Professor William Cronon is a University of Wisconsin philosopher and historian who explores environmental history and the West. He is in Bozeman this week to deliver the annual Wallace Stegner Lecture, tomorrow night at 7:30 at the Museum of the Rockies. I recommend it.

Cronon’s mere presence illustrates the evolution of the American West and suggests why such towns as Bozeman are increasingly attractive. Let me explain.

When I came to Bozeman it was a quiet place hosting an unpretentious cow college. Growing up farming, I was pleased to find three agricultural-implement dealers on our two major streets. John Deere (green) and International Harvester (red) on Main Street and Allis-Chalmers (orange) on North Seventh. And though I miss them, the forces that ushered their departure brought new, productive, and meaningful economic and cultural opportunities.

Economics is the study of the choices made when people face constraints i.e., when they must make trade-offs among things they value. For example, time spent fly fishing can’t be spent watching the Masters Tournament. I consider economics’ most interesting and helpful insights a subset of evolutionary biology. Like biological systems, economic life evolves as people and their organizations learn, respond, and innovate. I see this theme in Cronon’s exhaustive and engaging book, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.

This process is a profoundly powerful agent of change. As entrepreneurs discover and apply innovations, old ideas, technologies, skills, equipment, and jobs become obsolete. In some cases whole communities are displaced. Consider Butte. Such changes, positive and negative, ripple through Bozeman and across America.

Cultures and economies evolve. For example, on the frontier trees were once so plentiful that their value was often negative. Fertile cleared ground was frequently worth more than land with standing timber. Because trees swell at their base, timber cutters created temporary platforms (spring boards) from which they sawed the trees above the butt swell. This left much high-quality wood in the forest, but it saved labor. Our ancestors “wasted” wood to economize on labor.

Professor Cronon quotes a 19th-century observer who notes the pioneer’s perspective: “the forest is only to be exterminated, as it hinders his plow and obstructs his sunlight.” My, have our values changed!

Wallace Stegner was an observer and a prophet of change in the American West. He understood the pace and nature of the transformations that swept this region during the last century.

He observed that the West “changes faster” than most places, and he characterized the changes as “the warping influence of great in-migration, uninterrupted boom, and unremitting technological tinkering.” Stegner was keenly aware of how the West was addicted to this “boomer” mentality.

In the early days of settlement, this mindset herded Indians onto reservations, then repeatedly shrank the borders. In the federal reclamation projects, boomers oversaw the radical conversion of prairie to potatoes, of rivers to reservoirs, all at public expense. In the mining regions, boomers literally moved mountains. And the West became ever more wedded to subsidized models of extraction.

The ecological results were often catastrophic. This fact enraged Stegner and motivated his later work -- both his writing and his political activism. He issued a series of warnings, and some of his conclusions foresaw a pessimistic future. But in the end, Stegner held out great hope.

The economy of the West is forever changed. For over a century natural resource industries -- logging, mining, and ranching -- were economic keystones. The forces that cleared Bozeman’s Main Street of ag dealers shape a new economy. Service- and information-based industries depend on human capital, not commodity resources.

Urban and affluent newcomers to our region bring an utterly different value system for the land. To them, commodity extraction is inferior to the amenity value of land -- scenery, recreation, open space, fish and wildlife, wilderness. Rather than the “boomers” decried by Stegner, we now attract landscape architects specializing in conservation development. (Happy birthday, Scott!)

Montana’s economic prosperity requires policy innovations that retain and attract the ultimate key to progress, human capital and culture. Some want to reverse the clock and refocus on resource exploitation. But there is no going back. They will fail. Come to Cronon’s lecture to learn more. I hope to see you there.