THE STEADILY RIGHTWARD-DRIFTING Pee-Eye ran a big feature package last month on rural Washington state’s political climate for Indecision 2000.
The piece was full of the usual Grumpy Small-Town Conservatives (an archetype made for urban consumption if there ever was one). They dutifully blamed all of non-urbanized Washington’s economic problems on pesky bureaucrats and, in one interviewee’s description, “environmental Communists” meddling in these salt-O-the-earth folks’ need to make a rightful off-the-land living.
The reality, natch, is more complex.
The main reason for the economic gap between greater Seattle and the rest of Washington is that the Metroplex has had this here boom in hi-techy and other professional employment this past decade; resulting in the traffic jams, the real-estate hyperinflation, the proliferation of “Market Price” gourmet restaurants, the Blob-shaped music museum, and all the other detrius of gentrification we’ve complained about here.
But, despite the cyber-libertarians’ occasional claims that the PC Age would result in the death of cities (since, these pundits used to profess, doesn’t everybody really want to live in horse country?), eastern and southwestern Washington remained stuck in 1991-recession conditions.
The same global-corporate machinations that clogged Issaquah with condos kept farm commodity prices low, while diverting more pennies of the consumer food dollar toward processors and middlemen and marketers (which, in turn, have been merging and consolidating as fast as the financiers can close the deals).
The timber biz is in a similar predicament, with three additional complications:
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The rise on the world market of cheap wood stocks from Indonesia and other countries with low wages and few enforced environmental protections;
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The legacy of two or three decades’ overcutting here; which has pretty much just left the most environmentally-sensitive old-growth forests left (aside from the timber-company-run “tree farms” that are still years away from “reharvesting”); and
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Consolidation and automation within the sawmill side of the biz; allowing companies to close smaller mills and blame the environmentalists.
A true progressive movement in this country, somethiing along the lines of the old-line Minnesota and Wisconsin rural populists, would be able to capitalize on these real reasons for rural recession. It would feed this simmering frustration into a movement to check corporate power and promote sustainable forestry and agriculture.
Not “environmental Communism,” but a green-but-not-red campaign that would preserve both the land and the people who’ve depended upon it.
The leaders of today’s Democratic Party, concerned almost exclusively with raising $$ from the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and courting voters from affluent suburbs, couldn’t care less.
They’ve all but officially written off wide swaths of the nation’s heartland to the Republicans, who are more than willing to accept country folk as voters, volunteers, talk-show callers, and newspaper-interview subjects–all while the GOP politicians continue to prop up the pro-corporate policies that leave farming and timber communities stuck in their rut.
TOMORROW: The disappearance of the old-fashioned bicycle.
ELSEWHERE:
