The Farrington Foundation

James P. Owen, the author of Cowboy Ethics: What Wall Street Can Learn from the Code of the West should know what he talks about.  His firm, Austin Capital Management, has been a presence on Wall Street and Mr. Owen has reportedly been deeply disillusioned by the behavior he saw in that world.  His offering to us of a heavily photographed book of the “coffee table” type is an exploration of what he sees as “cowboy virtues” and what they could teach the unsavory, greedy inhabitants of the financial sector back East.

Who can argue with commandments like Finish What You Start and Be Tough, but Fair?  Or better, Do What Has To Be Done?  We here at Farrington have always had a stance toward the tougher side of conservation; one of our board members counts herself as a bona-fide Montana cowgirl at heart, and our founder grew up hunting and fishing in Wisconsin, Idaho, and Montana.  So the appeal of this book is obvious.

But unfortunately, Mr. Owen uses as his sources for the Cowboy Code the perhaps mythical ethos of Hollywood westerns–a genre that no doubt contributed greatly to our nation’s social awareness and spirit of independence, but is it really real? One is left wishing for a list written by a real cowboy…perhaps we’ll find one.

There’s nothing unreal about the photographs, however, and we chose to review this book for mostly that reason.  Whatever cowboys really thought or said, their spirit lives on, and the life they live in today’s world is beautifully captured in David Stoecklein’s work, with nary a pickup in sight.  (Well, one, but we’ll let you find it!)

In what must have been the late 50’s, (we are never told exactly) a young man named Edward Abbey took a summer job in the desert southwest, near Moab, Utah, and the Arches National Monument. Years later, long after the first two seasons spent tending to tourists and park facilities in a largely undeveloped wilderness, he returned, to mourn the loss of the nearly untouched landscape he had grown to love before.
Like Aldo Leopold, his personal relationship to the landscape resulted in a book about his days spent there: the wildlife, the weather, the damage done by man and the way the country affected the man who, for a while, tended it. Unlike Leopold, however, Abbey’s work is far less forgiving of man’s violence towards nature, through road building and “improvements” of tourist facilities. For Abbey, the only way to see and experience the desert is to take things slowly, on foot and roughing it. The changes that brought so many more visitors to his beloved landscape only destroyed it and their experience of it, forever. “This is a tombstone” he says in his introduction, referring to the book in the reader’s hands. “Throw it at something big and glassy”.
The book’s narrative, sometimes in diary fashion, sometimes expanding out to full-blown narrative, chronicles the escapades of his experiences there and of characters long gone but not forgotten in local lore and legend. The death of a lost park wanderer, his near-death in an off-trail adventure of his own, miner’s tales and Indian lore, all are spun together vividly against the backdrop of his own, and now our, Place that Mattered.

The Lorax is a book that every kid has read in the last 50 years. Here’s what Stephen Colbert has to say about the new movie..