Ramona and I created Gallatin Writers more than a decade ago. Our goal was to foster sensitive but analytically sound analysis of problems and opportunities in our emerging West. With generous support from the Fanwood Foundation and in cooperation with Yellowstone Public Radio, Gallatin Writers and FREE are again sponsoring the Wallace Stegner Essay Contest for college and AP students.

We are offering three prizes for 2,000-word essays: $1,000, $750, and $500. Don Snow, Mellon Professor of Environmental Humanities at Whitman College, has worked with me to define this year’s challenge. Here it is, mainly in Don’s words.

Stegner claimed he was born to write one story -- that of the “boomer” and the “nester” on the western frontier. “My father was a boomer, a gambler, a rainbow-chaser, as footloose as a tumbleweed in a windstorm. My mother was always hopefully, hopelessly, trying to nest. Like many western Americans, especially the poorer kids, I was born on wheels.”

Throughout his life and work, Stegner focused on the West’s boomer mentality. In the early days, it herded Indians onto reservations, then repeatedly shrunk the borders. In the federal reclamation projects that took over when the market knew better, boomers converted prairie to potatoes and 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. That the ecological results were often catastrophic was a fact that enraged Stegner and ruled much of his later work -- both his writing and his political activism.

But there was a quieter strain, too, and it led him to a useful observation about the strident opposition to change: “One of the things that marks people like that, it seems to me, is an unwillingness to accept or understand change, and also an unwillingness to understand or accept the responsibilities that go with the change….”

Stegner was both an observer and a prophet of change in the American West. Perhaps more than any other writer, 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 issued a series of warnings, and sometimes offered a pessimistic vision of the future. But in the end, Stegner held out great hope: “The West is still nascent, still forming, and that is where much of its excitement comes from. It has a shine on it. Despite its mistakes, it isn’t tired. Even the dubious achievements of the boomers and the raiders reflect an energy that doesn’t know what it means to be licked or to give up.”

In his most famous and oft-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 in healing the marriage between the boomer and the nester. Today’s successful “boomer” is an entrepreneur -- social, environmental, or political as well as financial. The nester remains the quiet force who builds without destroying, and stays without soiling the nest.

In this contest, we’re looking for imaginative essays that reconcile the roles of boomer and nester. For example, identify the constructive potential and accomplishments of environmentalists who recognize the positive potential of market forces, the danger of relying on governmental agencies to make things right, and the importance of recognizing the immutable forces of human nature.

What shapes might entrepreneurship take, and what new niches might it find? Sketch a reconciliation between the boomer and the nester and imagine a responsible culture and economy in the American West; when we finally achieve “a society to match its scenery.” For more information visit Gallatin Writers' web site.