Okay, so you got up this morning, scraped the scum off your teeth and that last bit of change from your kid’s piggybank, and headed down to the corner coffeeshop to buy one cup of endless refills and spend the rest of the day surfing the Interweb looking for some good news to brighten up your unemployed haze.
Well, just call me Mr. Buzzkill, because I’m the bearer of bad news. By now, everyone’s heard about the 45,000 jobs that were lost just yesterday. But there’s plenty of West-specific downers, such as:
• Nevada’s unemployment rate is now at 9 percent. That’s alarming, but not as alarming as how fast it’s climbing; just a year ago, it was near 5 percent.
• Weyerhauser is closing two mills in Washington. More than 200 jobs will be lost.
• Oregon’s unemployment rate climbed to 11 percent.
• Non-profits in California are suffering and failing.
• And in the Phoenix area, some folks are predicting an infestation of roof rats in homes that have been left abandoned by foreclosure. They’re also bemoaning a nearly $14 billion loss by Freeport-McMoran, the Phoenix based mining company.
I know, enviro-loving, tree-hugging folks like us should be celebrating the demise of the economy. After all, all those shut down sawmills, and mining company collapses, and shrinking exurbs mean less logging, mining and desert-gobbling growth. There may be something to that, and we may someday look back and see that our current woes slowed down a runaway train on the tracks to disaster. But that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people are in a world of hurt right now, and that our current problems could very well increase the gap between rich and poor. And before you go get another free refill on that coffee to celebrate the demise of society’s excesses, keep this in mind: A tattered economy provides one of the best justifications for all kinds of crazy stuff, like mining, drilling, building, you name it. And when folks are struggling to pay the rent, they care less about the environment.
Sorry for wrecking your day.
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