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Arguing is one of my favorite sports. I always like to participate, and often I enjoy watching, as with the latest bout between Thomas Michael Power, an economics professor at the University of Montana, and Ed Marston, publisher of High Country News.
Power, in collaboration with his colleague Richard N. Barrett, just published another book -- Post-Cowboy Economics: Pay and Prosperity in the New West. They argue that if rural places offer pristine beauty that will attract the right kind of people, then rural economies will thrive.
In reviewing the book, Marston observed that Power and
Barrett's work ignores the land except as a backdrop to
the kind of suburban development that characterizes the
rest of the United States. There are no working landscapes
in Power and Barrett's vision,
and that we need to
connect to the land around us in more ways than
recreation and preservation.
Power and Barrett responded to the review by arguing
that actively developing natural landscapes for
commercial purposes is not the only way in which to
productively and safely relate to those natural landscapes.
For instance, a miner engaged in tearing off the top of a
mountain, soaking the crushed rock with cyanide, and then
dumping the toxic remains into a value does not necessarily
have a superior cultural or spiritual relationship with the
mountain than a hunter, poet, hiker, mountaineer or
environmental geologist.
Personally, I've never known a hard-rock miner who wasn't also a rock collector, and this hobby implies a relationship that runs somewhat deeper than a paycheck.
But in an era when miners have pretty much gone the way of the buffalo and the steam locomotive, one might also ask whether the single-track mountain-bike enthusiast has any relationship with the terrain that goes beyond adrenaline. The same might be asked about the muscular sorts who climb all 53 of Colorado's 14ers in less than a fortnight, or those athletes who run the entire length of 476-mile Colorado Trail -- which was designed 30 years ago as a leisurely and varied exploration, not as a racetrack.
Are these people coming through because they want to savor our landscape and comprehend our culture, or because they've found an immense outdoor gymnasium?
The recreation and tourism industries which Power and
Barrett extol don't appear to be fostering a superior
cultural or spiritual relationship
with our landscape.
Instead, they seem to be turning the countryside into an
exercise zone. Who's got time to stop and sniff the
flowers, let alone identify them and their relationships to
the other flora and fauna and connect those to a cultural
heritage that extends from the Anasazi through the Utes to
an abandoned railroad grade near a collapsing A-frame, when
the idea is to get in more miles of personal
accomplishment?
The Mountain West was designed for two purposes after the Civil War. One was to provide a reliable Republican pool of electoral votes, and the other was to produce commodities for national and international markets -- gold, silver, lead, coal, zinc, timber, mutton, copper, wool, beef, wheat, to name a few.
The Republicans have done pretty well, but by and large, the West's commodity economy has faded; most of those things can be produced more cheaply somewhere else -- Argentine beef, Chilean copper, Canadian softwood, New Zealand lamb, on down the list.
It was the commodity economy that provided working landscapes and profitable open space -- often at a tremendous environmental cost, to be sure. But if it goes away, are we doomed to subdivided amenity landscapes?
Perhaps not.
Mel Coleman of Saguache, Colo., died on Feb. 3, 2002, a little short of his 77th birthday. Until about 1980, he and his wife, Polly, ran a typical family ranch -- that is, they got hammered every time beef commodity prices fell, to the point where foreclosure often loomed.
The extended family was gathered one Sunday for dinner -- featuring some ranch beef straight from the pasture -- when a daughter-in-law who lived in the city commented on its tangy taste and asked why she couldn't get beef like that in stores.
That was the inspiration for Coleman Natural Beef -- no herbicides or pesticides on the pastures, no growth-enhancing hormones in crowded feedlots, and now a producing and marketing network of more than 700 ranchers in 17 western states.
Mel Coleman loved his high-country grass and water and cattle, and family ranch life in general. But he couldn't keep all that as a participant in the volatile global commodity market. By developing a niche market, he saved what he loved, and blazed a trail for others.
Coleman discovered that he could produce a premium beef that wasn't a mere graded commodity, and in the process, he restored some of the old bond between producers and consumers. His persistence and vision kept a lot of family ranches as open space, rather than 35-acre subdivisions.
It's not the Commodity West of yore, and it's not the Adventure Park West that continues to invade, or the New West of coffee bars and broadband access.
Call it the Niche West. It starts with traditional commodity activities, but the products appear in local and niche markets, rather than national and international commodity markets.
Does it work with endeavors other than ranching? The last working mine in this area began in 1872 as a silver mine. Like most Colorado silver mines, the Sweet Home closed in 1893 when silver prices collapsed -- those global markets at work, again.
Unlike the other mines, it reopened a few years ago to
produce gem-quality rhodochrosite crystals for collectors
and jewelers. The small pockets of ore
are
discovered with ground-penetrating radar, and the waste
rock goes right back into the drifts and adits above Alma,
Colo.
This isn't somebody ripping the top off a mountain and pouring cyanide onto the pile, trying to compete in the world commodity markets. But it is a mine, it provides a few jobs, and Bryan and Kathryn Lees, the owners, do appear to know their mountain rather intimately, which implies a pretty strong relationship.
Even if the big timber operations have departed, there are a couple of small custom sawmills hereabouts. One processes beetle-kill from the national forests, and some of the scraps help keep my house warm. Another works with private landowners to manage their trees. Both give local construction a connection to the countryside that doesn't happen when a semi-load of two-by-fours from Oregon arrives at the lumberyard.
Further, the lumberjacks seem to have an informed relationship with the landscape -- they can show you where the 1962 White House Christmas tree came from, or which areas appear most fire-prone, or where there's dumb construction because the new trophy house is in an avalanche path. Maybe they don't exactly groove on the trees the way a poet might, but they're not just looking at our forests as so many board-feet of exploitable sawtimber, either.
To be sure, this is just in my little part of the West, but when I converse with friends in other mountain towns, be they in Idaho or New Mexico, I hear about the same sorts of activity: The big commodity industries may have abandoned us for cheaper production zones, but our working landscapes haven't vanished.
They might be mining clay for local potters, or raising vegetables for the local farmer's market, or milking goats to produce local cheese, or making jellies and jams from local berries, or growing and drying Anasazi beans, or fermenting wine from family vineyards and orchards. They're doing honest work that results in tangible products -- they're not just selling experiences -- and they connect with the landscape in ways that recreation doesn't.
Sometimes this can get a little too precious and cute -- just how many genuine hand-dipped beeswax candles can any household absorb, let alone the authentic aspen pencil holders hand-crafted from certified deadfall?
But by and large, this is healthy. We all consume tangible goods, and if we can get some of those goods from the Mel Colemans of this world, so much the better.
Besides, what's the alternative? Should we live in disconnected enclaves where our vegetables all come from the Imperial Valley and our wood from British Columbia and our beef from Iowa, so that Missoula professors can enjoy a vista unsullied by any sort of productive activity, especially the sweaty sorts of employment practiced by those unfortunates who do not hold doctoral degrees?
Should the rest of us be putting on authentic rural costumes every morning before we go to work guiding poets and hunters around a sacred Barrett & Power landscape, hoping that these visitors will develop the spiritual and cultural relationship that has so far eluded the single-track bikers, extreme-air skiers, endo kayakers, avalanche-chute snowmobilers and peak-grabber climbers?
To ask that question is to answer it. Honest work
producing honest goods in an honorable way is a good start
on an honest relationship with our landscape. I don't know
about you, but I'd rather have that than a superior
spiritual and cultural relationship.
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