Gooseberry on the New West

Hold on to your seat cushions neighbors; you soon may need to use them as a flotation device. News reports say President Obama’s administration will focus on running the Department of Interior in a much greener way and will “emphasize consensus building, tighter restrictions on drilling and funding aimed at conservation priorities.”

Shocking.

The good news is this will only impact the West. The rest of the nation -- you know those places where there are no unexploited natural resources , where all the people who voted for Obama live, and where people don’t dress in plaid shirts and funny hats, will hardly feel the impact of increased fuel or food prices. (Who needs coal, natural gas or cows on the open range anyway? These are modern times. We have electricity and supermarkets.)

There is no question, in the opinion of most Washington insiders the selection of the next Secretary of Interior will have a major impact on the lives of approximately 15 people. The real exciting positions in the next cabinet , such as Secretary of Agriculture (which anymore is really just the secretary of corn,), Secretary of Labor (unions) and the guy who is in the line of succession, the Secretary of State. The fact that more than one-third of the nation’s land mass is under the control of one agency, the Bureau of Land Management, doesn’t mean much in a society more interested in video games, celebrity sobriety and acceptance of global socialism.

Of course, this does not take into account the “New West.” Or in other words a west that does not rely on the development of natural resources to survive. According to New West pundits, we can all live off selling life insurance and self composting toilets. We can live off the grid (as opposed to living off of the grid, which is different, unless you use the internet, then you will be in the grid, but not of it). We can hovel together in ranchettes and raise llamas.

What President Obama will need to learn, and what New Westerners seem to forget, is that somehow, somewhere in the line of commerce everything starts as a raw material. Then those raw materials also need an energy source to be converted into a finished product. And no matter how frustrating it might be for the natural purists of the world, the west is a major source of both raw materials and energy.