COLUMN ONE : Showdown in the New West : The hotly fought Montana Senate race will test the impact of droves of newcomers on a region long ruled by resource-hungry businesses and conservative politics.

Bob Schumann considers himself a conservative who usually votes Republican. But he is GOP Sen. Conrad Burns’ worst political nightmare.

A retired attorney who looks like a cross between Ralph Lauren and Ernest Hemingway, Schumann is a foot soldier in the swelling ranks of newcomers on the march throughout the West. He fled the crowds and grime of northern New Jersey for the big sky and sparkling trout streams of Montana seven years ago, and has never looked back. He is part of an army carrying the potent germ of change.

Full of environmental fervor, Schumann built a lakeside cabin from logs harvested after a forest fire in Idaho--part of his commitment to practices that protect national forests from clear-cutting. He wants reforms in mining and grazing laws on federal lands and hopes relentless development in his new home, spectacular Flathead County, can be curbed.

“The old West, they just didn’t pay much attention to what you cut down or dug up, because there was always somewhere else to cut things down or dig things up,” Schumann said. “But this is the new West. They just can’t do it that way anymore.”

Environment-minded transplants like Schumann are arriving in droves throughout the West, transforming the social, economic--and political--landscape.

Their determination to protect the region’s beauty has put them at odds with the loggers, miners and cowboys who have long made their living from the land. The newcomers are challenging the interests of the so-called extractive industries, which use resources like forests, grasslands, minerals and water--most on federal land--to produce goods ranging from beef to gold.

And therein lies the problem for Burns, a freshman senator who has championed the business interests against efforts by the Clinton Administration to rein them in. He is facing a stiff challenge this November from Democrat Jack Mudd, an attorney who has assumed the environmentalists’ mantle.

The race is widely seen as a barometer of how firmly the new order of the West is taking hold and whether Western voters, facing economic and social dislocations, will act to extend environmental protections or relax them out of fear of losing jobs.

In Montana, the wave of newcomers has arrived in the midst of a slump in the natural resources industries, and the standoff between the two forces is as dramatic as any in the West. The Mudd-Burns race, in short, comes at high noon in a highly polarized state.

Demographers mark 1980 as the start of the latest stampede west, although migration to Montana has picked up steam only in the past four years. In the 1980s, 2.3 million people poured into Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, making the “Mountain Division” the nation’s second-fastest-growing region behind the Pacific states. While Montana’s overall population growth was a relatively low 1.6% between 1980 and 1990, it has taken off in the 1990s, growing by almost 3% from 1990 to 1992.

As newcomers have arrived, jobs in the retail, service, finance, insurance and real estate sectors have exploded. Mining, logging and agricultural jobs have lost substantial ground.

And once-sleepy outposts like Missoula, Bozeman, Kalispell and Billings have swelled with transplants from urban California, the Midwest and the East. Where once the Marlboro Man reigned, “fax rangers” and “cappuccino cowboys” roam.

In Kalispell, historically a logging town in northwest Montana, trucks peddling caffe latte, bagels and biscotti roll up twice a day to Mac’s Place, a sleekly housed computer mail-order business that arrived last October from the suburbs of Seattle. Robert Wilkins, the 32-year-old president, employs up to 200 workers in an area reeling from timber industry layoffs. He says he was drawn to Kalispell not only by low business costs but by the blue-ribbon trout streams and open spaces.

“The environment is really important to me--that it be stable and balanced,” said Wilkins, as computers hummed in the background. “I believe in the logging industry but we need stricter rules on how it’s handled. . . . I don’t believe in cutting old-growth forests.”

Wilkins and other newcomers have brought an environmental outlook considerably more progressive than that of most natives. Pollster Celinda Lake, who has surveyed much of the West for Democratic candidates, observed that among newcomers support for stricter environmental protections runs more than 20 points ahead of support from natives.

Demographers estimate that throughout the non-Pacific West 40% of residents came from other states. As a major new voting bloc with measurably stronger views about environmental protection, their views represent substantial new political clout.

They have been a major force for stiffening state environmental laws that protect rare species, govern mining operations and protect forests, wetlands and bodies of water. Their impact on gubernatorial elections has been considered powerful, ushering in a cohort of Western governors with comparatively forceful pro-environment views. More slowly, say political observers, they are changing the political complexion of the lawmakers they send to Washington.

Some of the environmental fervor has spread to native Montanans like 36-year-old Tom Maclay, who ranches outside Missoula, and Jeff Capps, a retired Army officer who opened a shop selling bird feeders in Bigfork.

“They call this the last, best place. That’s a warning, in my mind,” said Capps, who grew up in Great Falls, left to pursue a 20-year Army career and returned in May. “Where are you going to go if you mess this place up?”

Maclay, a Mudd supporter from a staunchly Republican family, is experimenting with grazing techniques that are gentler on the earth. He supports the federal government’s efforts to reform the rules under which ranchers graze sheep and cattle on public land, and raises oats for a genetic engineering firm in Missoula that aims to develop safer, more natural pesticides. Burns, Maclay said, “is not where Montana is now.”

And when it comes to environmental matters, he added, the senator appears to prefer “fanning the flames” of discord between environmentalists and displaced industries rather than helping find common ground.

Burns appears to be highly vulnerable in the coming election. In a recent survey of senators’ favorability ratings, 33% of Montanans said they approved of his performance, the lowest showing of 33 senators up for reelection in 1994.

But Burns is not without support. Despite its growth, Montana has only 822,000 people--most of whom expect to know their senator personally. And Burns, who drives a van with 170,000 miles on its odometer and a seat-back propped up with a 2-by-4, is an assiduous campaigner with a common touch and a crack constituency-service organization.

In the Senate, he has carved out a niche handling legislation on telecommunications--a high-tech specialty important to the state’s growing service industries.

Burns’ support runs especially strong in the rural eastern part of the state, where irrigated agriculture dominates, and in areas like Flathead County, where the decline of the logging industry has left many jobless. Ray Brandewie, a 54-year-old farmer in Flathead County, called Burns “a Montana environmentalist” who “represents all the interests of Montana.”

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A slim, soft-spoken hiker, the 50-year-old Mudd could hardly stand in greater contrast to the tobacco-chewing Burns, 59, who got his start in Montana as a livestock fieldman and auctioneer.

Burns, alternately folksy and fiery, has insisted that “Mother Earth heals herself” and has railed against the environmentalism of “elitists” who “would erode a whole way of life so they can wear their silver-tipped cowboy boots.”

Mudd has declared that newcomers will strengthen Montana, not only with new jobs and money, but because “they remind us that we can’t take the environment we have here for granted.”

As a senator, Mudd said, he would support some measure of mining and grazing reform, as well as large new tracts of wilderness in Montana. But he added that he would use his background as a mediator to help develop compromises between environmentalists and opponents of further federal regulation. “Rhetoric usually draws people further apart, whether you’re Israel and Jordan or a logger and member of the Sierra Club,” he said.

In Montana, as throughout the region, Mudd’s gospel of compromise is a tough sell these days. Communities are suffering not only growing pains but the loss of jobs in industries that have long defined the rough-riding West. In such places, the so-called “wise use” movement--a loose coalition of industries and the residents dependent on them--is a powerful force opposing more restrictive environmental regulation, including limits on logging and mining.

“Conrad Burns appeals to the fear in people here. And Jack Mudd appeals more to their hopes,” said Marc Wilson, publisher and editor of the Bigfork Eagle.

“Mudd is more of a new West politician and, if people are optimistic about the economy and the state in this ‘new West,’ he’ll have a chance in this election,” Wilson added. “But if people are fearful (that) their land is being tied up and the federal government and people back east are going to deprive them of a way to make a living in this ‘new West,’ they’re going to vote for Conrad Burns.”

Indeed, many who work in extraction industries in places like Montana have much to fear. They face a welter of federal environmental reforms that likely would curb their operations, cut their profits and trim their employment rolls even more deeply than they have been trimmed in recent years. As a result, industry representatives have opposed new laws sought by environmentalists and often by the Clinton Administration. And they have found an ardent defender in Burns.

Burns, with several other Western senators, has opposed the reform of regulations governing the grazing of livestock on federal lands. He has defended an 1872 law that has allowed mining operations on public lands, often with disastrous environmental consequences. On the campaign trail, Burns is charging that Clinton and environmentalists are waging a “war on the West” by pressing for stricter environmental protections.

It is on the issue of wilderness protection for huge tracts of Montana that Burns has taken his most visible stand in the environmental debate. Montana’s Democratic representatives, Rep. Pat Williams and Sen. Max Baucus, have backed a bill that would set aside 1.7 million acres of Montana for designation as wilderness. But Burns has countered with what he calls the Montana Jobs Security and Lands Protection Act, under which 800,000 acres would be protected, as wilderness, from development. Major timber companies had a major role in writing the bill, and Burns’ office referred early inquiries to industry representatives.

“We’re a resource-based economy, period,” Burns said flatly during a recent campaign swing through the state. “. . . That’s what’ll pay for our roads and our schools.”

But Burns’ critics question his unshakable faith in that social and economic order, arguing that the new Montana--like the new West they see emerging--will have a different and more evenly balanced constellation of interests--and different politics to match.

“Burns is placing his chips on a particular segment of the community and I suspect he may not be reading the state of Montana accurately,” said Democratic state legislator Emily Swanson, who settled in Bozeman from Colorado in the mid-1970s. He is making “too big a play” for the support of those who believe that the only way to protect jobs is to relax environmental strictures, Swanson added. “That may be his Achilles’ heel.”

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The Burns-Mudd faceoff is only one of many that will help define the political contours of the changing West. Outside of Montana, environmentalists are watching several races to gauge whether the long-term trend toward environmentalism is emerging in national politics.

One key Senate race is in Arizona, the West’s third-most rapidly growing state, where Democrat Dennis DeConcini is retiring. While primary votes have yet to be taken, Republican Rep. Jon Kyl, whose environmental voting record won him a 0 (lowest on a scale of 0-100) from the League of Conservation Voters, is expected to face Democratic Rep. Sam Coppersmith, who last year scored 90.

Wyoming, where towns like Cheyenne have become cities during the rapid growth of the 1980s, also has a Senate race that many observers say pits old against new. With the retirement of Republican Malcolm Wallop, who scored a 6 last year, Democratic Gov. Mike Sullivan is facing off against the state’s sole congressman, Republican Craig Thomas.

Thomas has won a 0 rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Sullivan has sought to diversify the state’s economy and raise fees on mining companies extracting minerals from state-owned lands.

For all the polling data, political change at the congressional level lags well behind the West’s seismic demographic shifts, said Jim Maddy, president of the League of Conservation Voters. But Maddy and other political activists point to early indicators that the new West is starting to take hold politically: They note that some of the fastest-growing cities, including Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Flagstaff, Ariz., have begun electing some of Congress’ most ardent environmentalists--Democrats Karan English of Flagstaff and Karen Shepherd of Salt Lake City. Other boom towns like Santa Fe, N.M., and Boise, Ida., are sending representatives to Washington who are much “greener” than their predecessors.

Since 1980, when the league began tracking congressional delegations by region, the average environmental score for lawmakers in the most urban Western region (the Pacific states including Alaska and Hawaii), drifted from 45 to 56 in 1993.

In the rapidly growing Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma), scores rose from an average of 28 to 41. The Rocky Mountain West, where the flood of transplants is more recent, inched from 33 to 34. Translation: Western politicians, apparently reflecting an increasingly green electorate, are getting greener themselves.

But nowhere is effecting such change more difficult than in Senate races, where critics say that six-year terms and costly statewide races insulate many lawmakers from changes among their constituents.

Incumbents are more likely than challengers to receive substantial contributions from political action committees, organized by established home-state industrial interests. As a result, they sometimes fail to appreciate the growing economic and political significance of upstarts like Bob Schumann and Robert Wilkins.

Those who believe they are watching the birth of a new West contend that demographics will help sweep away the forces that are protecting the old West’s political order.

“It will go in fits and starts,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who recently explored the new West’s social, political and economic contours in a hearing in Salt Lake City. “But this transition is irreversible.”