How the west was reinvented: nudged by Bill Clinton, an economy based more on recreation than extraction is transforming the rural west.

• Author: Cooper, Ryan
• Position: Escalante, Utah

A strange thing happened in Escalante, Utah, during the government shutdown last fall. The town, a remote community of fewer than 800 souls perched on a high desert plain around a trickle of water called the Escalante River, is surrounded on all sides by the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, two million federally protected acres of rugged, visually breathtaking sandstone wilderness larger than the state of Delaware. Because the monument is so vast, pierced by several highways and county roads, it was virtually uncloseable during the shutdown. So when thousands of tourists were turned away from the more famous national parks in the region--Zion, Arches, Grand Canyon--they made their way to Escalante to salvage their vacations. And Escalante had its best October on record, its small business owners making out like mule dealers in a gold rush. "Hotels were chock-a-block with tourists," says Brent Cottam, a gas station and Subway owner in town.

Escalante's boomlet during the shutdown was only the latest episode in a longer tale of the town's unexpected economic growth due to decisions in far-off Washington, D.C. And its story is itself part of a much larger transformation that has been creeping across the American West for decades, as a new recreation economy centered around tourism edges out an older extractive economy that relied on mining, timber, drilling, and ranching. It's a shift not just in the type of jobs available, but in the political landscape of the entire region.

In Escalante's case, the story starts in September 1996, when President Bill Clinton was faced with a dilemma. It was high campaign season, and for most of his first term he and environmentalists had been fighting a rearguard action to prevent the development of the massive coal deposits on the Kaiparowitz Plateau, a high bench in southern Utah notable for its Cretaceous-era fossils. Fed up with the squabbling and eager to lock up the environmentalist vote, Clinton decided to end the debate in one bold stroke: using the authority vested in the executive branch under the Antiquities Act, he declared the Kaiparowitz, as well as a huge swath of the surrounding region, a national monument. Unlike a national park, some grazing and timber sales would still be allowed, but the coal would be off-limits forever.

Clinton's decision was bitterly opposed by most of the citizens of Escalante, who were eager for the extra jobs and wage growth that many hoped would come with a giant new coalmining operation. And in Washington, Republicans reacted to what they saw not only as a classically liberal decision to sacrifice jobs on the altar of the environment but also as an underhanded abuse of executive power. They complained that the White House had prepared the monument plans in secret. Even the Utah congressional delegation wasn't notified until twenty-four hours beforehand. To add insult to injury, Clinton held the dedication ceremony on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, which is in Arizona and dozens of miles from any part of the new monument. Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican, said it was "something that I think would happen in the former Soviet Union or some Third World dictatorship." Brent Griffin, who owns a grocery store in Escalante, still remembers the move today. "The way they did it was awful sneaky," he says.

But much to the surprise of many, it wasn't long before the recreational industry in...