If you were real lucky as a kid, you'd have a guy like William Kittredge for a grandfather, which is to say, someone to tell you stories. What's more, he'd tell you stories about stories; about how you live by and learn from them, and how when stories go bad, people and their societies suffer and become lifeless.

Kittredge's Who Owns the West? also reveals him to be historian, commentator, prophet, raconteur, and elder. The book is wonderful grandfather material gleaned from a well-traveled past, great intersections with people and nature, and an ability to keep eyes open to the miracles and tragedies of humankind and its scars upon the earth.

Kittredge grew up on, and later managed, tens of thousands of acres in southeastern Oregon, spanning the period of transition from literal to figurative horsepower. His family raised livestock and crops on a mega scale. He altered the landscape with huge machinery, mutated the soil with chemicals, poisoned the water with runoff. Then, after something of a conversion, he turned away from it all, saying that the land should be given back to the birds and turned into a wildlife refuge. Lifelong friends considered him a "turncoat," and never forgave the betrayal.

He became a writer, professor and storyteller, writing in the tradition of Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry (all of whom take human involvement with Nature personally), hearkening back to John Muir and Thoreau. Their common theme: 1) Nature is beautiful and dignified, maybe even sacred. 2) We have really messed it up. 3) We ought to get better and clean up our mess.

Nowhere is this more pressing than in the West, an area rich in open resource potential and thus subject to rapacious plundering. In this, the West is not unique, just newer, larger and more immediately vulnerable to the transition from ambition to conquest. Western politics, environment, and landscape have all changed. Jobs are no longer secure; human impact has turned back on its perpetrators; heritage and assumed rights are no longer sacrosanct. Emotional, spiritual, and physical dislocations abound and violence becomes more prevalent.

Problems facing the West are legion: unchecked development, dammed and polluted water, clearcut logging, toxic deposits, transport of nuclear waste, despoiling of Yucca Mountain, and continued genocidal treatment of Native Americans. "We know the story of civilization," Kittredge says. "It can be understood as a history of conquest, law-bringing and violence. We need a new story, in which we learn to value intimacy."

For Kittredge, stories are a necessary part of reimagining the West. There's been a plethora of bad stories about "a world in which moral problems were clearly defined, and strong men stepped forward to solve them." This no longer works. Bad stories reek of Manifest Destiny, of owning not cherishing, of running roughshod over impediments to wealth, of equating power with wisdom. "Can we learn," he wonders, "to care about stories centered on gifts rather than getting, on giving away and learning to practice the arts of empathy?"

Kittredge's prose is folksy though eloquent, didactic yet accessible, at times peppery but never vulgar. His descriptions of nature come off the page like music, his prose matching the landscape. You hear his voice and can discern his spirit.

What does Kittredge want? "A process," he writes, "everybody involved -- ranchers, townspeople, conservationists -- all taking part in that reimagining. ... What we need in our West is another kind of story, in which we see ourselves for what we mostly are, decent people striving to form and continually reform a just society in which we find some continuity, taking care in the midst of useful and significant lives."

Is it possible to create this new vision while nuclear transports haul radioactivity to leaky graves, while the affluent invade working communities to build 10,000-square-foot houses, while ancient forests are clearcut, while toxic deposits infiltrate nature, while hundreds of ICBMs lie in silos?

The challenge is there, waiting for just the sort of reimagining Kittredge inspires.

So, "Who Owns the West?" Precisely those who could never fathom the idea of ownership. Those who would understand themselves to be stewards for all forms of life. And those who would create and tell the most life-affirming stories for the future.

John Bach lives in the West and spends most of his waking hours outdoors.