Green-Collar Jobs - Excerpt
The changing economy of a Northwest town--Bend, Oregon, which, like many Northwest communities, sends far too much of its money out of town for oil spending.
The following is an excerpt from Sightline's 1999 book Green-Collar Jobs
Chapter one: "Ketchikan: Closing the Mill"
To the teenagers filing into Ketchikan High School this dark morning through a tentative pause in the southeast Alaskan rains, the future looks different than it did to their counterparts a decade ago. In the late eighties, Ketchikan was the staging ground for a logging bonanza, and timber employment in Alaska was setting new records. If you had a good work ethic and a strong back, you could drop out of high school and make more money than your teacher.
But today--a cold November Monday in 1998--the southeast Alaskan timber industry has shrunk to one-third its peak employment, and almost nobody at "K High" is staking much on wood fiber. Nissa Cleman, whose father runs a logging company, has no intention of following him into the business. Rusty Etten, whose father was laid off from the town's pulp mill, does not see timber in his future. And Lindsey Barnes says, "I was thinking about studying environmental sciences, which is pretty weird since I'm from this pulp mill town."
All three, like most students here, are bound for college. All accept the fact that the global, information economy now demands at least 16 years of formal education. Their principal, Anthony Kennedy, practically chants "high skill, high pay" at them. In the sixties, he worked his way through college in the mills of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He says, "I did seven different jobs in the mill. Six out of seven no longer exist; they've been automated."
Ketchikan's easy--street timber jobs are also gone. The final blow came in March 1997, when the Ketchikan Pulp Company shut its mill and laid off almost 500 workers. Most of them, the elite of Alaska's manufacturing laborers, were well paid but poorly educated. They received an average of $45,000 a year for doing their part in the conversion of old-growth forests to dissolving pulp-a chemical building block of rayon, cellophane, and certain explosives.
Northwest media described the showdown preceding the mill closure as a classic case of jobs versus the environment, the latest skirmish of the war in the woods made famous by the spotted owl. Or they described it as another instance of a broader, purportedly incessant struggle between economy and environment.
I am visiting Northwest timber towns this fall and winter trying to better understand this supposed conflict. The journey is helping me personalize the mammoth body of economic literature and research data published on the subject. And it is helping me think about one of the Pacific Northwest's most confounding challenges: if we are going to safeguard most remaining natural ecosystems, stop sprawl, slash greenhouse gas emissions, curtail toxic chemicals, clean the air and water, and save endangered species, just what is everyone going to do for a living? In particular, what can the Northwest do to help its hard-pressed rural areas sustain their economies without high-volume resource extraction?
My answers to these questions are only partial, but they are guardedly optimistic. Employment and conservation are more often complementary than antagonistic, and most apparent conflicts between them disappear under rigorous examination. With surprising speed, Northwest employment is uncoupling itself from the volume businesses of resource extraction. The blistering pace of technological change, particularly the information revolution, has meant that most new jobs are in industries that spin wealth not by moving more timber or steel-at least not within the Northwest-but by moving electrons, or stimulating neurons, in more profitable ways. Steadily, the economy is becoming more about qualities than quantities, and the ascendant industries, while not without environmental problems, pollute less, consume fewer resources, and disrupt less habitat per job and per dollar of sales than do the declining industries. So although the transition from hewing wood to crafting bytes does not cure the Northwest's ecological ills, it makes their cure easier: the typical Northwest job is gentler to ecosystems than it used to be.
Unfortunately, the good news is tempered with two kinds of bad: the new Northwest has wider income disparities than the old Northwest had, and the consumption patterns of the winners in the new economy are quickly displacing the production patterns of the old industries as environmental threats. The things we are paid to do pose a smaller problem; the things we pay to do pose a bigger one. Thus, greening our work may prove simpler than greening our lifestyles--or than sustaining a modicum of income equality.
The best-case scenario is a future that blends advanced technology with humane policies to meet the region's millen-nial challenge: making the Northwest a global model of prosperity, prosperity that is shared among all citizens and abides by nature's limits.
The worst-case scenario, equally possible, is a bipolar economy: high-paying, long-hour, relatively green information-age work for those hooked into the global market and low-paying, temporary jobs for those who are not. This future, already manifest in places, includes trophy homes; telecommuting; second-home sprawl; and jet-setting, recreational consumerism for the privileged. For the not-so-privileged, it offers daily job insecurity, falling wages, and trailer parks. Furthermore, this emerging dystopia exports many of its environmental impacts beyond the boundaries of the Pacific Northwest, through the global production lines for goods such as Range Rovers and petroleum.
The Northwest's boundaries, defining the focus of this book, stretch from southeast Alaska to northern California-along a coastline cloaked in the largest rain forests outside the tropics-and inland to the headwaters of the rain-forest rivers (map inside front cover). This area, a biological zone of waterways home to salmon, is a test case for green livelihoods. Once overwhelmingly dependent on logging and other forms of resource extraction, the Northwest--with 14 million inhabitants, 7 million workers, and a $350 billion gross regional product-is now at the leading edge of both the conservation movement and the global information economy.
I am visiting Northwest places that are in different stages of the transition from timber to information to learn about the promise and pitfalls of this metamorphosis. I have chosen timber not because the industry is especially important to the Northwest economy, but because it is important to how the Northwest thinks about its economy. To many northwesterners, logging--and not farming,fishing, manufacturing, or any of the other possible case studies-epitomizes the supposed confiict between jobs and environment.
For me, for this book, the timber industry is a lens for viewing the larger economy. My hunch is that the uneasy transition the region's timber towns have been making holds lessons about how all northwesterners can reconcile work and nature. This book documents the efforts of remarkable northwesterners who are leading this change-by planning community forestry, fostering value-added manufacturing, retraining workers for ecosystem restoration, tapping the conservation market, and tethering money at home. None of these approaches is sufficient in itself, but they underline an all-important lesson: people make the economy, and people can change it.
See also
Green-Collar Jobs: Fact sheet about the term that's shaking a nation