JIM STILES: 30 YEARS 30 YEARS OF AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE | By Bill Keshlear

Jim Stiles has been editor of the Canyon Country Zephyr for 30 years.

UPDATE: Portions of this were published as an op-ed in a print edition of The Salt Lake Tribune; it never appeared online. In 2019, when this was originally published, Stiles' Canyon Country Zephyr went live six times a years with fresh stuff. Its current online presence is here. I was a contributor to the publication for several years. 

Stiles practiced the kind of "point-of-view" environmental journalism expressed by novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer Wendell Berry: "… this is what is wrong with the conservation movement. ... To the conservation movement, it is only production that causes environmental degradation; the consumption that supports the production is rarely acknowledged to be at fault. The ideal of the run-of-the-mill conservationist is to impose restraints upon production without limiting consumption or burdening the consciences of consumers.”
 

Many environmentalists, especially those whose activism is funded by giant corporations and foundation, didn't like his point of view (but many did).

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Once upon a time, many newspaper editors believed they were “watchdogs” of the common good, called to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They took particular pride in tweaking the powerful and their sense of privilege.

It was mostly mythology. Yet sometimes a watchdog comes along, barks and bites and just won’t let go. In the April/May edition of the Canyon Country Zephyr, editor and co-publisher Jim Stiles celebrated 30 years of playing that watchdog role southeastern Utah.

The print version of the Zephyr was one of the best “indies” in the western United States. It was a one-man show that had a long run. Missoula, Montana, filmmakers attempted to capture a bit of its attitude in the 2008 film “Brave New West.”

The movie was screened mainly at film festivals in 19 states, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, over 70 locations. It was shown in Ogden, Moab and twice over the Utah Education Network (UEN) but never found a mainstream audience in the state. Among public TV stations with audiences in the nation’s big urban media markets, including Utah’s KUED at the University of Utah, only San Francisco’s KQED broadcast it.

You can still watch it or buy it online.

“It was a foolish notion, but what is the point of living without foolish notions? And for a while, Moabites did pursue their visions in ways today’s residents can only … well … dream,” Stiles told Todd Wilkinson, founder of Mountain West Journal, in a 2017 interview for an article headlined “The New West: One of the toughest local papers in the West perseveres against change.”

Stiles writes and publishes point-of-view journalism and deeply felt personal essays that defend a rural way of life he believes is under attack by a formidable array of outdoor recreation- and tourism-oriented businesses and real-estate developers.

And more, much more:

• From Stacy Young, environmental negligence: “On election night 2016, the decision to designate a large national monument in San Juan County went from being a questionable theoretical proposition to a clear act of environmental negligence. There was no plausible scenario at that point in which the new monument would be implemented with any enthusiasm. A more realistic expectation was for the catastrophe that has unfolded.”

• From Tonya Stiles, beautifully crafted essays: “You can learn that you never needed to leave home, because home will follow you on dreadful plastic straw-ed legs wherever you travel. Or you can choose the crummy old decaying roads, where the concrete breaks off in chunks and falls into the grass. The roads that go out of everybody’s way. You can open the sticky doors to old pawn shops, laundromats. You can sleep warily in motel rooms with unvacuumed carpets. Eat from ungentrified taco stands. You can feel the fear that comes from walking into a world that isn’t your own. A world that doesn’t care about you, or accommodate for you. And, in doing so, you can give the universe a chance to do its work. Whether that work will land you among the choirs of angels or face-down in the gutter–well, nothing is promised.”

• From Jim Stiles, media malpractice related to national and regional coverage of all things Bears Ears: “Does the network and the producer, and the reporter, in this case CNN’s Van Jones, have an obligation to know and understand all the facts related to the story, even the ones that fail to fit their preconceived agenda? Do they have a duty as honest journalists to challenge comments by the selected participants when they don’t accurately reflect the truth? Can a journalist omit information that provides the very ‘balance’ that is being sought?”

• From Harvey Leake, historical nuggets: “From the 1890s to the 1930s, my great-grandfather, John Wetherill, outfitted and guided many parties on pack trips into the wilds of the Colorado Plateau, far beyond any traces of modern civilization. … Their destinations were often well-known archaeological or geological wonders of the region, such as ancient Native American cliff dwellings or the incomparable Rainbow Natural Bridge, but some explorers chose to venture into terra incognita in search of theretofore unknown treasures.”

• Staples from Jim Stiles, photography, ramblings and musings of a dear friend, Herb Ringer: “He blessed me with the kind of friendship that rarely exists across generations, like a very special love between father and son. And, in fact, because Herb never had children, he once asked me if I could ‘fill in’ as the son he never had. I always told him it was an honor. He also bestowed upon me the role of ‘keeper’ of his memories, magnificently told via the extraordinary collection of words and images he assembled in a lifetime.”

• And I’ve contributed a few times: “Taos (N.M.) Pueblo, the Navajo Nation and other tribes also have recognized the downside of tourism and commercial development: overloaded infrastructure, damage to nature and threats to their culture and heritage. Each tribe, given their unique circumstances, found the wherewithal to fend off a bit of the onslaught … by limiting or even banning tourism and related commercial activities, regulating the supply of accommodations and preventing infrastructure development.”

One of several slogans Stiles has embraced for the Zephyr is “Hopelessly clinging to the past.” It could also be “Sound-bite journalism not practiced here.”

Glen Canyon Damn: A History (And the Rest of the Story)…by Jim Stiles. From an environmentalist’s doodle to the cover of Edward Abbey’s “The Journey Home.”

The founder of The Zephyr  is an acolyte of Edward Abbey. He published the iconoclastic writer’s last original story in the newspaper’s premier edition. Abbey died as those first Zephyrs were birthed by ink-stained wretches in Cortez, Colorado.

Stiles reflected on that day a few years ago: “A couple days before I carried the layout boards to Cortez, I’d heard a rumor that Abbey was ill. The same rumor had hovered over us for years, in fact, but Abbey had always kept his health issues private. In January, I called the Abbeys and learned he’d had ‘an episode’ but was on the mend.

“So at 5 a.m. on March 14, 1989, I packed the layouts and my checkbook into my 1963 Volvo and drove the 120 miles to Cortez News. It took about five hours to produce Volume 1 Number 1. I worried about typos and scrambled layouts, knowing that once it rolled off the presses there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to fix them. By noon, The 2,000 Zephyrs were printed, boxed and loaded into my Volvo. The trunk and back seat and passenger seat were stacked to the ceiling. I barely had room to sit.

“I got back to Moab after 2 p.m. and had just unloaded the first box when a friend of mine, Jean Akin, pulled up to the curb. ‘Did you hear about Ed Abbey?’ she asked. I shook my head. Jean said, ‘Edward Abbey died this morning.’ … I couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely paralyzed. …

“In late May, a larger public memorial service was organized by Ken Sleight, Ken Sanders, Terry Tempest Williams and me. My job was to find a site for the event. I inquired about a location at Arches but when I was hit with permit applications and fees and a requirement to provide Porta Potties, I decided Abbey would prefer a different venue. I finally picked a site on the mesa above Arches but outside the park.

“In the early hours before the service, I couldn’t sleep and so I drove up Moab Canyon at three in the morning to watch the night sky. All through the night, a slow but steady stream of car lights climbed the old road. Mourners came from all over the West, from all over the country. By the time the service began, a thousand people had come to say goodbye to Edward Abbey.

“Ken Sleight was there. Doug Peacock. Dave Foreman. Terry Tempest Williams. Perhaps Abbey’s best friend, John DePuy, was too moved to speak. Later in the afternoon, I took Foreman to my favorite spot at Arches — Abbey’s Arch, the rock span Ed had found in 1956 and that I had re-discovered 20 years later. Less than a week after our hike, Foreman and other Earth Firsters! were arrested in a government sting operation.”

(Illustration: Jim Stiles)

Stiles' worldview had begun to shift  in the decade or so after the death of Abbey. His 2007 manifesto of sorts, “Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed,” marked a divorce from Salt Lake City- and Moab-based environmentalists.

Current members of Utah’s environmental community and their allies aren’t particularly receptive to the kind of criticism that a decade ago or two or three was commonplace – especially coming from the likes of Stiles, who refuses to give up the ghost of Abbey: namely, that a reliance on corporate largesse threatens the raison d’être of the movement. As a result, Stiles has been vilified in print and become a pariah in Moab.

Here’s an example taken from a profile of Stiles published in 2006 by High Country News:

“This all reached an argumentative crescendo earlier this year when Stiles submitted a column to the High Country News opinion syndicate, Writers on the Range, chastising SUWA for, of all things, having such a large war chest. According to tax documents Stiles hunted down, in 2004 SUWA had almost $5 million in ‘net assets and fund balances.’ He argued that, rather than letting its money sit in the bank, SUWA ought to disperse some of it to other, less-funded environmental groups that are tackling New West issues.

“In a response published in The Salt Lake Tribune, (Scott) Groene (executive director of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance) called Stiles the desert country’s ‘own Barney Fife. He’s worth having around, even if we have to clean up after him now and again.’ Groene said SUWA’s ‘rainy day fund’ was similar to those of comparable environmental groups, and said, ‘True enough, for almost the first time in its 23-year history, SUWA can pay its bills.’ ”

(Groene’s 2016 salary was $113,017, according to SUWA’s IRS Form 990.)

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Choose your parable to describe Stiles. I am partial to the little Dutch boy who sticks his finger in a dike to prevent inevitable flooding or Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Maybe the child who, when the emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, dares to say, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all.”