What's The Fleeting West about?

The West is changing, and it's not necessarily for the better. I want to show you how and why.

In the U.S., there’s a persistent trope that staying in the same town for too long is a sign of personal stagnation. I wonder how that works when you’re living in a place that is experiencing doubling, tripling, or quadrupling housing prices over only a few years because so many people want to live here?

I am, fortunately or unfortunately, that person. I have lived within 100 miles of my birthplace for my entire ~40 year existence. And before that, my parents have a similar story, and my grandparents have a similar story, and even before that my great grandparents have that story. We’re all from a little piece of ex-flyover country (your words, not mine) called Colorado.

As I write The Fleeting West, I am giving up on a dream to write a book that I’ve been taking notes and photos for for about 20 years — who’s going to read that? A whole book about a place with exploding population growth, the ensuing environmental and resource life support, and the variety of myths and identity dysmorphias driving people here by the hundreds of thousands … not a New York Times best seller, that’s for sure.

What you’ll read about here is change — and the myths driving that change — converting what was a truly sacred place into that of something familiar. And when I say familiar, I mean familiar to those moving here and not those already here. For the last 10 straight years, Colorado has added a net 100,000 people per year to an environment that has been on water life support for the last 60 years. I’ll be talking about that, and I’ll be talking about that entirely from a rooted westerner’s perspective.

I am also writing the Fleeting West because our news sources in the region are skeletons of what they once were, colonized, or lost in the narratives of today. Yeah, I’ll name them — High Country News, The Denver Post, The Daily Camera, the list goes on and on — I think they’re all lost in the muck, and writing for clicks and the muck of the day. I’m writing to get my small-town-rooted townie perspective out, and without the dithering of some transplanted out-of-state editor looking to sell papers.

I’m not writing this blog to sell anything, I’m just writing to get it all out in hopes of showing others what I see and where I see this all going. When I was born, there were less than 3 million people in Colorado, and now there are pressing on 6 million, and the State Demographer anticipates 12 million by 2050 or so. Almost none of which is growth due to reproduction. Since I grew up here from generations who grew up here, I’m not built for the kinds of urbanization that comes with — so I won’t be here anymore. And I have to wonder; Who would want to live in Colorado with 12 million people in it?

The West is fleeting.

The Fleeting West is a blog about change in the American West, written by a rooted westerner with a bone to pick and a riot act to read.