William Riebsame, General Editor, and James Robb, Director of Cartography

Atlas of the New West

An atlas for our times that makes sense of the fast-paced transformation of the American West.

The West. Americans hold dearly to old ideas of it as a unique, wild place of majestic space, ranching and mining, small-town life, and opportunity.

And so it can still be—but rarely. The West's central reality nowadays is that it is new.

This newness has never been so well presented in this book's forty-six full-color, three-dimensional, computer-generated maps; its two brilliant essays; its informative sidebars; its boxed information (for example, how the first seven wolves introduced into Yellowstone died); and its dozens of charts and graphs, highlighting:

• The New West's fortunes now ride on tourism and a postindustrial, high-tech economy.
• The West is America's fastest urbanizing region.
• Rodeos, dude ranches, and open range now abide with sprawling cities, ski resorts, plugged-in telecommuters, micro-breweries, and mountain biking meccas.
• Illustrations show old Western battles taking new forms—who owns what land? who controls what water rights? and how much development is too much?
• Gold-medal trout streams, nuclear-waste sites, jet ports, regional writers, reintroduced wolves, Rocky Mountain and Sierra Nevadan economies . . .