Life in the West
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Get Informed about Propositions you’ll be
Voting on – Before your Ballot Comes!
~Lynn Jackson, former Grand County
Councilman: “It’s all rather confusing to me. San Juan doesn’t want to
become another Moab, yet they are following the exact blueprint that got Moab
on its path to progressive nirvana. Welcoming and supporting outdoor
environmental education programs and investments, providing support for
building mountain bike trails, hiring an economic development coordinator with
deep ties to the megalithic outdoor recreation industry, and creating a tourism
slogan that’s over the top, in this case ridiculously over the top. “Make it
Monumental” is just hard to figure, sending the message you’re all good with
monuments down there, in light of what’s gone in the last 18 months? San Juan,
looks like you’re well on your way, following the recipe exactly.“
~In
discussing Springdale, Utah and Nat’l Parks: “Yale professor James Scott argues that ancient cities were
walled not just to keep invaders out, but to keep the slaves whose labor the elites
depended upon in. The modern city has improved upon the ancient model by
replacing physical walls with nifty technologies like exclusionary zoning, subsistence wages and commuting. This framework
guarantees the provision of all the poorly compensated labor necessary to
sustain a bourgeois utopia with virtually none of the pesky visual evidence of
actual poverty or hassles of chattel slavery. Win-win.”
~Stacy
Young: “Both Blanding and Monticello have had about the
same population since 1980, and the relationship between incomes and the cost
of living in both towns is rational and predictable. In fact, the average
household in each of these towns earns significantly more than their counterparts in the more trendy
towns (Moab) of the
region, and this remains the case despite the sagging fortunes of extractive
industries in the county over the past 30 years. Of course,
this relative wealth advantage is further boosted, by a lot, when it is adjusted for the disparity in the cost of living
between, say, Monticello and Moab. The disinvestment and depopulation crisis
that defines much of rural America does not really describe conditions in San
Juan County.”
“At Neldon Cochran's funeral and viewing, October 7, 2017, I visited with
Jodi Laws Cochran. As an Air Force pilot, her husband Jerry has been assigned
all over world, yet everywhere they went they met people with Blanding
connections. She suggested I collect stories with that theme. I thought it was
a great idea, and with everyone's help, it is becoming a reality. This blog is
dedicated to Jodi and Jerry Cochran, the impetus for making it happen.
Enjoy. Please share additional “connections.”
~~ It was arranged for the USC students to be
featured on the PBS News Hour. Their task was to fairly portray, to a
national audience, the
ongoing complex political and cultural
clashes and controversies in San Juan County-- and do it in five minutes and forty-eight seconds.” Such is the shallowness of television
coverage dealing with controversy! Stiles’ article provides links to the PBS slanted coverage.
With due respect to the college team: what they originally submitted was 11 minutes
long, but PBS kept hacking away!
The size and complicated logistics of
Navajo Reservation polices and politics deserved to be included in the PBS
video, as well as how and why they consider themselves a sovereign nation and
how that impacts county government in four states 
“Conservation and Indian groups say the
Antiquities Act doesn't allow Trump or any other president to revoke or shrink
an existing monument.”
~~~~~~~
Documenting Bears Ears
Controversy and Public Land Issues since July
2016
