Thursday, May 23, 2019

Creating new county and state parks and forests as rural economic development

Two big ideas:

Rural areas need economic development - and city-driven wealth generated by high education and high services isn’t the right fit. Tourism, however, which remains a growth industry could be a good strategy. So what do rural areas have that people want to pay to visit? Nature. A lot of it. How to expand and market that nature? Create and expand parks - not just our famous national parks but state and county parks as well.

A related idea is the power and necessity of planting a trillion trees - those great carbon-eating machines - on our planet to combat the devastation of climate change. The stark math of how much pollution we have pumped into our thin atmosphere and how much we have to somehow pull out is chilling. Trees are one of the tools in our arsenal to sustain life as we know it. And planting them at scale - a trillion of them - fits the scope of the challenge.

Since only half of us are inclined to attack climate change (at least in the US) and rural political leaders tend to feel even more skeptical of the value of attacking climate change, our campaign to earn their support to create new county parks with millions and millions of untouched trees and plants has to be an economic development strategy. Which I suspect pencils out in terms of wealth generation from increased visitors but it would be better to have data behind the pitch. And we need to sell the hundred thousand or so local and county and state leaders on implementing their own park-driven tourism development plan. Billions of federal funding for local forests wouldn’t hurt.

These ideas inspired by reading Richard Powers recent novel Overstory. I recommend it.

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