Sidebar by Allen Best
Cities in the Wilderness – December 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Bruce Babbitt, the secretary of Interior in the Clinton administration, hopes to reframe the debate about federal intervention in the West – and the rest of the country.
The federal government, he says, has been a relentless agent of development in the nation. It sped up the settlement of the West in the 19th century by subsidizing operations of the railroads and, in the 20th century, by subsidizing construction of dams and other water operations. More recently, it has subsidized development by building the interstate highway system.