A new atlas for a new West

An atlas, of course, is a book chock full of maps, charts, graphs and tables. Gehrardus Mercator, a 16th century Flemish cartographer, was the first to use the term "atlas" to name a collection of maps.

According to author Stephen Birdswell, Mercator was inspired by an earlier map collection illustration that showed the Greek god Atlas supporting the earth on his shoulders.

The first atlas, however, was penned around 150 A.D. when Ptolemy, one of the greatest astronomers and geographers of ancient times, published an eight-volume work on mapmaking called Geography.

Ptolemy thought the sun and the planets revolved around a stationary earth. This view was accepted in Europe until 1543. That's when Copernicus came along with a new and big idea that the Earth is the moving planet. In other words, an atlas can also be used not only to present facts but also to present a point of view in an illustrated or tabular form.

Such is the case with the Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region, published recently by the University of Colorado's Center of the American West with essays by professors Patricia Nelson Limerick and Charles Wilkinson, distinguished members, respectively, of the CU faculties of history and law.

This 192-page collection contains a message along with the collection of maps and charts including 46 full-color, three-dimensional maps that provide a rich and easily grasped pictures that locate the region's leading cities, nuclear waste sites, microbreweries, gold medal trout streams, Indian lands, commercial airports, jetports for executive aircraft, major public golf courses and indoor rock gyms.

The maps and charts are dramatic throughout. One called "Peopling the West," shows how the nation's other four census regions each sent more people to the interior West than they got back during the period 1990-94 and that more immigrants came from the Western census region, primarily California, than from all the other regions combined. This is a fact most of us know, but to see the portrayal of the net migration of people from West to East with large arrows drawn to proportion leaves an image that is hard to forget.

Data-rich graphics show why the West's "water problem" is more a problem of allocation than availability. According to the atlas, 87 percent of Western water is used by farming. The state-by-state graphics are dramatic, showing that 97 percent of Idaho's water goes to farming, 92 percent in Colorado and over 80 percent even in states with large industrial sectors such as California and Washington.

The atlas also includes information-rich sidebars. These include the Sagebrush Rebellion's "Declaration of County Supremacy"; a brief history of boating in the Grand Canyon along with a graph that shows annual traffic increasing from a couple of thousand per year in the 1960s to more than 20,000 per year beginning in 1986 or so; and many factoids.

Example: "Vail, Colorado has the highest proportion of 'second homes' of any resort towns in the West. A 1996 survey found that 66 percent of Vail's property owners list somewhere else as their principal residence."

The "maps and charts" part of the atlas is outstanding. However, like Ptolemy's Geography, the atlas also has a point of view. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Edward Abbey and the rants of the Monkey Wrench Gang against western development and industrial tourism get favorable treatment. Even the cappuccino cowboys, including media mogul Ted Turner, who owns a 160,000 acre Montana ranchette, seem to come out OK.

People who mine things, make things and grow things -- like William Mulholland, who watered the California desert and built Los Angeles with giant aquaducts -- do not.

But regardless of your view of the politics of the essays, the atlas is an important and well-executed contribution to the literature of the West that should be read by anyone trying to fathom the region's future.