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Newcomers
allow towns to wean economies from logging and mining
By
Larry Swanson
for Headwaters News
(Editors note: The maps to which this story links
are large files and will open in a separate browser window. Close
or minimize that window to return here.)
Here at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, we’ve been
closely monitoring economic conditions in areas closest to public
tracts of Western forests.
We've found that across the region, rural communities are no longer
isolated places with slow-growing populations whose fate is tied
to the rise and fall of extractive industries.
In fact, most are fast-changing and, for the most part, growing
places whose future vitality increasingly hinges on protection of
the qualities that make these places desirable places to live.
The big picture
The largest landowner in the United States is the American people
through their national government.
Within the 48 contiguous states, these public lands total around
810,000 square miles, more than 90 percent of which, about 740,000
square miles, are in the 22 contiguous states west of the Mississippi
River.
Included are 280,000 square miles of public forest administered
by the U.S. Forest Service (see federal
lands map).
Much of these Western forests extend in a long belt from the Cascades
of Washington south to and along the Sierra Nevada range of California.
Another belt extends along the Rocky Mountains from Idaho and western
Montana south through Utah and Colorado into the Southwest.
Tensions in forest lands management
Considerable attention has always been focused on how these Western
forest lands should be managed. A central tenet in this discourse
has been the widespread belief in a fundamental "economic imperative"
that emphasized economic needs of communities, particularly small,
resource-dependent communities.
Other values people associate with forests -- as habitat for wildlife,
viewscapes and scenery, generators of streamflow and protectors
of water quality and sources of recreation -- were secondary priorities.
For
many years, this economic imperative required public forests to
be actively used, tapped for their mineral resources and wood material,
and tapped at levels that sustained these economic activities.
Long-standing tensions in forest management have largely been borne
of extreme differences of opinion, scientific and otherwise, about
what these levels of extractive use can be if other forest values
and forest ecosystems are to be sustained.
Economic trends near public forest lands
Using GIS software, we’ve isolated 409 counties in the West
whose geographic center lies within 30 miles of these public forest
lands (see
Forest Lands map).
(more)
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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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