wealth of nature, The

Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 1996 by Power, Thomas Michael

RESOURCES: A CHANGING ROLE

Because the environmental model of community economic development shifts the emphasis away from extractive industries, it might be interpreted as suggesting that natural resources do not matter as much to these communities any longer. But its primary message is quite different. The role of natural resources in the local economy is not diminishing but changing, from extraction and export to nonconsumptive and environmental uses. A community's economic health continues to depend upon the surrounding natural landscapes but in a fundamentally different way. Our natural landscapes can no longer be treated primarily as warehouses from which to extract commercially valuable resources. Instead, we must recognize that they are the source of increasingly valuable flows of environmental goods and services: clean water and air, recreational opportunities, wildlife, scenic beauty, biodiversity, and environmental stabilization. Protected landscapes make the communities embedded in them attractive places to live, work, and do business. This supports and enhances local economic vitality and well-being.

Extractive industry by itself does generate ghost towns. High-quality living environments, on the other hand, are able to prevent ghost towns by attracting and holding diverse economic activity. Because of this, it is vitally important for all of us to check just where policymakers have their eyes focused and demand that they look toward a safe and prosperous future.

RECOMMENDED READING

Ray Rasker, A New Home on the Range: Economic Realities in the Columbia River Basin. Washington, D.C.: The Wilderness Society, 1995.

Ray Rasker, "A New Look at Old Vistas: The Economic Role of Environmental Quality in Western Public Lands." University of Colorado Law Review. 65(2): 369-399, 1994.

Gundaus Rudzitis, "Nonmetropolitan Geography: Migration, Sense of Place, and the American West." Urban Geography. 14(6): 574-585, 1993.

Thomas Michael Power, chair of the economics department at the University of Montana in Missoula, is the author of Los Landscapes and Failed Economies: In Search of an Economics of Place (Island Press, forthcoming May 1996) and Environment Protection and Local Economic Well-Being: The Economic Pursuit of Quality (M.E. Sharpe, 1996).