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One thing I learned early, growing up in Colorado, is
that we have a boom and bust
economy. First there
was a gold rush in 1859. Then stagnation after the easy
stuff had been gathered. Then the Leadville silver boom in
1877, followed by a collapse in 1893 when the federal
government quit subsidizing silver.
But that year brought another gold boom, Cripple Creek this time, followed by a long decline. There have been wheat booms and busts, uranium booms and busts, coal booms and busts -- you get the idea.
Now we're in the middle of an oil-and-gas drilling boom; it has become the largest single segment of the state's economy.
Consider many previous booms -- they may have torn up
the landscape, but they left us with charming Victorian
towns and whole mountains sprinkled with the materials for
heritage tourism
-- decaying ghost towns, the
eroding grades of abandoned railroads, towering mine
headframes and ramshackle boarding houses.
What will this boom leave us? There are reclamation laws these days, and even if there weren't, a rusting pump jack doesn't seem as photogenic as an old sorting house. And a clump of old log cabins offer charms that I can't see in our modern equivalent, the man-camp assembled from prefabricated housing parts.
But who knows how tourists of, say, 2070 will feel. They might well find charm in collapsed mobile homes while they delight in tracing the routes of old pipelines, just as we admire decrepit miners' shacks and long-forsaken wagon roads.
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