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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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As a Matter of Fact, Money Does Grow on Trees (cont.)

WILD SKY DOLLARS

Good jobs in the rural West once came predominantly from sawmills, ranches, and mines. The numbers now tell a different story. Thirty years ago the "cowboy economy"—mining, agriculture, timber, oil, and ranching—accounted for 20 percent of the rural West's economy. Now it's about 8 percent. From 1970 to 2000, nearly all of the income growth in the West came in the producer-service fields—engineering, design, finance, and the like—and from spending by retirees.

"Most people's understanding of the economy lags about 20 years behind reality," says Ray Rasker, an economist with the Sonoran Institute, a conservation group in Tucson, Arizona. "It's a tough perception to change, because the new economy is often invisible."

Rasker is one of a number of western economists tracking what he and others call the "lifestyle dividend," the idea that protected wildlands act as strong economic lures. As the University of Oregon's Whitelaw explains it, "Firms that compete nationally for highly skilled, highly educated employees can pay a little bit less than the national rate, because people are willing to trade off a little of their dollar wage for the nature wage."

That trend is only increasing as jobs become less tied to site-specific factories and offices. The

Angered by wilderness rollbacks, the outdoor industry threatened to move its $24 million trade show. "Money does matter," says one CEO, "And it's on our side."

rise of e-mail, overnight delivery, and cheap long-distance rates means population loss for Buffalo, population gain for Bozeman. Rasker summed this up in a July 2004 Sonoran Institute study: "The more dependent a state's economy is on personal income earned from people who work in the resource extractive industries," he wrote, "the slower the growth rate of the economy as a whole."

You can see these patterns playing out all over the West. Towns like Bend, Oregon, near Mount Bachelor and the Deschutes River, and Bishop, California, nestled in the eastern Sierra, have already transitioned from timber and mining towns, respectively, into recreation hotbeds. Kem Hunter, former mayor of Index, Washington, in the Cascade Range, is pushing Congress to pass the Wild Sky Wilderness proposal, which would protect the national-forest land that surrounds the town and draws kayakers, climbers, and campers from Seattle.

"The wilderness area will attract visitors who spend money," says Hunter. "Our logging and mining jobs are decades gone. We need sustainable jobs, and those are tied to outdoor recreation."

No case study is more persuasive than Kane County, Utah, about 210 miles south of Salt Lake City. Kane County, home to the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, has been the site of one of Utah's most intense wilderness battles. It started in 1996, when Bill Clinton's creation of the 1.7-million-acre monument made him as popular in Kane County as a Yankee fan in Fenway. A Dutch-owned mining company was considering opening a coal mine on the monument's remote, grassy Kaiparowits Plateau, and locals expected the mine to boost the economy. When the monument designation scotched that plan, predictions of economic doom rang through the county seat of Kanab, population 4,500.

Last year, Ray Rasker went to Kane County to see if the monument had crippled the local economy. It hadn't. In fact, Kane County was thriving. Rasker compared data from the four years prior to the monument's creation (1992–1996) with data from the four years after. During the latter period, the unemployment rate in Kane County dropped by more than half, while labor income rose faster than it had in the pre-monument period. Per-job earnings, which fell 7 percent before the monument, rose 13 percent after it was created. Property values rose significantly, too. "People in Kane County worried that all they'd get were low-wage tourism jobs," Rasker told me. "In fact, the average wage per job went up."

What accounted for the turnaround? "Word got out," says Rasker. "People read about Grand Staircase–Escalante. Some started visiting; others moved their businesses to Kanab or decided to retire in Kane County."

Those new retirees spurred growth in health-care jobs. Recreation boomed. Since the monument was created, hotel-room revenue has increased on average about 20 percent.

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