Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

The West’s New Economic and Environmental Silver Bullet?

By Joan McCarter, 12-04-07

Eleven million Americans, including as many as four million children, live within a mile of the roughly 1,300 Superfund sites currently on the EPA’s radar. That’s just the sites already identified and documented. About 70 of the currently listed sites are in the eight Mountain West states, a relatively small proportion of the whole, given the total number of sites and the prevalence of mining in these states (Nevada has just one, a number I find extremely suspect—there’s not a whole lot of reporting going on from that state, I think).

These eight states have also seen the land ravaged not by just toxic waste, but by bad forest management and logging practices, by wildfire, by overgrazing, and other agricultural practices. And they’ve also seen thousands of jobs lost as the various extractive and land-based industries—logging, mining, agriculture—becoming increasingly mechanized and as industry consolidation and trade take the jobs elsewhere. On top of that, there’s the increasing reality that Western economies depend on pristine environments. Increasingly - in some areas in the region – protected and well managed public lands are worth more to western communities than the oil, gas, or timber than you can pull out of them. The long term public policy view on the value of public lands and the resources they hold is going to have to change for the long term preservation of western communities.

With all this in mind, the new report by Western Progress and Progressive States Network entitled “Building a Restoration Economy” on how these eight states are approaching cleanup projects is informative. The report defines Restoration Economy as

the development of economic activities, such as jobs and increased tourist revenue, stemming directly from activities and projects that restore damaged resources. Restoration ranges from repairing abandoned mine lands and brownfields to improving the health of degraded forests, rangelands and waterways. The restoration economy highlights the ability of environmental conservation and restoration to create good jobs and increased revenue, thereby bringing together two interests, jobs and the environment, sometimes portrayed as being at odds.

Sounds great, no? Could this be the magic bullet to bring together a progressive coalition of labor and environmentalists, backed by state and local governments and even industry? Maybe. I talked about this with Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and his chief policy advisor, Hal Harper, last month in Helena.

The subject originally came up with Schweitzer when I asked him about how Democrats could turn around the decades old message that being pro-environment was, of necessity, being anti-jobs.

Schweitzer: What they did 25 years ago is they demagogued “environmentalists” and people who were pro-environment as people that are going to take away your logging job and your mining job. Well, as it turned out it wasn’t environmentalists who took your job away. It was mechanization and trade policy. My gosh, in Butte we’re mining as much ore with 380 as we did with 30,000 people in 1920. It’s mechanization. The timber industry—it’s mechanization and it’s cheap B.C. wood…. But, the Republicans managed to message it that it was environmentalists who took away your job, and it was always a question of the environment or your job, and people had to choose. And people chose, in big numbers, their jobs, and blamed it all on Democrats and on environmentalists.

All right. I don’t use those terms. [I say] “You’re going to be in a position where you can hand Montana off along to your grandkids in as good or better shape as when we found it.” Now that doesn’t sound like a guy whose going to take away your job. And I’m not. In fact, with our restoration economy in Montana, heck, we’re creating jobs like crazy, cleaning up the messes from the past. Making the rivers cleaner, making the fisheries better. Improving the roads that we have in the forests so they don’t increase siltation and kill bull trout. All those are jobs. Heck, there’s as many or more jobs doing that than there was digging the holes or cutting down the trees in the first place…. So it turns out it was all a lie—jobs or the environment. To a large extent, what’s driving Montana’s economy today is people moving here to live in close proximity to those wildlands.

Harper expanded on how the restoration economy is developing in Montana.

Harper: We have a whole new economy that’s growing up in this state, it’s present in other parts of the nation, that really hasn’t be recognized for what it is. The restoration economy is the process whereby we look at old, damaged works—everything from polluted rivers to old mines that are causing pollution, to brown fields in cities, forests that haven’t been cleaned up and treated properly and we’re going to do the same kind of work that was done in the first place when the damage was created, with the same kinds of machines and tools in some cases, and the same workers. We’re going to put the same workers back to work at good paying jobs making things better and restoring these areas. In doing so, we have to explode some myths. One of the myths is you can’t have good quality jobs and a good quality environment at the same time. This is both of them at the same time…. [A]s Brian likes to say, “You know, it used to be that the gold was in the mountains, and now the gold is the mountains.”

Montana isn’t the only state pursuing these projects, as the Western Progress/Progressive States’ report details. Though at this point the scale is heavily tipped toward plans these states have for investment in programs, and there’s little actual detail on progress made thus far. Montana is furthest ahead in this planning, having established a state staff position dedicated to coordinating restoration activities. While all of the eight states have at the least voiced support for the idea, in the form of signing onto a 2006 Western Governors’ Association resolution, all are limited by available funding. Montana is again ahead on money coming in, being home to the nation’s largest contiguous Superfund site, four sites that comprise the Clark Fork Basin Sites, where millions have already been pumped in, and a potential total price tag of $1 billion.

It sounds like new New Deal, CCC program all over again, with the added benefit of bringing in the private sector to provide the jobs and do the work, and in that way could be seen either as another form of corporate welfare, or as industry being forced to clean up its messes, with the incentive of some healthy federal contracts to soften the blow. It sounds like the way for Democrats to jump on a new economic bandwagon that once and for all kills the well-established Western narrative that pro-environment Democrats want to take away your job. It sounds like a way to provide more, good union jobs and to boost wages and local economies. It sounds like the way for millions of acres of lands damaged by everything from mining to wildfire can be brought back, thereby restoring critical ecosystems.

Is it all that?

It could be, but there are still a lot of unknowns and principles that have to be established. First, there’s not the kind of money in it for the states that there is in exploiting the minerals, gas, oil, and coal still in the ground. Relying on the goodness of the hearts in Western states governors isn’t going to be enough to get this going full bore. There will have to be a substantial federal investment, which will include redirecting some existing funds and coming up with new ones. It will mean going up against powerful industries to make them start paying up.

Second, it will require oversight to ensure that the methods and the equipment and the technologies used in restoration cause as little damage as possible, that they’re carbon neutral, and economically sustainable. That doesn’t necessarily mean all the trees and sagebrush have to replanted by hand, but building new roads into damaged areas with diesel spewing heavy equipment to “fix” them will largely defeat the purpose.

Finally, there has to be an acknowledgment that a commitment that a restoration economy can’t be self-perpetuating; that is, states can’t adopt these programs and use them as an excuse to allow industry to continue to pollute and tear up the land. It can’t be a double-dipping situation: first you have the jobs created by exploiting and ruining the land, and then you have more jobs created to clean it all up.

There is tremendous potential for a Restoration Economy to revitalize the West’s economy, providing good jobs that support communities while also restoring critical ecosystems. With careful planning, we might just have our cake and eat it, too.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of NewWest.Net/Politics’ “Diary of a Mad Voter” feature, a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. For more columns check in with www.newwest.net/madvoter. And for more information on each of the bloggers, click here.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.