Marking the Sparrow's Fall: Wallace Stegner's American West.

In Lasso the Wind, Timothy Egan chronicles his journey through the "New West" of hot tubs and espresso bars. What's discouraging, though, is how little has really changed since the '40s and '50s when the late Wallace Stegner began writing the essays that his son Page has collected in Marking the Sparrow's Fall. For generations, the story of the West has been the story of exploitation and extraction.

Egan sees some signs of hope in his tour of eleven Western states. Wolves are howling again in Yellowstone, the Nez Perce have been welcomed back to the Wallowas. But occasional ecological victories pale beside a Las Vegas or a Phoenix growing out of control on the desert floor. Even the vast public lands of the West are now overgrazed and overcut. What Egan calls the "narrative" of the West hasn't been changed but fulfilled. If the reactionaries have withdrawn to the woods, if there are more computer chips than cow chips in the West, if 86 percent of Westerners now live in cities, it's because the habits of the past have played themselves out. The mines are mined, the forests felled, and the only people who can afford to live on a ranch are stand-up comedians and Hollywood directors. Whether by cattle or by soccer morns, the land has been steadily consumed ever since we got here.

Stegner announced the problem years ago in his wonderfully dignified prose. What defines the West is "the test of aridity," a test that we are always failing. "People are everywhere and in trouble wherever they are," he wrote, largely because huge numbers of us insist on living in a desert that can only sustain a few, sucking up all the available water and then rerouting it from elsewhere until everything is out of balance. "There are too many of us," Stegner bluntly says. "We will either starve or strangle in our own wastes." And then still more bluntly: "conservation means survival."

What's threatened finally for Stegner isn't merely our economic survival - although for him this is a fact so obvious that he can only despair about the thickheadedness of the many people who choose to ignore it. What's threatened, too, is our spiritual survival, as he first put it in 1960 in his eloquent "Wilderness Letter," reprinted in Marking the Sparrow's Fall and reason enough to celebrate this sometimes uneven miscellany of pieces. "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed." The landscape shaped our character, and as that landscape disappears our inner lives become increasingly barren and narrow.

Egan's prose in Lasso is occasionally as glitzy as some of the places he describes, especially when read against the measured cadences of Stegner, but the point he makes is depressingly the same. Traveling, as he says, with a fly rod and running shoes, he encounters everything from the "Wacko West" of the UFO hunters and the survivalists to the literary West of the celebrities and the nature writers to the "bloated urban monster" of Las Vegas, our representative melanoma. Although Egan's tone of this is more like Tom Wolfe than Wallace Stegner, Stegner is the grandfatherly presence behind these very postmodern essays, the figure that Egan alludes to more often than any other.

And ultimately, too, for Egan as for Stegner, the struggle is even more spiritual than economic. "If land and religion are what people most often kill each other over," Egan says, "then the West is different only in that the land is the religion. As such, the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession." Egan's spiritual longing is perhaps clearest in his evocative essay on Acomoa, an ancient Anazsazi city of masoned stone high on a plateau in New Mexico. His forced comparison between the Palace of Popes in Avignon, France, and this "city in the sky," this "Place That Always Was," betrays the superficial theology of many contemporary writers. The tendency is to fall back on unconsidered stereotypes about Christianity and sentimental oversimplifications of Native American religion. But the longing is real - for a landscape of renewal, a landscape where we can contact whatever is beyond us. Underneath the slickness, Egan is just as rhapsodic as Wordsworth and Thoreau, although he has no more illusions than Stegner about the effect that writers might have on public consciousness.

The crazies are holed up in their mountain shacks, watching old John Wayne movies on their gas-powered VCRs. We yuppies are bumper-to-bumper on the freeways, Jeep Grand Cherokees as far as the eye can see, Garth Brooks sounding on every private stereo. And outside, all around us, the world continues to bleed.

Chris Anderson is professor of English at Oregon State University and author of several books, including Edge Effects: Notes from an Oregon Forest (Iowa, 1993). He is also a Catholic deacon.