The differences between east and west may not be as stark as they first seem. The former residents of the town of Hanford Washington for example were aggrieved at being displaced. Nerve gas leaks from Dugway killed lots of sheep in Utah. All of us 'downwinders', of whom I am one, who drank milk from cows eating radionuclide contaminated grass in Montana, Idaho, Utah and Nevada are right to feel put upon. Which brings up the former residents of what was the Nevada Test Site, or most of the sprawling military bases such as Nellis AFB and associated bombing ranges, or the Yakima Firing Center (lots of DU scattered all over). And then there are the people, tribal and non tribal, that lived where the Federal Columbia River Basin Hydropower system inundated and displaced vast stretches, nearly all as a matter of fact, of the unique and impossible to replace bottom lands of the Columbia and Snake rivers. In the Puget Sound, test firing of wire guided torpedos left thousands of miles of copper wire all over the upper sound (copper damages the olfactory tissues that salmon rely on for homing back to spawning grounds).
I could go on and on with hundreds of specific examples of how the US Government, often the military, caused essentially permanent damage to ecosystems. And I will not even bring up BLM and USFS chaining and road building activities. But having said that, I remain convinced that far more would be lost if our public lands were not managed and protected by thousands of dedicated and hard working federal employees.
There is not an either-or, good or bad, right or wrong way of being in our society. But what we very often fail to do is think things through and step back if the possible damages are too great. The profit motive alone is usually sufficient justification. In my experience with thousands of cleanup and restoration efforts, they do not ever bring back what was lost. At best you come out the other end with something better than when the damage was most profound. But in each and every situation something is permanently lost.
I have no expectation that humans will change for the better any time soon. So lets go out and enjoy what we can, while living as lightly as possible on the back country landscape.