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"I can sum up the Zephyr in one word . . . crap."
This rave review of the Canyon Country Zephyr came courtesy of Jimmie Walker, former Grand County (Moab, Utah) Commissioner. Jim Stiles, the one-man team that produces the bi-monthly publication, is proud enough of the comment to post it on his Web site under "Reasons to Read the Zephyr." This is Stiles for you. A canyon country eccentric, Ed Abbey devotee, desert rat cactus hugger, and independent-to-the-extreme journalist, Stiles takes outrage and criticism as signs he's doing something right. And to survive 20 years - in the black, no less - producing an independent and irreverent rag like the Zephyr, he's doing something right . . . and pissing off a lot of people in the process.

Once allies and fans of his - and contributors to the paper - the folks at Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) recently took some public pot-shots at Stiles and his publication, referring to him as canyon country's "own Barney Fife. He's worth having around, even if we have to clean up after him now and again." Of the Zephyr, they've said, "It's not relevant." This, of course, was after SUWA came under fire by Stile's ever-vigilant, undiscriminating pen.
After 20 long years of ranting and complaining, irritating and infuriating - i.e. generally carrying on Ed Abbey's cantankerous legacy - the pen is running out of ink. The last print issue of the Canyon Country Zephyr is February/March 2009. But Stiles fans need not fill the streets in protest; oddly enough, the man whose life and publication ascribe to the philosophy of "clinging hopelessly to the past," will turn to computer technology for salvation and the continued opportunity to preach the gospel of desert-life-in-balance. After March, disciples of the Zephyr will find it - in its cartoon-and-caricature-covered entirety - online.
As Stiles remarked in his farewell letter in the June/July issue, "I can't help feel relieved that I'd be saving about a ton and a half of trees each issue and hundreds of gallons of gasoline to distribute it. Still I love the feel of a Zephyr in my hands. It's actually painful to think about it."
However, the former point Stiles makes is an important one for a man who is "terminally sick of hypocrisy. My own and everyone else's." Perhaps, in this regard, an online Zephyr is the natural evolution of a publication concerned with the demise of the West, global warming, and the rise of Big Environmentalism and its inability to effectively and innovatively face the former two issues. Stiles' footprint will shrink significantly even as his voice is amplified by the World Wide Web's extensive reach.
"I'm hopelessly sentimental," says Stiles, "and so the idea that there's no print version after March is sort of sad for me. But on the other hand, it is exciting, and there are real possibilities."
Among these new Zephyr possibilities are a blog to immediately preach the newest cautionary tales of Western doom and gloom, color photos and cartoons (a Zephyr first), and a chance to cast a journalistic net that extends beyond the Four Corners. In fact, Stiles is referring to the first online issue as the Canyon Country Zephyr Planet Earth Edition. This may seem like anathema to area desert rats - the Zephyr is ours! It's what we read on the groover, it's what we use to clean up with, and it's how we start campfires! - but even worse is the fact that Stiles doesn't even live in this stinking desert anymore. He moved to Australia. He's getting married. He'll be a father to a daughter. He, in fact, received an order of stuffed animals in the mail while we spoke.
What has become of the Jim Stiles that prints "All the news that causes fits?"
The curmudgeon is becoming domesticated. The pariah is discovering acceptance. The outcast has found home. And all of this half-a-world away from the land for which he's laid his life and reputation on the line.
"When we come online, it's going to start covering a lot more issues than just the Southwest United States," he explains. "I'll be living in the southwest of Australia, and it has a lot of similar problems that we have here. My dream is to put out a publication that covers the southwest parts of two different continents at the same time, in the same issue."
While the misery-loves-company crowd of social deviants and misfits that call the desert home may take exception with the path of their patron saint, the fact that Stiles may have found some kind of peace - even if elsewhere - is heartening. This is a man who, like most creative visionaries, has creatively constructed worlds of misery for himself over the years. Perhaps desert rats can take comfort in the fact that they too, in the midst of their outrage at the state of the exterior world, can find an inner quietude to match the landscapes they love.
Though domesticity and a new home have claimed Stiles, it's unlikely he'll abandon his argumentative brand of honesty in the Zephyr's new incarnation. He still has some local fights worth picking, some local discussions to incite.
"If you read the very first issue of the paper, I said my goal was to make the Zephyr a forum for different opinions," he says. "I sought out people who had a different philosophy about land issues and politics so we'd have an interesting conversation. And that's what I've always tried to do, and that's what I'll continue to do.
"I think my disappointment was, I always assumed that all of us liberals were very open to different opinions and ideas, and what I discovered was that there are certain members on the liberal side of the aisle who are just as intolerant of dissent as people on the right side of the aisle. That was a real shock to me, the fact that people who had been close friends of mine suddenly wouldn't talk to me anymore because I was suggesting that we were part of the problem. Finally, I decided this is what my job is. And I think I'm right, so I'll keep doing it."
Since 2001, Stiles has run a series of articles taking Big Environmentalism to task, including local groups like Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Grand Canyon Trust, the national giants like Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society. His recent two-part series, "The Greening of Wilderne$$," takes aim at the financial ties these groups have developed with millionaire donors and their business interests. Stiles asserts that, as environmental groups become increasingly concerned with the accumulation of money and are run more like Big Business, their principles are compromised. They won't take on the most controversial fights because it threatens relationships with significant funders.
He also argues that, in this focus on finances, environmentalists' arguments for conservation devolve to the same base realm. For instance, there is the now-familiar approach that public lands protection is good for local economies. That's certainly been the case for Moab, with national parks and Wilderness Study Areas at its doorstep. But the amenities economy that brings hordes of tourists - and their dollars - to canyon country year-round is inflicting more damage to the desert than the extractive industries from which the land was originally protected.
"A lot of us environmentalists who were actively promoting the amenities economy as a solution to the economic woes of the rural West, we were creating problems of our own. We were creating impacts on the land we love that paralleled the impacts we were traditionally fighting against," Stiles laments. "And what I discovered, unfortunately, when I started making this position increasingly clear, is that a lot of environmentalists were very offended by it and didn't want to talk about it at all. The environmental movement has changed over the years and is looking at the economic advantages of wilderness as opposed to the moral and ethical reasons we should support wilderness."
Historically a hermit, Stiles is not one to sugarcoat words in order to maintain relationships. He states it as he sees it, damn the consequences. Thus, his recent tirades against Industrial Tourism, Big Environmentalism, and the ties between the two, have cost him most of the limited business relationships he once cultivated. The environmental groups now call him names. His advertisers have dropped from the page like flies killed by a rolled-up Zephyr. And yet, he still stands tall on his soapbox, preaching the gospel as only he knows it, maintaining fidelity to honesty, if nothing else.
God bless him for it, because even if the Canyon Country Zephyr is crap, at least it's a truthful reflection of the crap we've gotten ourselves into here in our beautiful, broken desert home. With little tact and no shame, Stiles is willing to shine a glaring light on the long shadows many of us cast across the landscape as we navigate a life of contradictions.
Let's hope that the online Zephyr is no less brutal in its barren, desert-inspired honesty.

Visit the Canyon Country Zephyr online at canyoncountryzephyr.com

Jen Jackson writes from the road these days, on a "geographical" - a traveling, untethered form of therapeutic transformation. However, she looks forward to reading the Zephyr, in order to bring her back home in more ways than one.