commuter shed’ in Jackson. Commuter shed is his own coinage. Think about a watershed, an area where all the waters come together in a central point, as all the small streams gather into a main trunk.
And so what we have done is created this odd tripartite community, both separated by natural national forest in both directions, where people have to commute in 30, or 40, or 50 miles to come to work in Jackson, but where they cannot afford to live.
And so there’s this strange, you could call it symbiotic, you could call it a parasitic relationship, which is at the foundation of the Jackson Hole economy. And, in fact, the whole economy of this region.
JM: That brings me to the title of the book, “A Watershed Moment,” also referencing the idea of the “watershed.” If we are in this watershed moment where we’re shifting directions and facing these major changes, what might be one of the catalysts to this trend we’re seeing across the West?
RF: Well, that’s a really good question. My own chapter explores the role of culture in these changes. That is to say, the role of mythmaking. I will argue that politics is downstream from culture. And, while we often do not respect the artist or the people who produce our cultural images, these images actually dominate our politics and our thinking. My own view of what’s going on nationally, politically, is this is a kind of backlash to what’s becoming clear to people that there may actually be limits to our behavior. We may have to change our behavior. This idea upsets a lot of people.
JM: Is there anything that gives you hope or clarity as we move forward at a time when the West is rapidly evolving?
RF: You won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t find the current goings on in Washington D.C. very hopeful. But I do wonder whether they could elicit a reaction that some of the policies being enacted would be so disastrous that it would bring home to people that we really do need to modify our lifestyle. The assumptions that we’ve had for two or three centuries in this country, that we can always do whatever we want and we can move out West and there’s endless space and resources. I’m hoping that in a few years time we will come to see that that myth no longer fits the reality on the ground, the reality that we’re actually living within every day.
These days, Frodeman spends most of his time in Teton County helping with the effort to get a new water system in Hoback and working on new book proposals. He will join a panel with three co-authors and fellow Teton County residents Feb. 27 at the Jackson Hole History Museum.
