ANAHEIM -- The mythical road to riches in the American West has always been tied to a deeper coal mine, a bigger clear-cut, a greater take from the earth. But those boom-and-bust operations have produced more ghost towns than prospering ones.
The road to economic stability for the west today, argues a University of Wisconsin-Madison rural sociologist, is one that takes an ironic twist to the frontier axiom that "all wealth comes from the land."
William Freudenburg says western towns that are healthiest today are those that have stopped chasing new mines, smokestack industries and prisons and focused instead on the west's greatest asset, its natural beauty. Many rural towns have growing populations and revitalized economies built on promoting environmental quality.
"The new prosperity in the west is based on the region's natural beauty, rather than on tangible resources like coal, trees, cattle and sheep," says Freudenburg. "The only mining in these towns is mining the coins out of the pockets of tourists."
Freudenburg is part of a Jan. 23 symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science exploring the changing character of the American West. A century after Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis," the west now faces a riding tide of challenges, including relentless development, battles over public land and environmental blight.
The symposium focuses on the interior west composed of eight states of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains. From 1980 - 1990, the population in these eight states (from Arizona and New Mexico north to Montana and Idaho) has increased 20 percent, twice the national average.
One telling example of change is Kremmling, Colo., a town of about 2,000 people an hour's drive from Steamboat Springs. For decades, its citizens saw industries such as sawmills as the surest route to prosperity. But that all changed about a decade ago, when the last timber-related industry shut down.
"A lot o
'"/>
Contact: William Freudenburg
freudenburg@ssc.wisc.edu
608-263-4893
University of Wisconsin-Madison
23-Jan-1999