Is the West Ready?
BY BRODEN MOCK | FEBRUARY 20TH, 2026
In 1890, the United States Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed. This announcement symbolized the end of westward expansion and marked a turning point for the American West. The region was no longer a place defined by movement, but by permanence. The West, now “complete,” was left to shape its own future, its culture, economy, and identity, within the broader story of the nation. Nearly 140 years later, in 2026, that future has once again become a subject of serious debate among historians, policymakers, and the people who call the West home. What exactly comes next for the American West?
This question is not new. It has surfaced repeatedly across American history, reshaped by each generation’s crises and transformations. Yet for me, as a life born Westerner, the question sharpened after watching Eddington (Aster, 2025), a film that examines the American West in a moment of profound transition. The film presents the region as a place where social change, environmental strain, and cultural identity collide in not pretty ways, where the physical landscape itself seems to push back against the people who inhabit it. Eddington suggests that the West is not simply changing, but accelerating toward an uncertain future, driven by forces that may be outpacing our ability to manage them.
Since 1945, the Interior West has undergone three major transformative periods: the post–World War II era, the post-9/11 era, and the post–COVID-19 pandemic era. Each transformation has been larger and more consequential than the last, layering new pressures atop unresolved ones. Like a snowball rolling downhill, these changes compound, gaining speed and mass while obscuring what lies ahead. Examining this shift on a smaller scale, Colorado offers a useful case study. Born shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century, I grew up in a post-9/11 Colorado already undergoing significant change. Once rooted primarily in agriculture and mining following statehood in 1876, Colorado evolved into a hub for federal government, defense, technology, and tourism. Cold War defense spending fueled the growth of major military and governmental installations such as NORAD and the U.S. Air Force Academy, making federal investment a central economic driver. Colorado’s story, however, is not unique. It reflects broader trends across the Interior, or Mountain, West, a region comprising Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
The post–World War II era fundamentally reshaped the Interior West. What had been a sparsely populated, resource-extraction-based region became increasingly urban, industrial, and economically diverse. Population growth surged as returning veterans used the GI Bill to pursue education, housing, and employment. Cities such as Denver, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City expanded rapidly. Wartime industries, including aircraft manufacturing, atomic research, and defense production, laid the groundwork for long-term economic diversification. Federal investments in dams, hydroelectric power, water infrastructure, and the interstate highway system made large-scale settlement and development possible in an otherwise arid and geographically challenging region.
The post-9/11 era brought fewer visible changes to the Interior West than World War II, but its effects were still significant. National security priorities reshaped daily life through increased airport security, expanded surveillance, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Tourism, an essential Western industry, was disrupted, particularly in air travel. Immigration policy became tightly linked to security concerns, reducing international travel and altering labor patterns. Notably, emergency management systems developed in the West for wildfire response, such as the Incident Command System, were adopted nationally under the National Incident Management System, reflecting the region’s influence on crisis governance.
The most recent transformation, the post–COVID-19 pandemic era, has arguably been the most disruptive. The pandemic accelerated existing trends while introducing new pressures. Remote work enabled a wave of migration from expensive coastal cities into the Interior West, drawn by open space, natural beauty, and perceived quality of life. This influx drove up housing costs, intensified development, and strained infrastructure. At the same time, limited water resources, already under stress from prolonged drought, faced increased demand. Tourism initially collapsed but rebounded unevenly, while service industries shifted to cater to new residents rather than temporary visitors.
Social media has become one of the most influential yet least examined forces shaping the post-COVID American West. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X have transformed how the region is perceived, marketed, and consumed, often reducing complex landscapes and communities into aesthetic backdrops or ideological battlegrounds. The West is increasingly branded through images of open land, mountain sunsets, and outdoor freedom, encouraging migration while obscuring the infrastructural and environmental limits that sustain life there. At the same time, social media accelerates political and cultural polarization, turning debates over housing, water rights, energy production, and land use into viral conflicts rather than sustained discussions. In a region already defined by rapid growth and fragile ecosystems, social media it amplifies it, shaping expectations faster than policy, governance, or the land itself can respond.
At the center of this transformation is a parallel shift in energy production and cultural perception, increasingly mediated through social media. Across the Interior West, coal-fired power plants that once anchored local economies are shutting down, such as the Craig Station in Northwest Colorado and multiple facilities in New Mexico. These closures symbolize the end of an energy era that shaped Western labor, politics, and identity for generations. In their place, renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, and geothermal, are rapidly expanding, reframing the West as both a site of environmental responsibility and economic reinvention. At the same time, there is a growing reconsideration of nuclear energy as a viable, low-carbon option, particularly in states like Utah, where small modular reactor projects have been proposed. Social media platforms amplify these transitions, often flattening complex realities into slogans, outrage cycles, or optimism narratives. Energy debates that once unfolded slowly through policy now spread instantly, shaping public perception faster than infrastructure can adapt. The West’s energy future is being built not only in deserts and plains, but also online, where identity, fear, and hope collide in real time.
These developments echo the warnings of Wallace Stegner in The Sound of Mountain Water (1985), a collection of essays that critiques the rapid transformation of the American West. Stegner’s work resonates powerfully in the post-COVID West, particularly his insistence on the spiritual necessity of wilderness and the dangers of unchecked individualism. During the pandemic, many Americans sought refuge in nature, reinforcing Stegner’s belief that wild spaces provide essential balance against what he called a fully controlled, “technological termite-life.” Stegner also argued that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the defining quality required to preserve the West’s fragile environment. The pandemic exposed how deeply interconnected Western communities are, emphasizing the need for collective approaches to public health, climate adaptation, and resource management. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the issue Stegner viewed as central to Western survival: water. In an arid land, he warned, “using water means using it up.” His critique of large-scale water exploitation feels prophetic as population growth collides with shrinking rivers, depleted aquifers, and intensifying drought.
So, is the American West ready for a post–COVID-19 world? The answer is increasingly shaped not just by policy or geography, but by perception, by how the West sees itself and broadcasts that image to the world. Social media has collapsed distance and time, accelerated cultural change while encouraged performative optimism and outrage over sustained collective action. Migration trends, energy debates, and environmental crises unfold simultaneously on the land and on screens, often disconnected from the slow realities of infrastructure, ecology, and human limits.
The closure of coal plants, the rise of renewables, and renewed interest in nuclear energy signal a region attempting to reinvent itself once again. But reinvention without reflection risks repeating the same pattern that has defined the West since the frontier era: extraction followed by displacement, growth followed by scarcity. The danger facing the West is not collapse, but gradual denial, the belief that adaptation alone is enough. The frontier may have closed in 1890, but the illusion of endless capacity persists. In a post-pandemic, hyper-connected age, the West is no longer waiting for its future to arrive. It is watching it unfold in real time, and the question now is whether recognition will come before it merely eats itself.
WORKS CITED
Aster, Ari, director. Eddington. A24, 2025.
Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West. Penguin Books, 1985.
U.S. Census Bureau. Report on the Social and Economic Conditions of the Frontier. Government Printing Office, 1890.
U.S. Department of Energy. Coal Power Plant Retirements and the Transition to Renewable Energy. U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2023.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Energy Futures in the American West. NREL, 2022.
