31 ELR 10438 | Environmental Law Reporter | copyright © 2001 | All rights reserved

The Changing Economic Role of Natural Landscapes in the West: Moving Beyond an Extractive and Tourist Perspective

Thomas Michael Power

The author is Professor and Chair of the Economics Department, University of Montana, Missoula. He may be contacted at tmpower@selway.umt.edu.

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Economic Confusion and Federal Land Management Policy

In discussions of the economies of the Mountain West,¹ natural landscapes tend to be looked upon from either of two perspectives. The first is tied to the history of European settlement of the region. Natural landscapes are looked upon as the source of the natural resource raw materials that supply the region's "basic" industries: mining and metal processing, farming and ranching and the food processing associated with them, and timber harvest and the manufacturing based on it. The second view focuses more on the present and expected future. It notes the rapid expansion of recreation and tourism in the region and points out the role played by those same natural landscapes in supporting that economic activity. The booming Mountain West resort towns are offered as examples of the emergence of a "new West."

This Dialogue argues that neither of these interpretations of the economic role being played by natural landscapes in the Mountain West is complete or correct. Both views are tied to an unreasonably narrow way of conceptualizing the regional economy. The primary economic role currently being played by the region's natural landscapes lies in the provision of high quality environmental services that make this region particularly attractive to new residents and businesses. It is the population growth drawn to the region by these amenities that is primarily driving the economies of the Mountain West region.² A more complete way of conceptualizing the local economy is needed if this amenity and population driven economic growth is to be understood.

The way in which the economies of the western states are conceptualized and understood is central to how the public lands that are primarily located in these western states are managed. Despite antigovernment activists' characterization of the federal government as a monolithic organization that dispatches "black helicopters" and "jack-booted federal thugs" to enforce a national policy, federal land management organizations have always been relatively decentralized and sensitive to perceived local economic needs. It is that solicitude to regional interests that has resulted in major, ongoing federal spending and investments on which the region has come to rely: major federal hydroelectric facilities that support electric-intensive metal and chemical industries, major federal irrigation projects that supported western agricultural production at the expense of other regions in the country, federally subsidized grazing, logging, and mining, federal military facilities, etc. Given this dependence on the federal government it may not be surprising that the region that most relies on the federal government to subsidize its private economic activities is most outspoken in its criticism of federal land management policy.³

Because federal agencies continue to be committed to supporting local economic development in the West, the popular understanding of the economies of the Mountain West has a significant impact on federal policy. If that economic understanding is flawed or distorted, federal policy is also likely to be flawed and distorted. This Dialogue explores the limitations of the two dominant conceptions of the Mountain West economies.

The next section of this Dialogue discusses the traditional "economic base" view of the economy and the role of natural resource industries. The third section discusses the relatively limited role of tourism. The fourth section discusses the anomaly of population moving to a region of relatively low pay and incomes. The final section resolves this anomaly and discusses the economic role of high quality living environments in supporting ongoing economic vitality.

Natural Resource Extraction and the Economic Base

The natural resources that can be extracted from the natural environment and the manufacturing activity that those raw material supplies support continue to be seen as a dominant element of the economic base of the Mountain West states. The political battles over changing the rules governing livestock grazing, mining, and timber harvest on federal lands dramatize this. The Clinton Administration's attempts to build more environmental protection into federal land management policy came to be labeled a "war on the West" that would undermine the region's economy.⁴ Almost all of the congressional delegation from the Mountain West states opposed these public land management reform efforts because of their assumed economic impacts.⁵

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This "economic base" way of looking at the western economies is outlined in Figure 1.⁶ This widely shared way of thinking about the local economy assumes that the only economic activities that really matter are those that inject income into the local economy from the outside. This income is seen as being spent and re-spent within the local economy, putting people to work in locally oriented economic activities. Without that income being injected into the local economy from the outside, it is assumed that no one would be able to live in the local area because there would be no income available to support them. In the Mountain West region, the specialized economic activities that allow export to the rest of the world and the injection of income into the regional economy are seen as the natural resource industries around which the region was originally settled by Europeans: livestock production, farm crops, mineral extraction and processing, lumbering, etc. These economic activities have always relied upon access to the extensive federal lands found in the West. Restrictions on access to those lands are seen as restrictions on core economic activities and local economic well-being.

The current role of these natural resource industries in the Mountain West economies is actually quite small and declining. Figure 2 shows that farming, ranching, mining and metal processing, and forest products directly provide less than 4% of total employment in the Mountain West states.⁷ Including agricultural services brings the total to about 5%. It might be objected that the percentage is this small only because the economic activities in the large urban areas such as Albuquerque, Boise, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Salt Lake and obscure the importance of these natural resource industries in the nonmetropolitan West. That objection simply underlines the fact that the Mountain West states are increasingly urban states—not rural natural resource regions. However, if we only look at the areas of the Mountain West that remain nonmetropolitan, the view (utilizing 1998 data) is not dramatically different.⁸ The natural resource sectors are, as expected, somewhat more important, but still provide a distinct minority of total jobs, about 9%.⁹ Figure 3 shows this. Since 1980, employment in these natural resource sectors has declined significantly in the Mountain West region. This is shown in Figure 4 for the total of the eight Mountain West states. Over 100,000 jobs have been lost in these sectors. In the nonmetropolitan portion of the region alone, as Figure 5 details, 50,000 jobs were lost in the farming, ranching, and mining areas alone.

Figure 2: Sources of Employment in the Mountain West, 1998

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Figure 3: Farm, Ranch and Mining Employment in the Non-Metropolitan Mountain West, 1998

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Figure 4: Farm, Ranch, Mining, Smelting, and Forest Products Jobs in the Mountain West

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Figure 5: Natural Resource Jobs and Jobs in the Rest of the Non-Metropolitan Mountain West

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Actually, the economic vitality of the nonmetropolitan regions of the Mountain West and the decline in the natural resource sectors there were even greater than these figures suggest. By the late 1990s the cumulative growth in many of the fastest growing nonmetropolitan areas had been so great that those areas were reclassified as metropolitan. The growth rate in these reclassified, previous nonmetropolitan, areas between 1980 and 1996 was twice that for all of the areas classified as nonmetropolitan in 1996, and, as one would expect, the relative importance of the natural resource sectors was lower and had declined faster.

If the region's economy were primarily based upon these natural resource industries, the economic base theory would imply that the rest of the economy should have contracted along with these industries. That, of course, did not happen. In fact, the western states led all other regions of the nation in economic expansion over the last decade with the Mountain West states challenged only by the Pacific West for the lead. Figure 5 shows this growth for the nonmetropolitan portion of the region and Figure 6 shows it for the entire Mountain West region. In the nonmetropolitan portion of the region alone, 1.7 million jobs were created outside of mining and agriculture between 1980 and 1996. That job creation was more than 30 times the job losses in the natural resource sectors. After 1996 several of the faster growing nonmetropolitan areas were reclassified as metropolitan with the result that the apparent growth in the nonmetropolitan areas during that time period was cut in half since that earlier growth was now associated with a metropolitan area. Still, job growth outside of agriculture and mining was 16 times the job loss in those sectors.

Figure 6: Jobs in the Natural Resource Sectors and the Rest of the Economy: Mountain West States

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This problem of reclassification can be avoided by looking at the entire state. For the Mountain West as a whole, the jobs created outside of the natural resource sectors were almost 60 times larger than the job losses. See Figure 6. The net result of this shrinkage of natural resource sector employment and the expansion of the other sectors of the economy was an overall decline in the relative importance of the natural resource sectors as a source of employment. Over the last three decades that percentage has declined to one-third of what it once was—from about 11% to less than 4%. In the nonmetropolitan areas as of 1998, the share of the jobs in farm, ranch, and mining employment was more than cut in half—from about 20% to less than 9% of total employment. That relative decline continues steadily.

The only conclusion that can be reached from these numbers is that the historically important natural resource industries are no longer a dominant force in the Mountain West region's economies. That is not to say that agriculture, mining activities, or forest products are not important to the region. They are important, especially in certain specialized rural areas, but their role is a modest and declining one.

Tourism as the Economic Base

In the context of the economic base view (Figure 1), if the economy has been expanding rapidly and farming, ranching, mining, and lumber and the processing activities related [31 ELR 10440] to them have been contracting, some other economic activities must be injecting income into the regional economy on an increasing scale. The rapid growth of resort towns such as Aspen and Jackson suggests one growing source of that outside income: tourism and commercial recreation. Economic observers tend to take a visual approach to the economy. They want to "see" the economic base. With farming, ranching, logging, mining, and heavy manufacturing that is easily done. The same is true of trade centers at crossroads, ports, rail terminals, etc. One advantage of the tourist explanation for the growth in the Mountain West is that the resorts, ski areas, golf courses, and the tourists themselves are quite visible. Except for some concentrations of high tech manufacturing in communities such as Boise, there often is no other "visible" explanation for the growth that has taken place in the inland West.

The tourism explanation for the "new West" economy is largely an artifact of reliance upon the export base view, which encourages a "process of elimination" approach to determining the particular activities driving the overall economy. If it is not the historically familiar natural resource sectors, what other industry is injecting the massive amounts of income that the theory says would have to be coming in to support the rapid and extensive expansion that is transforming the region? If one looks closely at the economic data, tourism and recreation, while important and growing, are so modest in size and extent they cannot possibly offer an explanation for the growth in the economies of the Mountain West.

If, for instance, one totals the population growth in all of the counties with major destination ski resorts in the Mountain West states, one finds that between 1969 and 1996, those counties gained 110,000 people.¹⁰ Of course all of the growth in those counties was not tied to the resorts. During this same period, the Mountain West states gained eight million people and the nonmetropolitan regions of the Mountain West states gained 1.7 million. The population gain in the resort counties represented only 1.4% of the total regional gain and about 7% of the nonmetropolitan gain. Using different time periods to focus on the years during which the resort counties were growing the fastest does not change these results significantly.

Of course, the four-season resorts that have developed around ski areas are not the only resort or recreation towns in the Mountain West region. Moab, Utah, for instance, has become a mountain biking center and Salmon, Idaho, a river-floating center. But then again, Aspen, Colorado, and Jackson, Wyoming, are communities in their own right that have economies that encompass considerably more than the resorts that are located there. The reason for focusing on the "ski counties" is that those resort towns are often used as symbols of the "new West" economy. The point here is that as dramatic and visible as these resort communities are, they are the exception, not the rule. They are not the economic engine that is driving the region.

This can be seen in another way. One can look across the nonmetropolitan areas of the Mountain West region and see where the economic growth is taking place. If the high growth areas tend to be those dominated by resorts or known for their specialized recreational attractions, that would tend to confirm the dominant role of tourism and commercial recreation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regularly maps population growth in the nation's nonmetropolitan counties using contrasting colors to show rapidly expanding, expanding, and declining areas.¹¹ What is startling in these visual presentations of growth data is the solid swath of color from the Canadian to Mexican border through the Mountain West indicating above average nonmetropolitan growth. Almost every nonmetropolitan county in the Mountain West region saw above average population growth during the first half of the 1990s. Since all of these nonmetropolitan counties were not dominated by resorts and commercial recreation, this growth pattern suggests that the economic forces supporting that growth are very broad-based in the region and not tied to particular tourist or recreation attractions.

As one example of the relatively modest role played by a destination resort, consider Big Mountain in Whitefish, Montana. Whitefish was primarily a small railroad town in Northwest Montana until the development of the ski area, Montana's first destination ski resort. Given the size of the flow of skiers through the relatively small local economy, one might expect tourism to be the dominant source of local economic vitality. But when the city of Whitefish studied its economy in preparation for an application for tourist impact assistance, it found that the impact of retirees settling in the area was far greater than the impact of tourists. It was new permanent residents that lay behind the area's growth, not temporary visitors.¹² If the impact of the settlement of new residents who were not of retirement age had also been taken into account, the relatively modest role of tourism in driving the economic expansion of the area would have been even more obvious. Tourism, especially tourism that has not been allowed to get out of balance with the overall economy and community, will almost always play a modest role in the determination of local economic vitality.

From the economic base perspective, the elimination of tourism as the replacement for extractive natural resource industries as the region's economic base simply leaves a mystery that is often expressed by residents of Mountain West communities: just what is driving the economic vitality that is transforming the region?

An economic anomaly associated with the region both adds to that economic puzzle and suggests a solution. The anomaly is that although the Mountain West states have been the fastest growing region of the United States over the last two decades, it is also a relatively low-income region. Four of the states, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Utah had average incomes that are about 20% below the national average in 1996. This placed them among the lowest 10 states. Arizona and Wyoming have average incomes that are 10% to 15% below the national average. Only two of the Mountain West states, Colorado and Nevada, have average [31 ELR 10441] incomes above the national average, and they are only about 5% above this said average.

This means that the migration into the Mountain West region largely involves movement from higher income states to lower income states. That is the opposite of the economic pattern that one would expect if average income is a good measure of average economic well-being in a particular area. Figure 7 shows the relationship between net domestic migration into states in the 1990 to 1997 period and average state income at the beginning of the period.¹³ Note the position of most of the Mountain West states: low average incomes and high in-migration. In the opposite quadrant are the northeastern states, with high average incomes and net out-migration. There is a statistically significant negative relationship between average income and net in-migration.

Figure 7: Net In-Migration and Average Income In the 1990s

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The only plausible explanation for this pattern is that there are characteristics associated living in various states that affect economic well-being that are not reflected in average money income. That is, there are site-specific nonmarket characteristics that either compensate for lower money income or reduce the benefits of higher money income. If that were not true, people voting with their feet (and at considerable financial, time, and emotional expense) would be choosing areas of lower economic well-being. It is those site-specific characteristics of living in the Mountain West states that may explain the region's economic vitality despite the declines in its historic economic base. It is to this possibility to which I now turn.

Moving Beyond the Economic Base View of the Mountain West: Amenity-Supported Local Economic Vitality

The economic base view (Figure 1) focuses exclusively on labor demand. Business firms are assumed to locate in a particular area because of certain site-specific characteristics. These business firms create a local demand for labor to which a workforce responds. Labor moves to where the demand for workers happens to be located. People move towhere the jobs are. Jobs do not move to where people are—or so the model assumes.

To many this is just hard-nosed economic realism. "That's the way the economy is." To economists, however, this exclusive emphasis on labor demand and rejection of the relevance of labor supply is more than a little suspect. It is usually the case, in most market settings, that demand and supply interact in important ways to determine the economic outcome. It is rarely safe to assume that only one of these two important economic forces is operating.

To say that only labor demand matters is implicitly to make two assumptions that, when stated, most analysts would agree are untenable. The first is that people do not care where they live. They simply move to where the economy demands. The second is that business firms do not care about either labor supply or markets for their products. The location of the population determines both of these, but firms are assumed to ignore both and choose their location on some other basis. Neither of these assumptions can be defended on either theoretical or empirical grounds. Abandoning them reintroduces labor supply as an important economic force in determining the location of economic activity and seriously undermines the economic base approach.

During the second half of the 20th century, changes in the economy made residential location choices increasingly important in the determination of the location of economic activity. These changes have made both people and businesses more "footloose." Those developments include the following:

. Improvements in transportation and communications have drastically reduced the costs associated with geographic distance from economic centers. These changes include the interstate highway system, the extension of regular airline service to small cities, the development of modern telecommunications networks and technology, the development of national and international television networks that reach the most isolated locations, and the emergence of competing next-day courier service. These changes significantly reduce the sense of isolation from the national economy and culture.

. Changes in what it is the economy produces have also had an important impact on the location of economic activity. With the shift from the dominance of extractive and heavy industry to light manufacturing and services, the relative importance of transportation costs has declined as the value to weight ratio has risen dramatically. Transportation costs no longer tie economic activity as tightly to particular locations.¹⁴

As a result of these changes, it is less costly for citizens to act on their preferences of certain types of living environments. Similarly, it has made it more feasible for economic activity to follow the population as it makes residential location decisions. The result is that economic activity increasingly follows people rather than people passively following businesses. Consider the shift from center cities to suburbs. First, people fled those centers of employment and commercial activity and commuted back for work and shopping. Later the manufacturing base followed the population to the suburbs, as did the shopping centers. Similar things can be said about the move to the sunbelt or the current resettlement of the inland West.

Since the mid-1950s, economists have emphasized the importance of residential location decisions as a powerful economic force emphasized the importance of local "amenities" in the settlement of the desert Southwest, Florida, and the Pacific Northwest.¹⁵ Charles Tiebout underlined the fact that people "shop around" for the social amenities produced by different levels of local government taxation and different public spending patterns.¹⁶ G.H. Borts and J.L. Stein argued that in a mobile, open economy, it would be an area's ability to attract and hold a labor force without bidding [31 ELR 10442] labor costs up that would determine the geographic distribution of economic activity.¹⁷ These economic forces tied to local amenities continue to operate in important ways today, helping to explain the above average economic performances of the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West states over the last decade.¹⁸

Conventional regional economic analysis now regularly takes into account the role of social and natural amenities in explaining migration patterns and regional development patterns. The USDA, for instance, which long has used farm, manufacturing, and mining to classify the major economic characteristic of nonmetropolitan counties in harmony with the simple economic-base approach, has expanded its economic classification to include "amenity" counties. This became necessary in the 1980s when a group of nonmetropolitan counties showed ongoing growth despite the economic difficulties most nonmetropolitan counties were having. The common denominator in these counties was their attractive landscape and climatic features that attracted recreationists, retirees, and other new residents. This impact of amenities has accelerated in the 1990s.¹⁹ Similarly, most migration modeling now takes into account the role of local amenities along with employment and income opportunities and cost of living.²⁰

Of course, most areas are not "amenity" magnets that draw national attention. That, however, does not mean that the attractiveness of a particular area to current and potential residents is unimportant. Most small towns and rural areas in the Mountain West region gained population and the new economic activity that supports it during the 1990s. The characteristics of a local area that allow it to attract and hold people are an important part of the area's economic base. If this is not recognized, that part of the economic base may be irreversibly damaged. Likewise, if this significant economic force is ignored, local economic planning efforts may become largely confused and ineffective.

One way to initially investigate the possibility that amenities are playing an important role in supporting local economic vitality is to analyze whether the current population and level of economic activity can be explained in conventional economic base terms. Often the industry historically considered an area's economic base has not provided a positive stimulus to the local economy but has actually tended to be a negative or retarding force as it shrinks in absolute terms. Despite this, the rest of the economy has often shown "surprising" economic vitality, expanding the employment and income opportunities. It is this "autonomous" economic vitality found outside of the "basic" sectors that may hint at the operation of an alternative set of economic forces, including amenity-driven economic vitality. It was exactly this pattern of economic activity that was documented hereinabove.²¹

In analyzing the positive impact that protected or improved natural environments can have on an area's economic vitality, it is important that the affected area not be defined too narrowly. We are primarily an urban nation with over three-fourths of the population living in urban areas. Even in the northern Great Plains two-thirds of the population is urban. In the West it is close to 85%. One implication of this is that there are many urban residents who are likely to value the natural landscapes found in rural areas. Put somewhat differently, the economic vitality of many of our larger urban areas is partially supported by the attractiveness of the natural amenities found in the surrounding rural areas. Potential residents of an urban area do not evaluate only the character of that urban environment. They also look at the outdoor recreation opportunities and natural settings they have access to in the surrounding region.

When we recognize the importance of social and natural amenities to local economic vitality, a quite different picture of the forces driving the local economy emerge. The ability of an area to attract and hold residents is central to its economic vitality. In that context, those locally specific qualities that make a particular area an attractive place to live, work, and do business are not just of aesthetic interest, they are part of the local area's economic base. High quality living environments attract and hold people and businesses. That in turn triggers a series of dynamic changes that supports ongoing local economic vitality. The quality of the social and natural environments have profound economic implications. For that reason, I have labeled this set of economic forces the "environmental model" of the local economy.²²

This alternative view recognizes that people have preferences for living environments and act to satisfy those preferences by moving to preferred social and natural environments. This creates an available supply of labor at relatively low cost because of the relative excess supply of people trying to live in those particular areas. That labor supply attracts economic activity. In addition, those residential location decisions are also likely to inject income into the local economy as individuals expend savings and make investments as they seek to "make a living" in those particular areas. Retirement incomes also follow the residential location decisions made by retirees. The net effect on the local economy is expansionary. Entrepreneurs seeking to remain in these areas will explore every opportunity to replace imported goods or to capture dollars that would otherwise flow [31 ELR 10443] out of the area by developing a more sophisticated array of locally available goods and services. Those businesses that are most successful at displacing imports and serving local needs may build on that success and begin exporting to the larger economy. All of this allows the number of residents that the local economy can support to expand. This increases the "critical mass" of the economy and expands the range of goods and services that can be produced and marketed locally. The more sophisticated local economy reduces the isolation and the cost of inputs that might otherwise be barriers to the relocation of economic activity to the area. This permits ongoing cycles of expansion as long as the area remains a relatively attractive place to live, work, and do business. This view of the local economy is labeled the environmental view in Figure 8 to underline the important economic role being played by environmental quality in both determining local economic well-being and in providing vitality to the local economy.

Figure 8 An Environmental View of the Economy

Natural and social environments do play an important role in the ongoing transformation of the Mountain West region economies, but that role is not primarily through tourism. Tourism is just one of the economic links between natural and social amenities and the new economic vitality found through much of the inland West. Those amenities contribute to local economic well-being in three ways:

. Those amenities contribute directly to the well-being of existing local residents because they are directly enjoyed by them.

. Those amenities tend to attract new residents and businesses and the economic activity they stimulate.

. Those amenities can be the basis for a wide variety of "tourist" businesses. "Mass" "industrial grade" tourism is just one potential. Adventure recreation, ecotourism, working ranches, cultural tourism, etc. represent visitor-oriented businesses that may have quite different impacts.

Note that tourism is purposely put third in the list and the variety of different types of travel industry activities is emphasized. This is important if distorted economic analysis is going to be avoided.

The impact of landscapes preserved in their natural state extends far beyond those natural areas themselves and far beyond the commercial recreation that may take place there. Natural landscapes tend to define the character and quality of the surrounding physical and social environment. This is clear when natural area preservation protects water quality, which then supports off-site fisheries, or protects habitat that then supports off-site wildlife populations. But the range of influence is greater than this. Protected natural areas preserve the landscape that influences everything from scenic vistas to recreational patterns to patterns of human settlement.

Conclusion: The New Economic Role of Natural Landscapes

The environmental model of local economic vitality out-lined in Figure 8 can be summarized very directly: people care where they live. They care about the qualities of the natural and social environment that make up the living environment, and they act on those preferences. They are willing to make sacrifices to obtain access to these natural amenities. High quality natural environments draw people and businesses to areas even when economic opportunities are otherwise quite limited. As a result, economic activity shifts toward those preferred living environments.

Because the environmental model of community economic development sketched out in Figure 8 shifts the emphasis away from exclusive focus upon extractive industry, 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. It is that the role of natural resources in the local economy is not diminishing but changingfrom extraction and export to nonconsumptive and environmental. Communities' economic health continues to depend upon the surrounding natural landscapes, but in a fundamentally different way. Our natural landscapes are no longer primarily warehouses from which to extract commercially valuable resources nor a playground in which commercial companies can entertain temporary visitors. They are now the source of increasingly valuable flows of environmental services: clear water and air, recreational opportunities, wildlife, scenic beauty, biodiversity, environmental stabilization, etc. Those environmental services provided by 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, prevent ghost towns by holding and attracting economic activity. Because of this, it is vitally important for all of us to check just where it is our public policymakers have their eyes focused and demand that they shift their view away from the rear-view mirror as they seek to steer our communities toward a safe and prosperous future.

This, of course, is not an unmixed blessing for either those landscapes or the communities of the Mountain West. The growing population and level of economic activity threaten both the integrity of natural system and the quality of social life in the communities. The real economic challenge for the Mountain West states is not how to stabilize or revive its declining natural resource industries or how to compete successfully for a growing share of the tourist market. The real economic challenge for the region is how to keep the "resettlement" of the inland West from destroying the very qualities that are drawing people and economic activity to the region and thus undermining the region's new economic base.

1. For purposes of this Dialogue, the Mountain West region consists of the states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

2. This view of the regional economy is starting to be accepted by government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). See, for instance, a recent issue of Rural Development Perspectives that focused on the Mountain West, 14, RURAL DEV. PERSP. n.p. (1999).

3. For a discussion of this "schizophrenic" attitude within the West, see ROBERT H. NELSON, PUBLIC LANDS AND PRIVATE RIGHTS: THE FAILURE OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT (1995).

4. WILLIAM PERRY PENDLEY, WAR ON THE WEST: GOVERNMENT TYRANNY ON AMERICA'S GREAT FRONTIER (1995).

5. For a discussion of the politics of the "new West," see Philip M. Burgess & Richard F. O'Donnell, Old West Values Prevail Over "City-Slicker" Politics, in WESTERN POLITICAL OUTLOOK (Center for the New West 1998).

6. For a further discussion of the economic base model, see THOMAS MICHAEL POWER, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND ECONOMIC WELL-BEING: THE ECONOMIC PURSUIT OF QUALITY (1996); THOMAS MICHAEL POWER, LOST LANDSCAPES AND FAILED ECONOMIES: THE SEARCH FOR A VALUE OF PLACE (1996).

7. All of the employment data on which Figures 2 through 6 are based come from the REGIONAL ECONOMIC INFORMATION SYSTEM CD-ROM, BUREAU OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS, U.S. DEP'T OF COMMERCE. As of January 2001, that database provided data only through the end of 1998.

8. To be classified as metropolitan, an urban area must have an urban core of at least 50,000 and a total population of at least 100,000 in the surrounding area of "urban influence." Over time, of course, some nonmetropolitan areas gain population and get reclassified as metropolitan. Hence the list of metropolitan areas changes each year, including increasing percentages of the total land area, population, and economy. That is the reason for specifying the year (1998) in which the nonmetropolitan calculation was carried out.

9. Data on employment in various branches of manufacturing, such as lumber and metal smelting, were not readily available for nonmetropolitan areas of states because of disclosure restrictions. For that reason, Figure 3 does not include this manufacturing activity tied to natural resource extraction the way Figure 2 does. Since much of the processing of natural resources takes place in urban areas, their inclusion is unlikely to change the picture portrayed in Figures 3 and 5 significantly.

10. Where a ski resort was in a county with a very diversified economy of which the ski area was only a small part, that county was not included. Thus Salt Lake City, Flagstaff, and Flathead County, Montana, for instance, were not included. The counties included were: Colorado: Eagle, Pitkin, Routt, San Miguel, and Summit; Wyoming: Teton; Idaho; Blaine and Teton; Utah: Summit; New Mexico: Taos.

11. See Nonmetro Population Growth Rebound of the 1990s Continues, but at a Slower Recent Rate, in 8 RURAL CONDITIONS AND TRENDS 46 (1997), fig. 2 (Econ. Research Serv., USDA).

12. Phil Brooks, Whitefish Resort Community Report (Nov. 15, 1994) (report prepared for the city of Whitefish, Montana) (copy on file with author).

13. The state net domestic migration data is from the U.S. Census Bureau website, Components of State Population Change, at http://www.census.gov/. The average income data is per capita personal income from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Economic Information CD-ROM.

14. Edwin S. Mills & Gary Chodes, Non-Extractive Employment Outside Metropolitan Areas, in NATIONAL RURAL STUDIES COMMITTEE: PROCEEDINGS 29 (Western Rural Development Center, Oregon State Univ. 1988).

15. Edward Ullman, Amenities as a Factor in Regional Growth, 44 GEOGRAPHIC REV. 119 (1954).

16. Charles Tiebout, A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures, 64 J. POL. ECON. 160 (1956).

17. G.H. BORTS & J.L. STEIN, ECONOMIC GROWTH IN A FREE MARKET (1964).

18. See generally ECONOMIC WELL-BEING AND ENVIRONMENTAL. PROTECTION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. A CONSENSUS REPORT BY PACIFIC NORTHWEST ECONOMISTS (Thomas M. Power ed., Dep't of Econ., Univ. of Montana 1995).

19. 7 RURAL CONDITIONS AND TRENDS 40 (1996) (Econ. Research Serv., USDA). See also K. Deavers, The Reversal of the Rural Renaissance, ENTREPRENEURIAL ECON. REV. 3 (1989); C.L. Beale & G.V. Fuguitt, 1990, Decade of Pessimistic Nonmetro Population Trends Ends on Optimistic Note, 6 RURAL DEV. PERSP. 14 (1990); Peggy J. Cook & Karen L. Mizer, The Revised ERS County Typology: An Overview (Rural Development Research Report No. 89, Econ. Research Serv., USDA 1994); Kenneth M. Johnson & Calvin L. Beale, Nonmetropolitan Recreational Counties: Identification and Fiscal Concerns (Jan. 1995) (unpublished working paper, Demographic Change and Fiscal Stress Project, Loyola Univ., Chicago) (on file with author).

20. Michael J. Greenwood et al., Migration, Regional Equilibirum, and the Estimation of Compensating Differentials, 26 J. REGIONAL SCI. 223 (1991). M.C. Berger & G.C. Blomquist, Mobility and Destination in Migration Decisions: The Roles of Earnings, Quality of Life, and Housing Prices, 2 J. HOUSING ECON. 37 (1992).

21. See fig. 5 & fig. 6.

22. See fig. 8. The critique of the economic base view and development of the environmental model can be found in the author's two most recent books. See POWER, LOST LANDSCAPES, supra note 6 and POWER, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION, supra note 6.

31 ELR 10438 | Environmental Law Reporter | copyright © 2001 | All rights reserved