Tribute: Utah’s Green Dissident has passed on

Saying goodbye to a brilliant, and sometimes tortured, non-conformist

James Ogden (Jim) Stiles, passed away at his home in Coldwater, Kansas on March 11, 2024, at the age of 74. A brilliant writer with an acerbic wit and self-effacing demeanor, Stiles spent fifty years of his life working in, fretting over, and fighting for Utah’s back country and open spaces. Having moved as a young adult from his home state of Kentucky to the Moab, Utah area, Stiles was an Edward Abbey brand of environmentalist. Abbey and Stiles became acquainted during the Moab years, and Stiles, with his mischievous mode of drawing, illustrated Abbey’s 2nd book. “The Journey Home.”

Over the years, Utah’s lands and its people began to shape Stiles’ personal philosophy and his opinion of the mainstream environmental movement. His interactions with the ranchers, farmers, miners, roughnecks and local business owners in Moab taught him that the traditional wealth-producing natural resources industries in southeastern were not destructive monsters as portrayed by “greens,” and that livestock, especially the dominant cattle herds that had been grazing in the area for 100 years, were essential to keeping Utah’s lands healthy and relatively wildfire-free.

Stiles published the Canyon Country Zephyr in print beginning in 1989, and slowly switched to an online presence in the early 2000s. In 2021, Stiles became a regular contributor to RANGE magazine. Stiles entertained, bewildered, angered, and captivated countless readers over a span of 4 decades with his prolific articles on topics ranging from the future of Glen Canyon Dam to the mysterious and tragic circumstances surrounding the 1961 death of Dennise Sullivan near Dead Horse Point. His book, “Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed” encompassed a visionary warning about the impact of urbanizing the arid West.

Beloved by many, and despised by a few, Stiles earned respect from people on all sides of the environmental issue for his honesty and courage in saying what needed to be said, and defending a traditional way of life that, if he had his way, would go on forever. Jim Stiles is missed by all who loved him, and will be recognized always for his unique perspectives, intensive and precise research, and passionate efforts to preserve the West and its natural and human treasures.

“Green Dissident,” an introductory profile of James Ogden Stiles, was published in the Summer 2021 issue of RANGE magazine.

Green Dissident

Jim Stiles is an environmentalist and philosopher wandering the lonely wastelands of gray area in a fixedly black-and-white world.

By Marjorie Haun

Verbose—”I can’t sneeze in 1,200 words”—and a lightning rod for controversy, Jim Stiles is probably the most eloquent, yet unjustly maligned nonconformist in southeastern Utah. Sporting a tumult of graying hair, unchanged in five decades but for the color, it’s hard to say how old Stiles is, or what generation he was born into. But his personal timeline gives us a hint. While a youth, a reading of Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” evoked in him a desire to preserve Utah’s wilderness and compelled his move out West from Kentucky. He says: “I had been out west many times over the previous five years but was determined to make the move permanent in the fall of 1975. Southeast Utah was my intended home.”

     Following in Abbey’s footsteps, Stiles went to work for the National Park Service at Arches National Park, where he earned his ranger credentials. ”I started as a volunteer at Arches in early December. In March 1976 they hired me as a seasonal ranger. I worked out of the Devils Garden campground and lived in the old trailer there for the next decade.”

     Although Stiles became known as an environmental activist, he found himself recoiling from the rigid dogma of the early green movement because of his genuine friendships with and concern for old-time locals whose jobs depended on access to resources. In 1985, Stiles was asked to join the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) board of directors, despite having never joined the organization. He explains: “I went to a board meeting in Boulder, Utah. Among other board members was the rancher from West Utah, Cecil Garland. We both sensed that we really didn’t fit, and both of us resigned within six months.”

     Pained by the contradictions of the environmental movement and the persistent misgivings of rural Utahans, in 1989 Stiles started his own monthly newspaper. “The Canyon Country Zephyr” would be a balanced alternative to local newspapers and increasingly propagandistic environmental publications. As publisher, editor, chief copywriter and illustrator, Stiles’ paper quickly gained a following. After a few years, the Zephyr had a bimonthly circulation of 15,000. Stiles wanted readers to see all sides of an issue. “After I started the Zephyr in the early 1990s,” Stiles explains, “I met Scott Groene and he offered to contribute to the Zephyr as a SUWA representative. I agreed and from May 1991 to December 2000, either he or a representative of SUWA would compile their monthly list of environmental concerns for southeast Utah.”

     Stiles gave those with economic interests the same consideration. “My idea was to create this forum where everyone could have a voice, and everyone could express an opinion. If I had a bias, I would admit it. Every month I did interviews with the county commission and the city council, as well as the Western Association of Land Users. And I did interviews with environmental groups. I had kind of a point/counterpoint going.”

Cancelled by Big Green

“I always thought the biggest problem for both sides is that each has an inflexible, idealistic view. The environmentalist looks at the scenery and thinks it must be preserved at all costs no matter what the economic impact is. But on the other side, the people whose lives depend on it don’t see any room for compromise at all if it’s going to cost a job,” Stiles contends. “It seems that these days with the environmentalists, they want as much as they can get, and they don’t care what the economic impact is.”

     It’s this kind of nuanced attitude that got Stiles kicked out of southern Utah’s elite green club. He recounts an interaction with SUWA’s Scott Groene: “I was talking to Scott Groene about how I had come to really like the people in these small towns who had jobs that depend on natural resources development. I said, ‘Most of these people are really nice.’ Groene looked at me and said, ‘We are here to pass a wilderness bill. Nice doesn’t have anything to do with it.’ It was that black and white for him, whereas with me it was always complicated. And it troubled me.” He goes on: “Over time I still favored a wilderness bill, but I was concerned about what kind of impact it would have, especially when the Red Rock Wilderness Bill jumped from 5.7 million acres to almost 10. I told him, ‘This is crazy. You’re going to lose support from the more moderate people.’”

     As greens sought another way to win over rural Utahans by monetizing the scenery and embracing big tourism, Stiles never strayed from his devotion to the wilderness. He says: “Though they often wrote about environmental impacts from the energy industry or grazing, in the early days SUWA also paid attention to the impacts from Industrial Tourism. But in the late 1990s I began to see a shift. In 2000 I ended SUWA’s Zephyr participation when they refused to oppose the operation of a commercial backcountry company that was causing environmental damage in Arches National Park. The company was also a proud business supporter of SUWA.”

     In 2001, an even greater schism opened between Stiles and mainstream greens when he published an essay in the Zephyr, “It’s Time to Look in the Mirror.” He wrote: “How can we continue to condemn the irresponsible and unacceptable behavior of people [who] we believe are damaging our irreplaceable natural resources, while ignoring or playing down the ever-growing destruction caused by us! Nonmotorized recreationists—hikers, group hikers, bikers, climbers, rafters, kayakers, runners, action tour groups—all those enlightened sportsters who wrap themselves in the environmental flag and send money to the Sierra Club while wreaking their own kind of enviro-havoc?”

     Instead of inspiring introspection, however, Stiles’ article triggered venom. “I never really had the frank and honest conversation I hoped that the story would generate. Instead, I seem to have become their mortal enemy,” he reveals. In 2006, Jim Stiles became one of the first victims of cancel culture. His blaspheming of Industrial Tourism—a term coined by Edward Abbey—led to a bruising war of words. In an op-ed published by the Salt Lake Tribune, Scott Groene dismissed Stiles as Moab’s, “own Barney Fife.” And other members of SUWA went to work smearing Stiles’ character by painting him as a “crank” and a dislodged relic with deep psychological issues.

     Stiles’ “offending” op-ed contained these passages. You decide:

     “We in the environmental community essentially declared war on the traditional abuses of public land—grazing, logging, mining—the extractive industries that have honestly wreaked havoc on the red rock country for a century. There were so few of us here then, just a handful by today’s standards, that our own impacts on the land—our non-motorized recreational activities—didn’t worry any of us.

     “But it should have…

     “To me, we environmentalists have failed to come to terms with the changes and grim promise of a very crowded future. We must be willing to come forth and say: WE ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.”

Edward Abbey

Stiles’ philosophy was shaped in large part by Edward Abbey, and after stalking his favorite author for a time, the two eventually met and struck up a friendship. “I read ‘Desert Solitaire’ in the early ’70s and was an ardent follower.

     “I read that he lived in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and in October 1975 I made the long pilgrimage down to the Arizona Strip in northern Utah to say hello. Except he didn’t live there. Nobody did. He just liked to say that he lived there on the jacket covers of his books. Eventually I made my way back to Moab and later discovered that he lived in a ranch-style home on Spanish Valley Drive. I finally met him at a poker game at the Old Ranch House restaurant north of town.”

     According to Stiles, Abbey was more of a frontiersman than a zealot. “Abbey did not like the rapid changes that were occurring in the world and especially in his beloved West,” Stiles points out. “He often complained about growth and change and would say, ‘I don’t want to keep things as they are. I want things to be as they were.’ Really, more than anything, Ed was an anachronism.”

     Underscoring clashing sentiments of native westerners and ex-urban transplants, Stiles explains: “Most old westerners hate Ed Abbey, who once said: ‘If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule. That was the American Dream.’ Despite such sentiments, they still despise him.” Stiles goes on: “Most new westerners love Ed Abbey, even though they despise half the people Ed honored in the preceding quote. They’ve read all his books and possess cherished signed copies but understand far less than they realize.”

     In an October 2011 Zephyr editorial, Stiles spotlighted Abbey’s surprising libertarian streak. He wrote: “More than 40 years ago, in a world so different from today as to almost be unrecognizable, Edward Abbey wrote about the need for wilderness and offered this unique suggestion: ‘The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. The Grand Canyon…may be required to function as a base for guerilla warfare against tyranny.’ Oh, the irony. Almost half a century later, Abbey’s rant sounds more like a passage from a Tea Party Survival Manual; yet one would be hard pressed to find a Utah Tea Party member willing to support even one acre of congressionally mandated legislation to designate ‘wilderness.’”

     Though friends for some 15 years, Stiles worked with Abbey on only one occasion. “I had given him a drawing of Glen Canyon Dam after the ‘precision earthquake’ and in June 1976 he recommended to his publisher that I illustrate his forthcoming book of essays, ‘The Journey Home,’” he recalls. “That was the only time I really worked with Ed. He contributed an original story for the first issue of the Zephyr. We went to press on March 14, 1989. He died the same day.” Stiles broods, “I think Ed is badly misunderstood by both the Left and the Right.”

Moving On 

In 2007, Stiles published his book, “Brave New West,” a droll and scathing takedown of Utah’s big tourism industry and its environmentalist enablers. Rife with his surly illustrations of a “morphing” Moab, the book won Stiles new fans, but further alienated him from Utah’s mainstream greens.

     After four decades in southeastern Utah, Stiles left the desert where solitude has given way to millions of preoccupied tourists and headed back east in 2010. He settled in friendly a tiny ranching and farming town in Kansas. In 2011, the once reclusive bachelor married Tonya Audyn Morton, a younger woman—but how much younger, it’s hard to tell—talented writer and eager partner in parenting Stiles’ only child, the Zephyr. In 2020, Tonya took over as publisher.

                Like Stiles, the Zephyr is now less involved with current events and controversies of the day. Though some of its articles connect to contemporary cultural and political problems, today’s Zephyr reads like a trip into the good old days of the West, before the world was changed by big tourism and social media likes. In “It’s Time to Look in the Mirror,” Stiles reasoned: “It’s time for a new line in the dust, one that makes sense and recognizes the common bond that many of us share but try to deny because the labels don’t fit. To hell with labels. Environmentalists v. anti-environmentalists. Liberals v. Conservatives. Urban v Rural. These labels are just getting in the way and preventing any kind of united front against the one true threat that all of us who love the West should unite against. To me, that threat is Greed.”

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