Somewhere in New York a ball is waiting to drop. In a couple of days, they’ll hoist that gaudy thing to the top of 1 Times Square before they let it back down again and we’ll all sing Auld Lang Syne and strangers will kiss in the street and then they’ll pack the whole thing up in styrofoam peanuts and wait for the next year to do it all again. It’s a tradition.
New Year’s is a holiday fraught with tradition, after all, with the songs, and the hats, and the terrible champagne, and the resolutions, and the ruminating on just what happened over the last twelve months. It’s pageantry for the sake of pageantry, mostly, and I would never suggest that you make a New Year’s Resolution. But in the long nights and bloated post-Christmas stupor one can’t help but reflect, for a moment, on the highs and lows of the year before.
To me, 2016 felt old. It was a relic. Somehow we are standing on the cusp of a robot revolution and using the vocabulary of the Civil War. We each carry an inconceivably powerful computer in our pocket and we’ve cured the most devastating diseases in history. Yet the national dialogue seems inclined to fire up the Cold War for old time’s sake and cast aside the lessons from the 20th Century so we can do it all again. Even Siri and Alexa sound a bit like HAL, if you think about it.
Take, for instance, the jobs conversation (you remember the election, yes?). As far as I can tell, our new administration’s plan for economic prosperity evokes the tenor of Reconstruction, and rests on coal mining, assembly line labor, and condemning immigrants.
When we talk about the economy we still use the parlance of the Industrial Revolution, when factory output and factory jobs correlated one to one and energy was free. We ignore the fact that 85% of manufacturing jobs were lost to automation and improvements in technology, not lowly paid currency manipulators.
I mean, good god people – we live in the age of self-driving cars, but the national dialogue on job creation is still built on Henry Ford’s assembly line. A manufacturing-based economy is lost, not to trade and immigrants, but to the unflinching wheel of progress. The south fought a war to preserve a slave-based economy only to see it rendered moot by the mechanization of the cotton harvest. Our current president-elect has promised a trade war over jobs that began fading to obsolescence in the 80s.
(NB: If we’re actually interested in putting people to work, it’s hard to imagine a more labor and investment intensive project that redesigning the entire power grid for renewables. Hell, Exxon and Phillips can have the contracts for all I care.)
But the tendency to look to assembly lines and strip mines for jobs ignores a quiet industry giant. Starting in 2017, the impacts of outdoor recreation (you know it as “playing”) will be included in the US GDP calculations. A 2012 Economic Impact Study of the sector reports that the number will be somewhere around $650 billion in the US alone. (That’s bigger than the pharmaceutical industry, btw.)
And so when we talk about jobs, it’s time to start talking about real jobs. Not imaginary jobs that your grandfather had after he came home from killing Nazis but that haven’t existed since I Love Lucy got cancelled.
We’re talking about real careers that support real families and buy real houses. It’s hunting guides and trailbuilders and bike mechanics and ski lodge operators. It’s the guy at the Patagonia store, or who shows you where the big fish are.
This is a segment of the economy that relies on government assistance, but not in a traditional way. The outdoor industry doesn’t rely on subsidies and tax breaks. It doesn’t shelter profits in Ireland. It doesn’t ask regulators to look the other way during an oil spill to keep people at work. The outdoor industry only asks that open and wild spaces are protected (we’ve got, like, five year budget forecasts and stuff and it’ll really do us a solid if we can count on us not, like, damming the Grand Canyon or something).
For generations, conversations about the economy have pitted conservation against prosperity. This was probably about right when “prosperity” meant clear cutting and cyanide leach mining. It doesn’t have to mean that anymore.
In the west we have a tradition of, like Wallace Stegner said, approaching “land, water, grass, timber, mineral resources, and scenery as grave robbers might approach the tomb of a pharaoh.” We have the Berkeley Pits and stump towns to prove it.
But Stegner was also hopeful that a newfound western community would “work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air and water… to control corporate power and to dampen the excess that has always marked the region, and will arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on resources that they will know how to cherish and renew.”
And we’re on the right track. Wild places are now scarcer than energy and we need to ascribe value appropriately. Not only out of sentimentality and a liberal arts degree, but out of good business sense. It’s time to get our thinking out of the 19th century and into the 21st.
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I’m currently working on a new line of auto-belay robots that will soon replace your precious mountain guides. You can thank me later.