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Appended is an article from today's Salt Lake Tribune published under the headline "Marketing Western beauty." It begins:
[Western counties that rely on timber, coal mining and oil and gas drilling at the expense of natural beauty are trading short-term gain for an economy that could rely on hunting, fishing, tourism and attracting affluent residents from other parts of the country.]
... and it ends with this thought:
[So, although selling beauty is a better long-term prospect than drilling for riches, rural residents could end up working in "the king's land," Knold said. Park City is a good example of where successful tourism morphed a played-out mining town into something far different but not unreservedly better.]
The article is about a new Sierra Club report titled "The New Economy of the West: From Clearcutting to Camping."
I'd like to further introduce this article with two contiguous paragraphs I
wrote for publication several years ago -- and a decade old warning from
High Country News:
[The conservation interests of both Kerr and Foreman are rather narrowly focused upon the protection of trees from loggers and the protection of Western grasslands from cows. To them, recreation and tourism are seen as alternative uses for public lands, uses that can be promoted to advantage. They judge pay-to-play recreation and tourism to be less environmentally harmful that logging or grazing. They appreciate that lands used for logging and grazing are, because of their degraded state, less valued for recreation and tourism. Thus, by using market based arguments, Kerr, Foreman and others believe that it is environmentally beneficial to encourage the replacement of harmful logging and grazing, with less harmful recreation. Allowing land managers to commodify recreational pursuits and to charge for access and use, provides incentives that would lead those mangers from offering below-cost logging and subsidized grazing, to offering recreation and tourism instead.
During the Clinton/Gore years there was a general move away from logging, mining, drilling, grazing and other resource extraction uses of public lands. These trends were so deeply engrained in the common lore of the times that the authoritative newspaper of Western land uses, High Country News, produces a special edition on April 27, 1998 titled "The Old West is Going Under". Publisher Ed Marston began his front page article with these words "Think of this as a deathwatch issue, in which we hover around the bed of the extractive West, some of us administering CPR, some of us trying to yank the creature off life support so it can die a quicker death, and some of us worrying over what will come next." In the next few paragraphs, Marston introduces articles that appear later in the journal in which the presumed demise of logging, grazing and drilling are each, in turn, discussed. Marstons' ends with these words; "The final article … is about the recreation industry that is moving quickly to take over the forests, mountains and deserts that the loggers, ranchers and oil and gas guys are vacating. Indications are that this new extractive industry, which carries with it user fees and increased motorized activities, isn't going to be a huge improvement over the natural resource industries." At the time, it would have been appropriate to say that it appears that the pragmatic conservationists had indeed prevailed and that pay-to-play recreation and tourism would become the dominant new revenue-generating uses of America's public lands. ]
The article referenced above was given the headline, "The latest 1,000-pound gorilla". The warning it offered is as valid today as when it was published.
Scott
--- begin quoted ---
08/08/2007
Marketing Western Beauty
Study touts outdoor recreation as key to economic longevity
By Patty Henetz - The Salt Lake Tribune
Western counties that rely on timber, coal mining and oil and gas
drilling at the expense of natural beauty are trading short-term gain
for an economy that could rely on hunting, fishing, tourism and
attracting affluent residents from other parts of the country.
That's according to a report, "The New Economy of the West: From
Clearcutting to Camping," from the Sierra Club. Using federal and state
data gathered over the past three decades, the report concludes that
outdoor recreation is key to the vitality of Western communities,
rather than extractive industries that have supported the region in the
past.
But the idea that mining and drilling ever was the heart of the Western
economy appears to be a bit of a myth. "In the past, [extracting]
natural resources probably wasn't as big as we thought it was," said
Mark Knold, senior economist for the Utah Department of Workforce
Services. "It was only about 8 percent of our economy in 1960."
In rural Utah, however, mining was huge, mostly because the nation's
industrial economy demanded fuel and because mountains stood in the way
of commerce. "Now, it's being shifted," Knold said. "In the technical
economy, mountains aren't a barrier at all."
So the question for those pushing economic development is whether to
keep the land clean and entice more people to move here or to continue
with "an old industrialized structure and not maybe be able to employ
as many people," Knold said.
The Sierra Club report comes down in favor of marketing beauty. Unless
public land is protected, the report states, the economy can't sustain
itself.
Using U.S. Commerce Department figures, the report says that Western
counties where more than 60 percent of federal public land was
protected grew 66 percent faster from 1970 to 2000 than counties where
the same percentage of of public land was not protected.
Although the report focuses on the West as a whole, a snapshot focuses
on how the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument has affected
Kane and Garfield counties. A 2007 Utah State University study found
that 91 percent of monument visitors also stopped in the counties,
spending millions of dollars at scores of businesses and supporting
hundreds of full-time jobs.
It's a case of selling what you have, said Knold, whose contribution to
this year's Economic Report to the Governor supports many of the Sierra
Club's claims.
Although the report makes grand statements about the Western states'
economies, it's really the rural areas that benefit from scenery, Knold
said. Looking again at Garfield County, numbers in the governor's
report show that natural resources and mining employed just eight
people in 2005 - the most recent year for available numbers - while
tourism employed 859.
In Grand County, when the uranium boom has played out, workers fell on
hard times until tourism took hold in Moab and its surroundings. By
comparison, Emery County clings to the mineral-resource economy.
"It's hard to blame them, because they are high-paying jobs," Knold
said. At the same time, "Grand County has grown. Emery has not."
In areas such as Uintah County, said the Sierra Club's San Francisco
spokeswoman Kristina Johnson, most of the money leaves the region,
while county governments are stuck with the bill for road repairs,
waste management and burgeoning crime.
At the same time, according Utah Department of Workforce Services
statistics, in 2005 natural-resource extraction employed 2,519 people
in Uintah County, about 22 percent of the total number of people
working. Tourism employed 929.
Carbon, Duschesne and Emery counties were the only others that employed more people in extractive industries than tourism.
Tourism's low pay remains a downside. Statewide, tourism accounted for
$1.4 billion in 2005 payroll wages, compared with mining and drilling's
$486 million. But the average monthly pay for an extractive industries
worker was $4,778, and although tourism business owners may do well,
their workers made $1,100 during an average month. Knold said that
includes seasonal and part-time workers.
So, although selling beauty is a better long-term prospect than
drilling for riches, rural residents could end up working in "the
king's land," Knold said. Park City is a good example of where
successful tourism morphed a played-out mining town into something far
different but not unreservedly better.
"You'd hate to see places like Escalante and some of these other little towns" turn into that, Knold said.
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