Dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America, the Center supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Reflecting on a Year of Transition and Growth
Idaho's Lava Lake Ranch, taken in September 2012 by Sophomore College Student Annie Kong
As 2012 comes to a close, we at the Bill Lane Center for the American West have much to celebrate.
We hope you'll take a moment to read faculty director David M. Kennedy's letter summing up the year. In addition, you may enjoy the following articles about our work and activities:
- Water Course: a Stanford magazine story on our Sophomore College field course in the Grand Canyon
- Producing a Collaborative Media Fellowship Model at Stanford: a post on the PBS MediaShift blog about our academic-journalistic collaborations
- Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West Moves Into News: a Stanford Report article on our media fellowships and Rural West Initiative
This is a year of leadership transitions for us. Kathy Zonana joined the Center in September as associate director, taking over administrative leadership from Jon Christensen, who has taken up a post at UCLA. The Center remains involved in Jon's CityNature and Year of the Bay projects, and we are grateful to still benefit from his energy and wisdom. Next summer, the distinguished political scientist Bruce E. Cain will take over as faculty director. David Kennedy will remain actively involved in the life of the Center, and we all look forward to the next chapter in our history.
In the meantime, we have a slew of activities planned for winter quarter: lunchtime seminars with political science professor Scott Sagan and visiting scholars Edward Melillo and Ruth Morgan; a talk by award-winning author, New York Times opinion blogger and former Center media fellow Tim Egan; and the Knight-Risser Prize symposium, celebrating High Country News for its feature on pronghorn migration and discussing the state of wildlife journalism.
Details on these events will be forthcoming, and we hope to see you at many of them. Meanwhile, please accept our warm Western wishes for a wonderful holiday season.
Where Scholarship and Journalism Meet
The Bill Lane Center for the American West has always been committed to working with journalists and supporting great reporting on the West. We also believe that the growth of the Internet has increased the potential reach and impact of good journalism, as well as opening new possibilities for enhancing the user experience, like data visualization, interactivity and multimedia. But with the economic challenges facing news organizations in the current era, we are also concerned about the state of reporting on critical issues facing the West.
The Stanford News Service has a story today about the Center's efforts to develop new partnerships and collaborations with journalists, centered around our Media Fellowship program, our original reporting for our Rural West Initiative, and our work developing interactive media projects:
"We have this idea that universities have a real role to play in engaging the public," said Geoff McGhee, the center's creative director for media and communications.
The Center has increasingly been partnering with news agencies, as well as producing its own original reporting. "We can carry the weight that independent news agencies are increasingly unable to carry on their own," McGhee said.
The Center is already well known for bringing together academics on Western topics ranging from wildfire ecology to rural health care. Now, in a process that began with former executive director Jon Christensen and has continued with new associate director Kathy Zonana since her arrival in September, the Center has been bringing journalists to those academics, partnering with news agencies and conducting original reporting on the West.
If you're interested in learning more about our media fellowships and looking at some of the projects we've created in collaboration with news organizations like High Country News, Harper's Magazine, the Texas Tribune and KQED Public Media, see our post on PBS Mediashift, "Producing a Collaborative Media Fellowship Model at Stanford."
Center Co-Hosts State of the West Symposium
Watch complete video from the conference
The Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research co-hosted the second annual State of the West Symposium on November 15. The symposium included panels on political demography (video), the regional economy (video part 1 and part 2), and climate change (video). Luncheon speaker Richard Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, analyzed job creation and other economic indicators from California to Texas (video), and keynote speaker Utah Gov. Gary Herbert advocated a free-market approach to citizens’ desire for affordable clean energy (video).
"Our annual assessment of the fiscal, economic, and political state of the West produced both good and less-than-good news,” says Center director David M. Kennedy. “The West continues to be the nation's most vibrant region, though it has much work to do with respect to energy security, adaptation to climate change, and accelerating demographic transformation. And some parts of the West are healthier than others. We learned that California, in particular, with its chronic fiscal and governance difficulties, is perhaps facing long-term challenges from other states -- notably Texas -- for the mantle of regional leadership."
Large-scale Conservation on Montana's Glaciated Plains
Bigger is better when it comes to conservation efforts on Montana's glaciated plains, writes Michelle Berry, a Center intern this past summer at the American Prairie Reserve. Representing one of the largest conservation efforts in the United States, the Reserve currently spans 274,000 acres, and hopes to expand to more than three million. At the Reserve, Berry completed a 10-week internship researching historical wildlife populations. Her summer findings were recently featured in The National Geographic Society's NewsWatch blog.
Berry writes:
America’s iconic species – bison, pronghorn, elk, wolves, grizzly bears – evolved over tens of thousands of years on a wide-open continent. Over this long period of time, these species became well adapted to environmental “stochasticity,” the highly dynamic and unpredictable nature of their habitat. In fact, the prairie is one of the most dynamic ecosystems in the world.
In Wake of U.S. Election, Center Directors Offer Context and Analysis
As the sun sets on the epic 2012 presidential election cycle, scholars from the Bill Lane Center – past, present, and future – have taken to the media to help Americans, and westerners in particular, make sense of the results. On CNN's home page on Wednesday morning, Center director David M. Kennedy greeted readers with a sobering preview of the next four years in his op-ed, "Obama's victory won't transform America."
Americans may yearn for strong leadership, but in their stubborn contrariness they do not want truly powerful leaders. They may want effective government, but they apparently like divided government even more, when neither party simultaneously controls House, Senate, and presidency -- the situation we've been saddled with for 31 of the last 43 years. So it should not be surprising that Obama's accomplishments marked the narrow limits of the achievable. They triggered a vicious political backlash in the 2010 election, ushered in yet another round of divided government, and may yet prove but short-lived reminders of the young president's aspirations, not permanent features of the American landscape.
Professor Kennedy elaborated today on these thoughts in Bloomberg Views, while our incoming faculty director-designate, Bruce Cain, could be heard on the airwaves assessing the election results on the Wednesday morning edition of KQED Radio's "Forum," the full audio of which can be streamed on our website. Professor Cain was part of a panel that included the veteran political consultant Chris Lehane, and the Bill Lane Center's former executive director, Tammy Frisby of the Hoover Institution, who served as an adviser to the Romney campaign.
Read and hear more on our media and publications page »
Photograph: WCHI News via Flickr
Center Welcomes Harold Montgomery to Advisory Council
Harold Montgomery, who received his bachelor‘s and MBA degrees at Stanford University before founding a Dallas-based electronic payment processing firm, has joined the Advisory Council of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. As a member of the council, Montgomery will help guide the Center as it makes its transition to a new director in 2013, and seeks to expand and refine its work supporting research, teaching, and reporting in the American West.
‘Harold comes from a family with deep roots in Texas and a deep commitment to public service -- as well as abundant connections with Stanford," says Center faculty director David M. Kennedy. "He will bring to our Advisory Council his intimate knowledge of the region‘s history and his passion for its future, and, of course, his matchless business acumen as we plan for the next phase of the Center‘s development.’
Montgomery is the Chairman and CEO of Calpian, which provides electronic payment processing services to retail merchants around the United States. He is a widely known authority in the transaction processing industry, contributing to trade publications and speaking regularly at regional and national conferences. He has been a resource for the Federal Reserve Bank Card Payment Center in Philadelphia, and has testified before Congress as an expert witness on credit card legislation.
He is a native of Dallas, Texas, and currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Communities Foundation of Texas and the Board of St. Mark‘s School of Texas. He has served as President of the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations and Young Audiences of Greater Dallas. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and was a member of the Young Presidents‘ Organization from 1991 to 2009.
"Year of the Bay" Launches with the Sail of the Alma
Photograph by Madeline Weeks
2013 is the "Year of the Bay," bringing together the America’s Cup yacht races, the opening of a new span of the Bay Bridge, the 150th Anniversary of the Port of San Francisco, along with dozens of events, museum exhibitions, publications, and media projects celebrating San Francisco Bay.
On November 1st, the Alma, a historic scow schooner, sailed from the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park’s pier to Hunters Point, the site where she was built in1891. This also marked the launch of an online crowdsourcing history project about the bay by Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project is a collaboration with Historypin.com, a nonprofit technology company whose applications enable millions of people to come together, from across different generations, cultures and places, to share small glimpses of the past and to build up the huge, diverse story of human history. The public is invited to participate in this project by digging up old photos, letters, maps, and other documents about the bay.
Many organizations are coming together to celebrate the Year of the Bay, including the California Historical Society, Heyday Books, the Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco Public Library, the Bancroft Library, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Golden Gate Audubon, the EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many others.
Learn more about the Year of the Bay project »
Jon Christensen is the former executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West.
High Country News Report on Pronghorn Migration Wins 2012 Knight-Risser Prize
Photograph by Joe Riis
Judges have awarded the 2012 Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism to "Perilous Passages," a High Country News report by Emilene Ostlind, photographer and biologist Joe Riis, and contributors Mary Ellen Hannibal and Cally Carswell. Including graphics, maps, video, and striking nature photography, the report gives readers a first-hand view of the pronghorns' journey along a 120-mile route through Wyoming that is studded with obstacles, from roads and fences to the region's booming natural gas fields.
The contest also awarded a special citation to the Seattle Times for its report on the Elwha Dam removal on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, the largest such project in North American history.
The $5,000 prize, which is jointly awarded by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, will be presented at a Knight-Risser Prize Symposium on environmental journalism, to be held in 2013.
Read more at the Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism »
Websites Help California and Washington Voters Understand Ballot Measures
A century after progressive reforms brought the referendum and initiative process to the West, voters still enjoy the privilege — and bear the challenge — of wielding the levers of government. In 2012, California and Washington voters face a daunting array of ballot measures, from education financing to marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage to food labeling. For those who haven't voted early, there's still time to get familiar with the proposals, the issues, and where various groups stand on them.
California Choices is an online resource guide that enables interested voters to get concise descriptions of each proposition, read nonpartisan analyses, browse opinion polls, and consult a handy matrix of which newspapers, civic organizations, unions, and political parties endorse those measures. You can make your own choices and share them with others through social media. California Choices is the result of a collaboration among Next10, the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego, Cal State Sacramento, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West's California Constitutional Reform project.
The Living Voters Guides for Washington State and California take a more personal approach, enabling users to pin notes to ballot measure descriptions, arguing their reasons for and against each proposal. Those who prefer not to express themselves in writing can use a slider to indicate the degree to which they support or oppose a particular measure. You can also "subscribe" to measures to get email updates as additional users share their positions. The Living Voters Guide, created by the Seattle City Club and the Engage Project at the University of Washington, also includes local-level propositions within Washington state.
Learn more at CaliforniaChoices.org, Cali.LivingVotersGuide.org and Wash.LivingVotersGuide.org »
