What Washington Conservation Can Learn From Idaho
Consider the similarities. Both Idaho and Washington are this year graced with budget surpluses: $214 million in Idaho and a whopping $1.4 billion in Washington. (Even in per capita terms, Washington's surplus is roughly 50 percent larger than Idaho's.) Both Idaho and Washington are also graced with stunning natural features and a populace that purports to love the outdoors. But both are also cursed by a crumbling infrastructure of woefully underfunded state parks.
Enter Idaho's republican governor, Dirk Kempthorne, who wants to spend $34 million on upgrading and expanding Idaho's park system. Maybe Kempthorne is selfish--he's known to camp frequently in the summer. Or maybe he's just a wise investor--officials calculate a big return on the investment, according to the Idaho Statesman:
The economic benefits of spending about $34 million on construction and improvements of state parks would bring $52.5 million to the state's economy through goods, services, leisure and hospitality and other types of sales, according to state figures.
And what's Washington proposing to do with its park system? That's where the similarities end. Washington's proposing, well, pretty much nothing.
Just My Opinion
Two op-eds in today's Seattle Times worth taking a look at...
- Biodiesel: short-term crush or long-term relationship? Bruce Ramsey takes a balanced, but ultimately favorable, view of government programs to encourage home-grown fuels.
- The rapid disappearance of America's middle class. We posted on a similar subject a few days ago, but it's worth repeating -- rising family incomes don't necessarily mean that we're better off. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, male full-time workers earn $800 less today than in 1973, which means that the rise in median family income is entirely due to increases in two-earner households. Of course, these sorts of trends are hard to make sense of across decades, since so many things change -- people's expectations, the quality of consumer goods and public services, enjoyment of time at work vs. time at home, etc. Still, there's ample reason to believe that the well-being of the middle class has become uncoupled from steady increases in per-capita GDP. The money quote of the article. "All the talk about family values is just that -- talk -- when our financial policies are driving middle-class families to the wall."
I'm not sure I share all the opinions expressed in the op-eds -- but don't really have anything to add to either piece, either.
Go Fish
Over the weekend The Oregonian ran a good short series on the diminishing numbers of hunters and anglers in the state. While the state's population has doubled since 1950, the number of hunters and fishermen has actually declined. [Read the articles here, here, here, and here.] This is not just a Beaver State phenomenon--it's true nationwide--and it may lead to some troubling implications for wildlife protection.
The Oregonian seems mostly concerned that without hunting and fishing, fewer people will want to protect wildlife and natural areas. I think that's not right. Northwesterners are still getting out into nature in vast, teeming, trail-clogging hordes. In fact, wildlife watchers spend generate substantially more economic activity than hunters and anglers combined.
The more important question--and the one that The Oregonian gives comparatively short shrift to--is a basic policy question. As the paper has it:
...who will pay the costs of preserving habitat and managing fish and wildlife? Hunters and fishermen now foot most of the bill, not just through the steep license, tag and access fees they pay, but also through countless hours of volunteer labor, pulling out abandoned fences, cutting down water-sucking juniper trees, planting streamside willows and tending boxes of fish eggs.
In Oregon, as in many other states, hunting and fishing licenses, together with taxes items like ammunition and fishing rods, pay for a huge variety of conservation benefits--everything from fieldwork by professional biologists to refuges like Sauvie's Island on the Columbia River. Without those (declining) sources of revenue, the future of conservation may look even more bleak than it already is. So what to do?
