Looking Back at a Productive 2014
Photograph: Snow in Yosemite Valley, Dec. 13, 2014 (Christopher Michel via Flickr)
Along with the Stanford University campus, The Bill Lane Center for the American West shut down on Friday, December 19 for winter recess until January 5. As we approach the end of 2014, we offer the following reflections from the Center's faculty director, Professor Bruce E. Cain.
The Bill Lane Center for the American West continues to flourish, thanks to the generosity and wise counsel of its Advisory Council members and friends. Your support enables our many activities on behalf of Stanford’s students and community. Capping a notable year, the Eccles family established a $4 million gift to endow the Center’s directorship. I and my successors will henceforth be known as the Spence and Cleone Eccles Family Director. Among the many benefits of this gift, the Center will be able to perpetuate and expand the annual Rural West conference and related projects. Launched by the Center’s founding director, David M. Kennedy, the Rural West Initiative promotes education, study and outreach about this often-neglected but critical portion of our region. The Eccles gift will also enable us to deepen our network with other universities in western states.
The Center’s Advisory Council has been strengthened by the addition of two new members: Bob Ducommun and Martha Wyckoff. Bob is a fourth-generation Californian and a 1973 graduate of Stanford (majoring in history). He is a director of Ducommun Incorporated, which is the oldest ongoing business in California. It was started in Los Angeles as a general store and trade station by his great-grandfather in 1849. Bob assures us that he will be in training this winter on the streets of New York for our annual Stanford to the Sea hike. Martha is a Seattle-based community investor who contributes her time, energy and resources to land conservation, the arts, the environment and civic engagement. She served on the national board of the Trust for Public Land from 1996 to 2009, and is currently an emeritus board member. In addition, Martha has embarked on a project to co-author a full life biography of John A. McCone, a notable California industrialist and 20th-century public servant.
Last year at this time, we were preparing an ambitious interdisciplinary course on the American West. The new course, launched in spring quarter, was an instant success, attracting over 100 undergraduates. Taught by five senior professors in such divergent fields as English, art history, history, political science, and civil and environmental engineering, it examined distinctive western themes such as water scarcity and economic boom-and-bust cycles from different disciplinary perspectives. We will be offering this course again in spring 2015. We also designed and launched a new Sophomore College class entitled Energy in the West. During this three-week course, held just before the beginning of fall quarter, students learned about different types of fossil-fuel and green-energy technologies, and how government policies shape their development. After a week of on-campus lectures, the class went to Wyoming, the Energy State, visiting policy makers and energy sites on a 1,500-mile journey over a two-week period. Planning has already begun for a course next year that will focus on energy in the Southwest.
Many of Stanford’s talented undergraduates try to have at least one experience undertaking original research before they graduate. Some are testing out the idea of pursuing a PhD, but most are seeking valuable skills that can be used in the modern workplace. Last year, 22 students worked for the Center as research assistants on the following projects: the history and efficacy of the California Coastal Commission, an analysis of state water plans, digital cartographic accompaniments to an exhibition of Carleton Watkins photographs at the Cantor Arts Center, a Grand Canyon digital humanities project, Native American tribal governance, the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, California conservation history, humans and biodiversity in Stanford’s green spaces, and geo-engineering the American West. This year, several of these projects will continue, plus we have added research assistantships on parole hearings for California's “lifer” inmates and on defining fragmentation in metropolitan communities.
Many Stanford undergraduates also try out possible future careers via summer internships. The Center’s internship program specializes in western U.S. opportunities. This past year, we offered nine internships, at Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, Henry’s Fork Foundation, Heyday Institute, Peninsula Open Space Trust, San Francisco Estuary Institute, and the National Conference of State Legislatures. All of these will continue in summer 2015, plus we will have two interns at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area for the first time in five years.
The Center continues to promote research on and public understanding of important issues in the American West. Our faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates collaborated on many topics, including aquifer management on the U.S.-Mexico border, groundwater management and water scarcity issues, the effects of coastal management by the California Coastal Commission, and efforts to create a more regional approach to water management. A Center hallmark is addressing important real-world problems with high-quality research to inform policy making. To that end, the Center complements its research with conferences and symposia that bring local officials together with academic researchers to assess current policy problems. Our marquee event is the State of the West Symposium, co-sponsored annually with the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. This year’s symposium focused on water and energy infrastructure issues with a keynote address by the current head of the Western Governors’ Association, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval.
Our public outreach included a series of five multimedia articles entitled “Understanding California’s Groundwater”, developed in conjunction with Water in the West, a joint program of the Bill Lane Center and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. The series contributed to public discussion in a year when California enacted its first legislation to regulate groundwater and its voters passed a $7.5 billion water bond; The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog called it “an invaluable package of analysis, graphics and recommendations on groundwater management.” In conjunction with the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford, we awarded the 2013 Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism to Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee for “The Killing Agency,” an investigation of the federal agency Wildlife Services’ practices. The related symposium focused on the current opportunities and challenges for investigative environmental journalism in an era of shrinking news budgets and governmental restrictions on access to information. The Center also awarded a media fellowship to Mary Ellen Hannibal, author of The Spine of the Continent, to develop a six-part series on “extinction’s greatest hits” that is slated to run in The New York Times. Mary Ellen discussed extinction at one of our popular lunchtime talks this year; other speakers covered subjects ranging from California environmental history to farming on the Ogallala Aquifer to magazine coverage of environmental issues in the 1960s and ’70s. We also sponsored a well-attended film series on western water issues, entitled Ripple Effects.
If you are in the area, please feel free to stop by the Center. We wish you a very Happy New Year, and hope to see you soon.
