Dear HCN,
“In search of
the Glory Days” (HCN, 12/23/02: In search of the Glory Days)
follows what has become a tradition at HCN
— nostalgia for the West that has passed or is passing. In
this case, it is the glory days of mining that are mourned and the
present days of outdoor recreation resorts that are disparaged.
I’ve been here before. A few years ago, I sat in a
car in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada with former timber
workers who were working to create a forest restoration economy. We
had stopped in a former company timber town that had been
transformed into a tourist village. Over lunch, my fellow travelers
bemoaned the loss of community, high-wage mill jobs and honest
woods work which had been replaced by retail shops servicing
visitors from San Francisco.
Such nostalgia ignores
historic reality. Western company towns — whether timber or
mining-oriented — were run by absentee owners. Profits, and
the natural capital from which they were generated, were
transferred back East or even to Europe. Precious little trickled
down. In contrast, the tourist/recreation service economy supports
a large number of small businesses run by regular people pursuing
the American Dream. Many of the wage workers in these new Western
towns are from Mexico. The jobs are a vast improvement over working
the pesticide-poisoned fields of the West’s corporate farms.
Nostalgia is patently human and thus attractive.
HCN, however, owes it to its readers to temper
the tendency with a healthy dose of reality.
Felice Pace
Etna, California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Tourism is a vast improvement over mining.
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