Under siege, the West's public lands vanish or become fragmented

July 06, 2008|Rick Bass

Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America
By Stephen Trimble
University of California, 319 pp., illustrated, $29.95

"Bargaining for Eden" is a book that starts slow, as it reports on a story so familiar to even a casual student of the exploitation of the West's once-bountiful and vibrant natural resources that there's not a lot of suspense in the telling. Self-made millionaire Earl Holding, in Utah, very much a product of his Mormon heritage, set out to develop a hidden little valley, high in the pastoral glacier-carved cirques of the Wasatch Range, known as Snowbasin.

It is country with which I am familiar, having had the good fortune to explore it, as a young man attending college in northern Utah, for the primary purpose of skiing. It is country I have not been able to return to, unwilling to witness any longer the diminishment, the eradication of character. For this reason, perhaps, I read the section on Holding with the self-preservation of detachment - somewhat in the manner of the avid sports fan who merely skims the next day's newspaper with its box scores enumerating drily the consequences, the logistics, of an exceptional loss.

The doggedness with which Holding pursues his goal - spanning parts of three decades - of constructing a massive ski resort where once only a few locals skied is neither a new story nor, to my thinking, an admirable one; it reveals simply the unimaginative relentlessness of the commercial mind.

Trimble, to his credit, takes pains not to caricature Holding as mindlessly greedy, and seems instead to do a good job of portraying him as a man interested in quality - though the portrait feels a bit flat due to the fact that Holding refused to ever meet with Trimble, leaving Trimble to compose his profile from afar, and from secondhand testimonies. (About that keen commitment to quality: There is one particularly troubling description of Holding's inspection and choice of "each of the fifty-thousand-pound blocks of Bethel White granite that would sheathe Grand America" - the hotel he built in Salt Lake City - "and shipped the lot of them to his favorite stonecutters in Spain. Earl favored the Vermont source, in part, for its proximity to Joseph Smith's [founder of the Mormon church] birthplace; the [Mormon] Church also favors Bethel White for its new temples. The dressed granite slabs returned by boat via the Panama Canal to Los Angeles, from where they were trucked to Salt Lake City - along with cherrywood furniture from France, crystal and bronze chandeliers from Austria and Italy, English wool carpeting, and marble from France, Italy, and Portugal."