By Erik Loomis in RIFuture.org
Reductions of 77% in the Gulf of Maine and 61% off Cape Georges
are in order. Many fishermen will lose their jobs. Coastal communities will
likely suffer serious economic problems, even if they have developed something
of a tourist economy; the ones that haven’t will struggle much more.
Letters to the editor and interviews with workers in recent weeks have demonstrated the deep angst fishing reductions are causing. Take this recent letter to the editor in the Journal. The writer, a fisherman and Ph.D. student working on fisheries, says the reductions reject what his eyes tell him–that there are lots of fish in the sea, forget what the computer models say. The writer struggles with what this means for his family, his future, and his personal identity.
What does it mean to lose a regional identity based around
natural resources? Again, while this might not define the Rhode Island economy
to the extent it did 50 years ago, for communities in New England that still
have active fishing economies, the cultural change can be as devastating as the
economic struggles.
As a historian of natural resource economies in the American
West, I’ve seen miners in towns like Butte, Montana and Leadville, Colorado
struggle to adapt to closure of mines, holding on to their mining identity
while other cities in Montana and Colorado create vibrant tourist economies.
In
my home state of Oregon, loggers turned out of their jobs in the 1980s and
1990s have also found it difficult to thrive in an economy now recast around
tourism and high-tech industry. Pockets of poverty surround the supposed
hipster paradise portrayed in the TV show Portlandia.
A significant number of loggers and their now-grown children
have created a new way to live off the land: by growing marijuana or producing
crystal methamphetamine under the forest cover. Ranchers
around the West find themselves selling their cows and property, unable to
compete with big industrial cattle operations and instead dividing their
property into housing developments.
There’s no easy answer to the economic or cultural adjustments
required when people get thrown out of their job by resource depletion,
globalization, or other developments out of their control. Loggers blamed
environmentalists, even though environmental regulations played a relatively
small role in the timber industry’s decline. Ranchers blame government
regulations on grazing national forest land and now fishing communities blame
government bureaucrats and arbitrary regulations.
Again, the loss of cultural identity through work is a hard blow
to take. But there is precedent for the federal government to assist workers
who lose their jobs because of environmental restrictions. The 1978 expansion
of California’s Redwood National Park led to the unemployment of loggers.
Rather than leave them to their fate without government assistance, labor unions,
environmentalists, and the federal government created the Redwood Employee
Protection Program which provided significant payments to workers displaced by
the shuttered mills.
They received direct payments from the federal government
until 1984 to build a bridge until they could find other work. The generosity
of this was controversial–President Carter himself was quite skeptical when he
signed the bill. And in many ways it didn’t work that well.
There were battles
over who should qualify–were the mills shutting down because of a lack of
timber or because of globalization and mechanization? Moreover, there were some
disappearing funds and management issues.
We don’t need to get into these
details now. What’s notable though is that at least one time the federal
government decided to expand the welfare state, however tentatively, to workers
put out of work in order to save rare resources.
Erik Loomis is
a progressive, a native Oregonian and a professor of history at the University
of Rhode Island focusing on the Civil War era as well as labor and
environmental history. He also blogs for lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com and you can
follow him on twitter @ErikLoomis.
