Think tanks challenge conventional wisdom and generate alternatives. Gallatin Writers and FREE seek innovative solutions to difficult environmental and economic problems. In this spirit we sponsor the Wallace Stegner Essay Contest. Here are the results for 2004.

Wallace Stegner claimed that he was born to write one story -- the story of the “boomer” and the “nester” on the western frontier. Throughout his life and work, Stegner remained keenly aware of how the West had come to depend upon the boomer mentality. It was a mindset that herded Indians onto their reservations, then repeatedly shrunk the borders. In the federal reclamation projects, boomers converted prairie to potatoes, 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.

In his most famous and widely quoted passage, Stegner remarked, “Angry as one may be at what careless people have done and still do to a noble habitat, it is hard to be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it finally learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the pattern that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”

Perhaps a conservationist future for the American West lies not in banishing the boomer but in healing the marriage between the boomer and the nester. The boomer is, after all, the force of enterprise -- the bold mover and shaker, the rain-maker. The nester is the steward, the quiet force who builds without destroying, and wants to stay without soiling the nest.

In this context FREE and Gallatin Writers requested imaginative essays exploring, in real-world terms, the reconciliation of the boomer and the nester. Where do we find such reconciliation? What shapes does it take, and what kind of work does it provide? What hope would a reconciliation between the boomer and the nester hold for the future of the American West?

Congratulations to Brandon Schrand, an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Idaho. He earned first place with his essay, “Balancing the West: Mythology, Economy, and the Reconciliation of Old Patterns.” He argues that reconciliation of the boomer and nester must occur at the community level. Continuing cycles of boom and bust “will not stop until we begin to see through the lens of a balanced community.” He points to Senators Dorgan and Hagel’s New Homestead Act as a possible solution. “Adopting similar, community-minded policies could go a long way in balancing the West’s cultural, environmental, economic, and human enterprises.”

Second place went to Pete Gomben, a graduate student in the department of Environment and Society at Utah State University, for his essay, “Having Everything Before Us: Boomers and Nesters in the American West.” Gomben believes we must “start by understanding that both boomers and nesters form important parts of the patchwork that is the West.... And we must recognize that whereas nesters form what ecologists might call climax communities and can perpetuate themselves indefinitely, boomer communities need a little help … if they are to survive.” This requires adapting to new economic realities.

Patrick DelHomme, a graduate student in the University of Montana’s Environmental Studies department, won third place with his essay, “Boomers and Nesters: Finding Reconciliation in the Nonprofit Enterprise.” DelHomme finds the key to reconciling the boomer and nester lies in private nonprofit organizations. The “tension created between the private non-profit and the profit-making enterprise ... strengthens both enterprises by involving the booming, industrious nature of the profit-making enterprise with the community-building nature of the nonprofit.”

Judges for the contest were Dr. John A. Baden, Chairman of FREE and Gallatin Writers; Professor Jerry Johnson at Montana State University; Dr. Ramona Marotz-Baden, Gallatin Writers’ Program Coordinator and professor at MSU; Helen Guthrie Miller of Butte, Montana; Dr. Sara Jayne Steen, Dean of MSU’s College of Letters and Science; Professor Donald Snow at Whitman College; and Dr. Karl Stauber, President of the Northwest Area Foundation.

All three winning essays are available on Gallatin Writers’ web site.