Changes inevitable but not painless
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
March 20, 2002
Countless small towns across the West may be adapting to a flood
of newcomers coming in and a tide of traditional industries going out, but the
transition still isn't easy.
Phelps Dodge Corp. employed 2,400 people at two copper mines near Silver
City, N.M., three years ago. Since, it has laid off all but about 700, and support
industries have laid off 400 more.
Not far away, Loving, N.M., had seven
operating potash mines a few years ago. Three are still operating but with
1,000 or so fewer workers.
Both of those cities are typical of Southwestern communities where traditional
mining and farm products have been squeezed by global competition.
A few of those towns are growing anyway, those in the path of urban sprawl,
but even there, the dichotomy can be dramatic. In Queen
Creek, Ariz., a cotton-farming town of 5,000 being shored up by suburbanites,
the average price of a new home is $300,000, while most of the older homes qualify
for federal renovation loans.
Montana hasn't
been hit as hard by the current recession as most of the nation, simply
because it doesn't have the kinds of industry that suffer most. Instead, Montana
added jobs in January, most of them in construction and health services, plus
about 200 in mining, compared with a year ago.
Reading between the lines, two of the state's fastest-growing counties, Flathead
and Ravalli, also had the highest
unemployment rates, arguably evidence of the transition between old economy
and new. The timber industry, other than log home manufacturers, has been all
but eliminated in Ravalli County and pushed to the brink in Flathead County,
while those newcomers need new homes and a growing and aging population supports
more health services.
Meanwhile, Plum Creek Timber Co. is offering 20,000
acres of real estate with trophy home potential in Montana's Swan Valley.
Critics immediately focused on what they said was the company's breach of a
complicated agreement to rotate timber harvest and other activities among state,
federal and private lands to protect the area's grizzly bears.
But the move also underscores the point that the land has become more valuable
for subdivisions than for growing trees.
Even Forest Service projects
billed as rehabilitation are far from assured sources of timber for local
mills. Three projects on the Clearwater National Forest, long one of Idaho's
most productive in terms of volumes logged, would supply 100 million board feet
of timber, introduce controlled burns and return a creek to its original meanders.
But environmentalists say the proposals, particularly those in roadless areas,
are just new euphemisms for more logging.
Measuring unemployment, per capita income and labor earnings reveals critical
aspects of local economies, but perhaps the most wrenching changes are in the
sense of place most recently described by essayist George
Sibley in High Country News.
He paraphrases Wallace Stegner:
No place is a place, until two things have happened: one, things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments; and two, it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry. So geography only becomes a place when some set of humans becomes all bound up with it in some way.
As that tide of newcomers buys ranchettes and trophy tracts, the
mills and mines close, Main Streets are renovated with Old West themes and the
economy shifts toward construction and service jobs, the sense of place slips
away. There aren't enough people that have been around long enough to recall
the yarns.
"More to the point," writes Sibley, "they all arrive with a well-developed
sense of what civilized people do once they get to the place they've chosen.
The more money they come with, the stronger their sense of what a place should
be, and their place in the place."
And all over the rural West, that's a lot different than what it was.
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