Lex Anteinternet: Monday, August 25, 1924. True then and now.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, August 25, 1924. Ratifying the Dawes Plan...: 

The Cheyenne paper pointed out that summer was drawing to a close.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day: 

Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day

Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day: A Celtic cross in a local cemetery, marking the grave of a very Irish, and Irish Catholic, figure. Recently I ran this item:  Lex Anteintern...

So, after the crabby entry, what did I do for St. Patrick's Day?

Well, my St. Patrick's Day really started on the prior day, March 16, as my daughter was in town.  We always have corned beef and I hadn't secured one, so after work (lawyers, you should be aware, often work six days a week. . . at least I do) I went to get one.

Usually, this isn't a problem, but it was on Saturday and I ended up getting one at a specialty butcher shop after going to three of them, which is a nice thing to think of in a way.  Distributism saved the holiday.

I now also have a corned pork butt, or corned pork roast, I'll have to look at the label, from the second one I visited, that visit being due to the recommendation of the first. They were really friendly at all of them, and at that one they insisted I try the corned pork, which they had just cooked one of for themselves.

It was quite good, much like pastrami.

Long-suffering spouse informed me that while she doesn't like corned beef (her DNA, I'd note, is almost as Irish as mine, but not quite) she hates pastrami.

Anyhow, I also went to the liquor store to buy stout and Irish whiskey.  I got the last six-pack of Guinness and some Irish ale I'd never heard of.

Which made me wonder what on earth was going on.  To see the shelves cleared that way was downright weird. And all the parking lots all over town were full.

I chose the liquor store as it was near one of the churches in town, and it gave me the opportunity to go to confession.  They informed me in the store, which was new, that the parking lot was full as their bar had just opened, and it was packed. That surprised me as it was about 1:00 p.m. which strikes me as really early to hit the bars.

I went to confession, as noted, and was right behind my next store neighbors.  I avail myself of the sacrament frequently, so I was comfortable speaking to my neighbor while in line.  I know what my sins and many failings are.  The very traditionally dressed women behind me in line, however, was clearly not happy with us chatting. Anyhow, it's odd as we live right next store, but we don't actually chat all that much.

Long suffering spouse is a better chatter than I am.

I went home and I fixed the St. Patrick's Day meal, which is my chore.  It was good, but the corned beef was uniquely not very fatty.  Long suffering spouse and daughter liked it better than the usual, grocery store bought, one.  I like the fatty one better.

We'll see what opinions are on the pork.

On St. Patrick of Ireland's day itself, the first thing I did was go to Mass.  The Gospel reading was as follows:

Gospel

Jn 12:20-33

Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,  and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew;  then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them,  “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Amen, amen, I say to you,  unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,  it remains just a grain of wheat;  but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me,  and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me.

“I am troubled now.  Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven,  “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;  but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered and said,  “This voice did not come for my sake but for yours. Now is the time of judgment on this world;  now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth,  I will draw everyone to myself.” 

He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.

It struck me because of this section:

Amen, amen, I say to you,  unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,  it remains just a grain of wheat;  but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me,  and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me.

The reason is that I've been going through a lot that's been forced up on me recently, together with others upon whom it's been forced, but I'm finding myself unique making decisions for everyone, and not for what I want to do, but for others. The stress of it has been gigantic and when I stop to think about it, it's depressing.

I went home and made a breakfast out of a bagel and left over corned beef.

In the afternoon, I went out fishing and took the dog.  On the way, I was listening to a podcast, like I'll tend to do.  It was a Catholic Answers Focus interview of Carrie Gress and it was profound.  I'll post on that elsewhere.  

We didn't catch any fish.  Nothing was biting, so we came home.

By that time, I'd finished the short Gress podcast and listened to This Week.  I've later listed to Meet The Press.  Both featured Republicans try to tell people that when Donald Trump promised a bloodbath if he isn't elected, he didn't really mean that, but was speaking instead about cars coming in from Mexico from Chinese factories. The full text of his speech stated:

We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected, now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories.

It's interesting that Republicans feel compelled to continually tell you that Trump didn't mean what he said. It's also interesting that a person with such a strange pattern of speech is listened to.  He rambles and repeats.

The other thing that the shows all dealt with was Chuck Schumer calling for an Israeli election as he's upset with the current Israeli government.  A lot of people are upset with the current Israeli government, including a lot of Israelis, but an American elected official calling for a new government in another democracy is really beyond the Pale.

St. Patrick's Day's meal was left over corned beef and Brussels Sprouts, and cheese lasagna from the prior Friday.

No big blowout, no "Craic".  Just an observation that probably more closely resembles that of centuries of Irish people, in Ireland and the diaspora.  A small family gathering, a small feast, a little regional alcohol.  Reconciliation and Mass, and knowing that today the grim problems of the last two weeks, on this Monday, return.

Labels: Catholic, Commentary, Daily Living, Introspection, Personal comments, religion, St. Patrick's Day, Work

Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures

Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures: 

Contrary to our natures

When this blog was started several years ago, the purpose of it was to explore historical topics, often the routine day to day type stuff, from the period of roughly a century ago.  It started off as a means of researching things, for a guy too busy to really research, for a historical novel.

It didn't start off as a general commentary on the world type of deal, nor did it start off as a "self help" type of blog either.  Over time, however, the switch to this blog for commentary, away from the blog that generally hosts photographs, has caused a huge expansion here of commentary of all types, including in this category and, frankly, in every other.

 

The pondering professor of our Laws of History thread.

Readers of this blog (of which there are extraordinarily few) know that I've made a series of comments in the "career" category recently that touch on lawyers and mental health. They also know that I was working on a case (actually, two cases) in which an opposing lawyer, without warning or indication, killed himself.  That's bothered me a great deal thereafter.  It isn't as if we could have done anything, but that it occurred bothers me.  And, as noted in the synchronicity threads, I've been reading a lot of comments in lawyer related journals and blogs on this topic as well.  Perhaps they were always there and I hadn't bothered taking note of them, or perhaps that's synchronicity again.

In that category, I stumbled upon a piece written by a fellow who runs a very well liked blog, and who is a lawyer, but whom has never practiced.  I very rarely check that blog, The Art of Manliness, but it's entertaining to read (or probably aggravating to read for some) and I was spending some early morning time in a hotel room waiting for a deposition to start and stopped in there for the first time in eons.  Sure enough, there's an article by a lawyer on the topic of mental health.  Specifically, there was an article on depression, which is the same thing that a lot of these lawyer journals are writing on.  Having somewhat read some of the others, and being surprised to find this one, I read it. Turns out there's an entire series of them and I didn't read them all, but in the one I did read, I was struck by this quote:

If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.

I think there's a whole lot to that.
 

The "office" your DNA views as suitable. . . and suitable alone.

Indeed, I think a drove of current social and psychological ills, not just depression by any means, stem from the fact that we've built a massively artificial world that most of us don't really like living in.  It's a true paradox, as I think that same effort lies at a simple root, the human desire to be free from true want.  I.e., starvation.  Fear of starvation lead us to farming to hedge against it, and that lead to civilization.  Paradoxically, the more we strive for "an easy life", the further we take ourselves away from our origins, which is really where we still dwell, deep in our minds.

Okay, at this point I'm trailing into true esoteric philosophy and into psychology, but I think I may be more qualified than many to do just that.  Indeed, I was an adherent of the field of evolutionary biology long before that field came to be called that, and my background may explain why.  So just a tad on that.

Some background

 

With my father, at the fish hatchery, as a little boy.

When I was growing up, I was basically outdoors all the time, and I came from a very "outdoorsy" group of people. And in the Western sense.  People who hunted and fished, garden and who were close to agriculture by heritage.    They were also all well educated.  There was no real separation in any one aspect of our lives.  Life, play, church, were all one thing, much as I wrote about conceptually the other day.

When I went to go to college, post high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and decided on being a game warden, which reflects my views at the time, and shows my mindset in some ways now, set on rural topics as it is.  However, my father worried about that and gently suggested that career openings in that field were pretty limited.  He rarely gave any advice of that type, so I heeded his suggestion (showing I guess how much I respected his advice), and majored in geology, and outdoor field.

As a geology student, we studied the natural world, but the whole natural world back into vast antiquity.  Part of that was studying the fossil record and the adaptive nature of species over vast time.  It was fascinating. But having a polymath personality, I also took a lot of classes in everything else, and when I completed my degree at the University of Wyoming, I was only a few credits away from a degree in history as well.

Trilobites on display in a store window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now extinct, trilobites occurred in a large number of species and, a this fossil bed demonstrates, there were a lot of them.

That start on an accidental history degree lead me ultimately to a law degree, as it was one of my Casper College professors, Jon Brady, who first suggested it to me.  I later learned that another lawyer colleague of mine ended up a lawyer via a suggestion from the same professor.  Brady was a lawyer, but he was teaching as a history professor.  I know he'd practiced as a Navy JAG officer, but I don't know if he otherwise did.  If lawyer/history professor seems odd, one of the principal history professors at the University of Wyoming today is a lawyer as well, and the archivist at Casper College is a lawyer.  I totally disagree with the law school suggestion that "you can do a lot with a law degree" other than practice law, but these gentlemen's careers would suggest otherwise.

Anyhow, at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the suggestion.  I was a geology student and I was having the time of my life.  I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is exactly what I did.  By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that finding employment was going to be difficult.  Given that, the suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology.  I did ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.

Casper College Geomorphology Class, 1983.  Odd to think of, but in those days, in the summer, I wore t-shirts.  I hardly ever do that now when out in the sticks. This photos was taken in the badlands of South Dakota.

So what does that have to do with anything?

Well, like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to me).  And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.

Our artificial environment

So, as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people do the unnatural environment all that well.  In other words, I know why the caged tiger paces.

People who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who do not. There's no real getting around it.  People who live outdoors and around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier and healthier.  Generally they seem to have a much more balanced approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death.  They don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical quackery.  You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be little girls.  Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.

You won't find a lot of people who are down, either.  

Indeed the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London, the famous author, to the effect  and then goes on to conclude:

If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.

I think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.

Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time.  All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.

Ruin at Bandalier National Monument.  The culture that built these dwellings still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few actually grow it.  The modern pueblos continue to live in their own communities, sometimes baffling European Americans.  I've heard it declared more than once that "some have university educations but they still go back to the reservation."

Even in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now.  Now most people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea of what rural life consists of.  Only a few decades back this was not the case.  Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their 80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945.  He went to college and after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before . . . ."

 Louisiana farmer, 1940s.  Part of the community, not apart from it.

Now, however this is rarely the case.  Indeed, we can only imagine how unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the work force now.  "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "

No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.

Indeed, people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it one way or another.  Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.

Others try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls.  I can't recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes.  Many offices seem to be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor.  It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire.   That says a lot about what people actually value.

Others, however, sink into illness, including depression.  Unable to really fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger, they become despondent.  Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and upset.  No wonder.  People just aren't meant to live that way.

Others yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they rebel against it.  From time immemorial people have done this, and created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and try to create a new world from their despair.  Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit this mold.  Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on.  And it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.

But we really need not do so.  So why are we?

"It's inevitable".  No it isn't.  Nothing is, except our own ends.  We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves.  We don't have to do anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or that we haven't thought it out.

So, what can we do

First of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to suppress them .  Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or somewhat odd.  To heck with that.

The ills of careerism.

Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant.  In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.

How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it.  And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.

In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career.  Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career".  For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.

Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else.  More than family, more than location, more than anything.  People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.

The payoff for that is money, but that's it.  Nothing else.

The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.

What's that have to do with this topic?

Well, quite a lot.

People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good.  Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently.  And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.

That's not all of course.  Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place.  We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires.  In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship.  For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.

There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe.  There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them.  At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that?  One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves.  Not really a good situation.

Now, am I saying don't have a career?  No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe.  Deep down, that's really still who you are.  If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you.  But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.

As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way.  This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.

Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here.  Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities.  He noted that; "this is our home".  That says a lot.

Get out there.

 Public (Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail ourselves of these sites.

And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.

Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding.  Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.

 

That means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in the dirt, if we do it.  That's part of human nature as well, and humans are very bad about it.  I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses, and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. . you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with the concept that fish are tasty).   Some fisherman will take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing hunting.  Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner) outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a means that killed wildlife just the same)".

If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better.  If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures.  Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not.  Give it a try.  And so on.

Get elemental

At the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting.  Try fishing. Raise a garden.

Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.

Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass.  Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop.  I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something.  And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.

The Land Ethic

 

Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie.  The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now, this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations.  At this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Decades ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac about the land ethic.  Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't.  He was a hunter and a wildlife agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that, he lived what he wrote.

A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic.  I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that.  Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61.  It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.

If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl.  In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past.  Now, that's very much not the case.  I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem.  Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.

Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however.  Not that the wildness of land is not appreciated.  Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at.  The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that.  Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order.  As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.

It's not inevitable.

The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so.  And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.

There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't.  Baloney.  We don't exist for business, it exists for us. 

Some thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this topic.  Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how mild, as "socialism".

The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature.  And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist.  The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd.  Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production.  Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.

Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism.  That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.

It's not impossible

Now, I know that some will read this and think that it's all impossible for where they are, but truth be known it's more possible in some ways now than it has been for city dwellers, save for those with means, for many years.  Certainly in the densely packed tenements of the early 19th  Century getting out to look at anything at all was pretty darned difficult.

Most cities now at least incorporate some green space. A river walk, etc.  And most have some opportunities for things that at least replicate real outdoor sports, and I mean the real outdoor activities, not things like sitting around in a big stadium watching a big team. That's not an outdoor activity but a different type of activity (that I'm not criticizing).  We owe it to ourselves.

Now, clearly, some of what is suggested here is short term, and some long. And this is undoubtedly the most radical post I've ever posted here.  It won't apply equally to everyone.  The more means a person has, if they're a city dweller, the easier for it is for them to get out.  And the more destructive they can be when doing so, as an irony of the active person with means is that the mere presence of their wealth in an activity starts to make it less possible for everyone else.  But for most of us we can get out some at least, and should.

I'm not suggesting here that people should abandon their jobs in the cities and move into a commune.  Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that as that doesn't square with what I"m actually addressing here at all.  But I am suggesting that we ought to think about what we're going, and it doesn't appear we are. We just charge on as if everything must work out this way, which is choosing to let events choose for us, or perhaps letting the few choose for the many. Part of that may be rethinkiing the way we think about careers.  We all know it, but at the end of the day having made yourself rich by way of that nomadic career won't add significantly, if at all, to your lifespan and you'll go on to your eternal reward the same as everyone else, and sooner or later will be part of the collective forgotten mass.  Having been a "success" at business will not buy you a second life to enjoy.

None of this is to say that if you have chosen that high dollar career and love it, that you are wrong.  Nor is this to say that you must become a Granola.  But, given the degree to which we seem to have a modern society we don't quite fit, perhaps we ought to start trying to fit a bit more into who we are, if we have the get up and go to do it, and perhaps we ought to consider that a bit more in our overall societal plans, assuming that there even are any.

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week, and Agrarian of the Week, Tom Bell.

Wyoming rancher Tom Bell, a Fremont County rancher who lost an eye from flak during World War Two, fits both of these categories this week.

Indeed, he nearly defined them.

So, too, the memories of youth return on occasion to bring the warmth of old friendships remembered and old experiences renewed. Some of my fondest memories are of the dog days of August. Then much of the ranch work was done and cares slipped away. School was in the offing but far enough away to leave free time. And even after school hours, there was still time to slip away and meditate beside some branch of the river — a retreat unsurpassed even yet in my mind’s eye.

It was during those days that we often fished. Two boys and a girl, a boy and a girl, two boys, and on many occasions — a boy. Whether together or alone, the memories recalled are always pleasant.

We caught fish, sometimes excitedly, but mostly we just fished. It didn’t really matter. They were the pleasant hours when teenage cares could be temporarily submersed.

Tom Bell.

Bell was born in Winton, one of the variety of Sweetwater County mining towns that once existed before they boiled down to Rock Springs and Green River.  His parents moved him to Lander when they took up farming during the Great Depression.  He graduated from high school in 1941 and lost his eye as a crewman on a B-24 run over Austria.  He graduated from the University of Wyoming with a Masters in Zoology/Ecology in 1957, was a founder of the Wyoming Outdoor Council and the High Country News, as well as being a rancher.

Lex Anteinternet: Before the Oil. And after it? The economies of Wyoming and Alaska.

Lex Anteinternet: Before the Oil. And after it? The economies of W...: 

Before the Oil. And after it? The economies of Wyoming and Alaska.

This is a thread that I captioned, in a somewhat different form ("Before the Oil") and then failed to add any text to, after I'd come back from the last vacation I went on, which was to Alaska.  

Fish hook statue, Homer Alaska.

That was several years ago, 2015, which I guess says something about me, and it isn't good.

Anyhow, what I had intended to write on, and still will, was Alaska before aggressive oil exploration in the 1970s.  I never got around to it, but unlike some undeveloped posts here, and indeed unlike some developed ones, I didn't trash the draft as I still intended to come back to it, which I'm not doing. 

But now, I'm going to add in Wyoming as well.

Indeed, even since I started what was sort of a pioneering thread, at the time I resumed it several days ago, this story has continued to develop and now I can't really claim the "you heard it here first" tag that it would have deserved.  An article very similar to this one, in some ways, has already appeared in the Tribune, for instance.  And indeed, not one articles, but now two.

Wyoming stands in a completely unique position in comparison to Alaska in that oil has been a feature of our economy going all the way back to the 1880s.  This isn't the case for Alaska, although oil was discovered in Alaska as early as 1902,but because of the state's high transient population, chances are good that there are plenty of Alaskans at this point who have no memory of a pre oil economy.  Both Wyoming and Alaska can be pretty chauvinistic about out states, but truth be known the transient population is so high that there are more imports than imports in the state at any one time.*

Real commercial exploration of oil started in Alaska in 1957, not earlier, in spite of a least one paper on Alaska's oil trying to track the history of oil exploration back that far.  I reality, prior to 57, oil wasn't much of a thing in Alaska and there are Alaskans just a little older than I am that might have a memory of the pre oil days. No living Wyomingite remembers a Wyoming before oil.

We may be about to find out what that is like.

Indeed, on the day I'm finally putting this up, it's believed that President Biden will enter a second, more permanent, order.

It's a fact of human memory that its largely inaccurate on certain things, while blisteringly accurate on others.  It's odd, but true.  And as part of that, it's almost impossible for people who have become acclimated to one economy to accept its change, let alone its disappearance. There are still people sitting around in Detroit who had worked in the automobile industry in the 1970s who are waiting for it to come back irrespective of the fact that automobile manufacturing went global in general, and went south, in the United States, in particular.  I don't know why Ford, Chrysler and General Motors centered their activities in that far northern state, but they did. They're never going to do that again.

Wyoming and Colorado were the homes, in the late 19th Century and early 20th, of a collection of famous saddle makers.  You could not only order one of their fine saddles in their shops, but also by mail.  There are still saddle makers in Wyoming, and in Colorado, and some very fine ones at that, but not that do the largescale sort of business that the saddle makers of that period did.  At least one of them located in Colorado warned his fellows to get out of the business in the early 20th Century before taking his own life.  He saw the automobile induced change coming, but he couldn't adapt to it himself.

At least Wyoming has been sort of like that.  We've experienced booms and busts repeatedly. Every time we busted, we vowed to broaden our economy, but we've never done it.  In our heart of hearts, we really don't think the oil economy will ever go away.

On this blog there's a very long thread on the history of coal.  I'm not going to repeat what was written out there, as its written out there. But what you'll find is that if you really look into it, coal began to decline as "King Coal" prior to World War One.  That wasn't obvious to common people however.  Indeed, it certainly wouldn't have been obvious to Wyomingites as coal came on strong here in the 1970s, well into the decline, paradoxically making coal's golden age something that's really a feature of my adult life.

Not so much that I obtained employment in the local coal industry, however.  Coal is cyclical like other energy sources and when oil slumped in the 1980s coal followed along, but more slowly. Again the history of my personal connection with it can be read in the other thread.

Petroleum oil and natural gas, which of course are not the same thing, have a more complicated history in regard to the state and the nation.  The US is a massive petroleum producer and always has been.  There's never been a point at which, after petroleum was first produced, that the US hasn't produced a lot of it.  And not just in the West, like we sometimes like to think, but also in regions of the East, Pacific Coast, and the South.  

The perception of an oil shortage, which came on strong in the US following the 1973 Oil Embargo, wasn't due to a lack of supply, but a gigantic demand.  After World War Two, and up until then, the US was the dominant economy of the world in an unprecedented way.  The Second World War left Europe and Asia's economies completely wrecked and they really didn't recover for a couple of decades thereafter.  It wasn't until the 1960s that European economies began to resemble what they had been, and it wasn't until the 1970s that Asian economies really entered the scene.

In that gap, the US economy went wild with expansion. At the same time, we became the free world's guardian or the world's policeman, depending upon your view.  At any rate, we kept producing a lot of oil but we also were consuming huge amounts at the same time.  We crept into being an oil importer without really realizing it and without doing anything to attempt to address it.  Cars that got 12 mpg were no big deal to us as the price of gasoline were pretty consistently low.

The 73 Oil Embargo changed all of that. There was a dual front effort to address the situation.  One was to expand our production of petroleum, and another was to reduce our consumption.

In expansion, if you lived in Wyoming in the 1970s, you knew that was going on. Drilling was going on like crazy.  And that's when the  concept of a Trans Alaska Pipeline came on.

That petroleum existed under Alaska's North Slope had been proven, but there was no way to get it to market. The pipeline was pushed as a way to address that.  It was controversial even at the time, as the Environmental movement already existed, but backed by a nation suffering from high petroleum prices and rampaging inflation, and Alaska's politicians boosting it as a way to open coffers of money to the state, it was amazingly rapidly built.  Even while the controversy went on, it was heralded as a technological achievement of historical proportions. As a kid in grade school at the time I recall it being compared to the Transcontinental Railroad as an achievement.

The expectation that the pipeline would transform Alaska was completely correct.  Oil booms, like booms of any kind, transform a region wherever they occur.  For Alaska, the impact was profound.

Prudhoe Bay, 1971.

Alaska became a petroleum producing state prior to the pipeline.  The first oil discovery was in 1902, so in some ways it's economy mirrors Wyoming's in this respect, but only slightly.  There was a 55 year gap in oil discoveries in Alaska after that, and the industry really took off in 1957.  That's long ago enough, however, and prior to statehood, such that one study notes that employment in Alaska's "traditional" economy, which includes fishing and logging, as well as petroleum extraction, hasn't changed since its 1959 statehood.  

Be that as it may, Alaska's oil fields presented all sorts of challenges that Wyoming's, Colorado's, California's, North Dakota's, Texas', etc., do not, and transportation was one of them.  Oil was produced in Alaska's large North Slope fields prior to the mid 1970s, but it had to be shipped out literally by ship, with that really being a seasonal endeavor. The pipeline changed all that.

This left Wyoming and Alaska in similar positions in the 1970s.  A massive oil boom in states with vast distances (with Alaska's obviously being much more vast) and economies that were in need of cash.  Wyoming had been relying on petroleum production for a large part of its economy going back to at least the 1910s, and World War One greatly expanded that.  Alaska hadn't really relied upon it until the 1960s, but it rapidly acclimated to it.  By the late 1970s both states had economies that depended enormously on petroleum production.  Wyoming had augmented its original prime industry, agriculture, with petroleum, and then coal, up to the point where they largely supplanted agriculture as economic drivers.  Alaska had started off with fishing and logging, which remain, like Wyoming's agriculture, but with petroleum being the main economic driver.

So where are we now?

Now we can hardly imagine a world that works differently.  Do we have to start to?

That's difficult to tell, in terms of the complete story, but at least Wyoming's example would suggest the answer is yes.  Wyoming, unlike Alaska, never relied completely on petroleum, although it relied heavily on it.  It had coal too.  Now that's rapidly passing away and the state is in deep economic trouble.  New petroleum booms have come on since 1990, fueled in part by massive technological advances in petroleum extraction, but they've tended to be natural gas centered, something that has oddly not been noticed outside of the industry. This is actually a good thing for the industry in Wyoming, however, as gas seems to be an up and coming fuel.  It's a bad thing in that the price has been pretty depressed recently, but that may be a temporary thing.

Which leads us to where are now.

That probably should start with the state of the industry.

Which is actually pretty hard to flesh out.

At the time of my writing this, there are four oil rigs that are working in Wyoming.  There are five working in Alaska, half as many as were working last year.  In August 2019  the rig count in Wyoming was 37.  So things are not going great.

There's a lot that went into causing that situation to occur.  One of them was geopolitical.  Saudi Arabia and Russia got into a price war and the prices went down and down. During that time, there was speculation that the Saudis were intentionally depressing the price in order to attack the American industry, which had been hugely successful in the prior decade but which also now relies enormously on horizontal drilling and fracing.  This means U.S. drilling is comparatively expensive.  Saudi production is cheap, but they depressed their prices so low that they weren't making money on it, leading to legitimate questioning about how wise their engaging in a game of oil chicken was.  Whatever their logic, the price of oil has never returned to a break even place for them.  Indeed, all the benchmarks remain below $60.00 bbl today.

Recently there's been some real efforts on the part of the Saudis to get their act together, raise prices, and return to some sort of normalcy in the market.  That briefly boosted prices, although it didn't stick. The resolve is there, however.  If they stick to it, they can manage to dry up the current petroleum surplus and slowly rise out of the current situation. The problem is that they really need to, as prices have fallen so low that petrostates are now no longer able to balance their budgets. That oddly doesn't seem to be a problem with wester nations that never do, but with nothing to fall back on, it is a problem.

Indeed, it's a problem for Wyoming and Alaska, for the same exact reason, except we didn't bring this on ourselves through starting a price war.

That's part of the reason that the price of oil is low, but another has to do with a transition that's occurring away from petroleum.  It was subtle at first, but now electric cars are coming on strong.  And added to that, quite a few younger people are simply eschewing driving.  It's somehow lost its allure.

That means that demand is actually fallen.  And as it fell, technology entered the picture and is increasingly changing the market.

Environmental concerns have been impacting automobile manufacturing since the 1970s, but within the last 20 years it was clear that electric cars would be on the scene in the near future.  In Wyoming, and I'd guess Alaska, there are still a fair number of people who are steadfastly obstinate in their rejection of the concept of electric cars, but the fact of the matter is that the pace of electric car technology is accelerating dramatically.  "They'll never make a pickup that can take you into the sticks" is still heard here, but it isn't true. They will, and soon.  Ford  and General Motors are introducing full sized standard electric 1/2 ton pickups  Chrysler hasn't, but it's holding back to see where things are going.  It will very soon.  Harley Davidson has an electric motorcycle. Chrysler's subsidiary has an electric Jeep.  

Within a decade, just on the current trend line, it's safe to assume that more electric automobiles will be sold than petroleum fueled ones.  With the accelerating pace of technology in the industry, that's all the more certain.  While people will deny it even now, we're in the end stage of the gasoline engine automobile.

And now new technologies are being explored for aircraft as well.  Boeing is going to be introducing aircraft that fly on biofuel.  Airbus is going to be introducing hydrogen fueled aircraft which would be even "greener" than that.  We're not only in the end of the era of fossil fuel ground automobiles, but in the end stage of fossil fueled aircraft as well, although that will take longer.

The only thing left, after that, are railroads, currently the most efficient, and greenest, means of transportation that there is.  The technological evolution there is obvious and has been for decades. The longest railway in the world, the Trans Siberian Railway, is electric.  American railways could be as well, but for the fact that fossil fuels have been so cheap.  

All of this leads, we'd note, to the topic of "green" electricity generation. And its been a big topic.  Ironically, its been something that's boosted the petroleum industry in the past couple of decades as coal has faded.  Environmental concerns on the part of consumers, and the inefficiency of coal in comparison to natural gas, has lead to a shift over to gas, which is cleaner.  It's not as clean, however, as wind and solar, which have really come on in the past couple of decades.

What would really put the bullet in all things fossil fuel would be nuclear power.  Bizarrely, and stupidly, the western world public just can't get around to grasping t hat.  It actually is the energy solution.  Having used nuclear energy first for a field deployed weapon has arguably put us decades behind deploying it for power.

The point of all of this is that Wyoming, and Alaska, the two states most heavily dependent on petroleum production, are frankly facing a pretty uncertain future in regard to them.  Pretty soon, electric cars will be the norm everywhere.  Pretty soon, aircraft will be using alternative fuels.  Pretty soon, maybe. . . . railroads will be electric, again maybe.

It's not that this would mean there's be no need for oil. There still would. Petrochemicals are a really big deal.  But the need would be dramatically reduced.  Where would we then be?

That's pretty hard to tell, actually.

It's hard in part because humans are notoriously inaccurate in predicting the future, and tend to block out things they don't like about what they can in fact predict.

Having said that, one thing that is clear is that "alternative energy" is going to be a big thing.  It already is.  But the number of people it employs is another thing.  One of the ironies about wind and solar is that not only are they greener in power generation, they're low overhead in terms of employees. The real work associated with them is in turnarounds, when infrastructure is replaced. But like turnarounds at refineries, that's not work that goes to locals.  Indeed, in a further irony, it tends, just like petroleum facility turnarounds to go to companies located in Texas and Oklahoma.  Those companies travel all over, and their employees are based somewhere else.

That leaves us with what we can see, which isn't necessarily what will be.  And that is those portions of the economy, or as I'm dealing with two, the economies, that predated the oil in the form it became.  And those were land based industries.  Agriculture, silviculture, and in Alaska's case, commercial fishing.  Those industries have been there the whole time.

But can you build a modern economy, if that's what we currently have, on those?

The evidence would be yes, but it'll require some thinking outside of the box.

We've dealt with this before, but the thing that Wyoming has been poor at it.  We'll pick that back up where we left off with it last time.

 Agriculture

 Oats

Agriculture is the great ignored industry in Wyoming.

This will being the hackles up on some, because agriculture in Wyoming is generally conceived of as ranching, and ranching has some real opponents in the modern U.S., even though in the West, contrary to the anti's views, its darned near environmentally neutral.  In fact, truth be known, it's environmentally positive if objectively views. That's right, that's what I'm saying as that's the truth. An environmentalist, if they're realistic, ought to thank a rancher every time he sees one (and ought to be for nuclear power also, but that's another topic).

 

Laramie Range hayfield.

Agriculture is an economic constant in Wyoming. While there was some economic activity, even national economic activity, if we consider that courier du bois  and trappers were in fact part of an international industry, it's agriculture that really created the state and made it what it was, and is.

Agriculture made its appearance in a recognizable form in Wyoming as early as the 1840s when New Mexican laborers brought up to work on Adobe buildings at Ft. Laramie stayed on and started small vegetable farms on the "Mexican Hills" near there.  This gave them in an income in that the produce was available to sell both to soldiers at Ft. Laramie as well as to travelers on the Oregon Trail, who by that time no doubt were pretty darned ready for something green and fresh.  Unfortunately, while the area remains a farming area, as far as I know there aren't any farms in the area that are descendant from the original ones.

Cattle, of course, is what we think of in terms of Wyoming agriculture, although it was really farming that made its the first appearance and it certainly continues on in a big way.  Crop farming continues on in southeastern Wyoming which has a climate and soil much like Nebraska's, and hence is part of the giant corn and wheat belt that stretches all the way into the Mid West and which is a massive part of the economy in many such states.  It also exists in Fremont County as well, and in Big Horn and Washakie Counties.  Hay crop production exists in many places, as long as there's water to support it.

 

Porta-vet box of a large animal veterinarian.  A common ranch site in some times of the year.

Where there isn't sufficient water, which is most of the state we have cattle and sheep, although now days mostly cattle.  And Wyoming cattle live out on the range.  They're fed in the winter, but on the range.  Really, they're making use of the ground that in earlier eras buffalo made use of and in the same way, save for the fact that buffalo tended to crowd into Cottonwood groves in the winter and destroy them.

It's cattle and sheep that keep Wyoming wild.  This use of the land keeps the land open and natural. When that stops, you get houses and "ranchettes", something that environmentalist should keep in mind.  A strong cattle industry makes for a strong wild Wyoming.

Given this, and that it's so much a part of the background of the state, you'd think that this is an industry the state would seek to support in some ways.  But it doesn't.  Stockmen and other agriculturalist are largely on their own in all sorts of ways.  There is the leased ground, a very misunderstood public asset, but even this is under attack, unfortunately by agriculturalist as well as others.  At any rate, agriculture is an industry which, in spite of the slams against it, just keeps on keeping on by itself under its own steam, ignored by the state and by Wyoming communities.

It should and must be noted that employment in this industry has really changed over the years.  In the early days Wyoming ranches large and small employed a fair number of people directly.  That was due tot he nature of the operations, and even though a very significant amount of the labor on ranches remains the same now as it was in 1890, not nearly as many people are directly employed in the industry as once were.  There are a lot of reasons for this.

 

One reason is that barbed wire changed the nature of ranching and accelerated the change to smaller, in relative terms, family operations.  When that occurred large numbers of year around employees were not needed and to some extent those employees were members of the immediate family.  As this evolution took place family run operations relied on neighbors and friends for additional labor support during those times of the years which, at one time, caused large numbers of seasonal cowhands to be employed.

Another big factor was the 4x4 truck.  Up until World War Two ranches had to rely on cowhands stationed at the edges of their lands for winter feeding in many instances. The truck stopped that, and it reduced the need for labor as well.  Ranchers that once would employ several hands on remote areas of their ranches could now simply drive their with a 4x4 truck.  Such trucks were first available immediately after the war, and it was the war that really brought them on in strength and proved their utility.  So now many ranches, even large ones, employ no individual cowhands at all, although there are still quite a few that do.

 

World War Two era Dodge 4x4 truck.  With very little in the way of change, this model would go into civilian production immediately after World War Two.

The demise of the sheep industry also really played a large role in the number of direct employees.  There are still Sheepmen in Wyoming, but not like they once were. And this is because, in part, due to the fact that that sheep production was in fact one of the rare areas where there was government involvement, as up until the late 1980s the Federal Government supported the price of wool due to the Defense Wool program.  That program came in during the Korean War when the military had to purchase heavy woolen clothing in large quantities and found that there wasn't a sufficient supply of it. The wool program was therefore brought in but it carried on well after it probably should not have.  Even defending the program it has to be admitted that ending it in the late 1980s made sense, keeping in mind that we hadn't fought a cold weather war since 1954 (we would again in the 2000s) and the technology of winter clothing had changed a lot in that 30 year period.

 Sheep in Natrona County, Wyoming, 1940s.  This photo could have been taken at any point in the 20th Century up into the 1990s.

Also related to it, however, is that the United Kingdom joined the European Community which in turn caused the UK to dump the market policies that favored its former Dominions.  During the late Empire stage of the UK the UK had a policy of developing agricultural production in its Dominions but finishing the products in the UK. So Australian, New Zealand and Canadian wool all went to fine British wool mills for a finished product.  When the UK became part of the EC, however, that violated the EC's policies and the British stopped doing that, focusing on local markets instead.  Indeed, the EC has sort of a bizarre semi autarkic economic policy that heavily impacts agriculture in a negative way in some instances and which explains some odd things, such as a constant EU effort at serious beef production, which it really doesn't have an agricultural landmass to support properly.

When that occurred the Australians dumped their wool in the United States and an already ailing American wool industry was really hurt. So we see few sheep now, although they've come back a bit.

The sheep industry supported an infrastructure that was immediate and obvious, which brings us to the next part of this story.  While Wyoming has lost direct employment in agriculture, it's really lost the infrastructure over the years in a major way.

Early on, there was no infrastructure and everything produced here was shipped out for processing in some fashion.  We've almost completely returned to that.  Turning first to wool, when the sheep industry massively contracted all the supporting wool buyers and shearers, an immediate support industry, were hurt.  But its in other areas where the change has been more dramatic in some ways.  Wyoming once had a very large number of stockyards. Every city had them, and they were mostly associated with railroads.  Those are almost all gone, and that's due to the fact that commercial trucking has completely taken over that role from the railroads, although as late as the 1990s the railroads were still attempting to get back into this for sheep.  Perhaps nothing can be done about that and it was inevitable.

Less inevitable, however has been the end of the local meat processing operations on a large scale. There are still some, but they're really small custom houses.  It was this industry that brought my father's family to Wyoming, as we owned a packing plant here in Casper. Today there is no packing plant in Casper, or anywhere in Wyoming for that matter, of that type.  The plant produced not only meat for sale to stores, but other products as well.  Now, you will not find that in Wyoming.  The cattle are all here, but they are shipped out of state for finishing and processing.

 Closed packing plant, Omaha Nebraska.

You'll also not find much in the way of dairy production, although the Starr Valley in western Wyoming hands on in this area, producing cheese on a commercial basis. At one time most larger towns had a creamery that processed milk, and indeed my family had one for a time here in Casper. That meant that there were dairy cows nearby, which there were, and where you have dairy cows, you have to have a large quantity of high quality hay for them, which was also produced locally.

 

Former Jersey Creamery, Casper Wyoming.

Now all of this is gone.  National consolidation of these things is the reason why.  The situation in the meat packing industry is legendary and is the source of steady complaints from both ranchers and consumers.  Indeed, ti's slowly spawned a direct buy movement, which is now pretty common, where families will purchase a cow, i.e., a "beef", for a half beef, for slaughter.

Having said all of this, the direct economic impact of agriculture remains quite large in Wyoming, it's just not very well noted by anyone. Independent truckers, local feeds stores, professional services, and even local manufacturing all rely on it pretty heavily.  Seemingly nobody notices.  Indeed, in some instances, local governments can be a bit hostile to agriculture when some sorts of support facilities are proposed.

Before I depart from this topic, I'm going to note one thing that seems self evident but for some reason is never treated that way.  Silviculture, the raising of trees for harvest, is agriculture. That makes logging part of agriculture.  Indeed in Wyoming, all logging, to the extent any remains, and it isn't much, takes place on land that cattle are normally on.  Logging is an industry that's really been hurt in the US over the last thirty years and this may actually be one area where environmental concerns have hurt agriculture, although ironically here too its something that environmentalist should reconsider.  Growing trees are carbon sinks.  Full grown trees much less so.

 

 Cattle sharing ground with camping fisherman.

And, in the same thread:

So where do we go?

So then, what to make of this?

Well, usually when we go through a crash, we start to talk about diversification.  We also usually start to take about cutting back government spending.  And we're going to have to talk about a new government revenue sources, or having a state government that matches the money we take in.  It's probably time for all of that.

Maybe its' time to talk about building upon what we have, and actually realizing what that is.  And, as we can see from the above, in terms of private industry, that's agriculture, tourism and mineral extraction.  And, like it philosophically or not, we have a lot of government employment in this state and government entities that are pretty darned involved in some sectors of the economy, particularly oil and gas, already.

So, what do we have to build with?  Let's start with mineral extraction.

Mineral extraction?  Perhaps you're thinking "why I thought you were arguing against relying on that?"  No, I'm really not. I'm arguing that we have to be smart and realistic about that.

The boom and bust nature of much of the mineral industry is a feature of it that is pretty fixed, long established by history, and that's all largely beyond our control.  We have to accept that.  But these industries aren't going completely away.  Even coal, which is in real trouble, isn't going completely away and indeed even right now there's an effort by one coal company to start a mine near Sheridan.

The thing we can do, therefore, is to be smart in our planning on these industries.  And that would have to accept that they're going to have rocky periods.

We may also want to be very careful, and we very rarely are, about thinking that when times are good that they're going to go on forever.  There are those who will act that way and they nearly take any suggestion to the contrary as a hostile comment.  Planning for the crash ought to go on during the boom, rather than waiting until it occurs, and that's just smart.

It's also smart to recognize long term trends, none of which are hugely favorable towards the fossil fuel industry.  Recognizing that isn't being hostile, once again, it's just recognizing it.

And perhaps we also ought to at least ponder that, like the oil exporting nations of the Middle East, we really don't do much with the raw product anymore.  We did at one time with petroleum oil, in that we did refine it here, but we no longer do that.  Natural gas, because of its nature, is "refined", or rather processed here, and that will go on.  We ought to consider all of that, however.  We never processed the iron we mined, for example, even though we had all the things necessary to do it (except, perhaps, the large scale shipping necessary for that).

Now, at this point in time, I may have to admit that the ship has sailed on all of these things.  Down to a handful of refineries, I don't see that industry coming back.  There's a reason that super sized refineries are all located on the Gulf Coast.  But if we're not going to process our raw products here, maybe taxing slightly what we export would be a good idea.  Nothing radical, but to add a little bit of a tax in addition to the existing ones for what is departing would not impact the price and might help us out quite a bit in lean times, particularly based upon how the funds were earmarked.  And who knows, maybe that would encourage a little processing here as well.

All of which might do nothing at all, I'll concede.

Okay then, what about agriculture the one we ignore?

Well, here's something I think we can do a fair amount about.

Agriculture in the state has weathered all the storms. Everything we've ever raised or grown here we still do, we just don't do it in the same proportions as some prior eras, but that's not surprising. What we don't do is to process hardly anything here.  We don't pack any of the meat on a large scale.  We don't process any wool into woolens.  We don't mill any flour.  We don't do any of that.

Indeed, the only processing we do, and its a return to something we hadn't done in a long time, is to brew beer and bottle it and (and this is new) to distill grain and bottle that.

Maybe it's time to sit back and have one of those beers and ponder that.

There's a lot we can do here, but in some ways we have to be a bit bold and buck some trends.  There's a large multi-state industry devoted to processing remotely here, and to suggest we ought to do it locally means having to deal with that.

But it can be dealt with.

Let's start with the toughest aspect of that, the beef cattle industry.

At one time, Wyoming had at least one packing plant, indeed right here in Casper.  There was another just outside of the state in Scottsbluff, right over the border, and yet another in Denver.  There were probably others, including perhaps some in the state, but now there are none and all of those which I have mentioned are gone, although one remains in Greeley Colorado.

 February 1922 Casper Packing Company advertisement.

Now, they are gone because the meat packing industry has become amazingly consolidated and the profit margins in packing are, or at least were, low. But if the packing industry could be revived, it would be a natural for Wyoming.  We have everything it requires, at least in certain localities, that being cattle, agriculture for hay and feed corn, sufficient water, good roads and land.

The situation is similar when we consider sheep.  While the sheep industry has really taken a hit, it's slowly somewhat revived over the years and we do have sheep.  Sheep, as an agricultural animal, are interesting in that their primary crop is really wool, with meat being a secondary one.  The meat aspect of this is already addressed by the comments on beef above, but the wool part isn't.

Wool itself used to contribute quite a bit to the Wyoming economy in that there were wool buyers, sorters, and shearers, all in addition to the sheep ranchers, who employed themselves and their herders.  What we never had, however, was a woolen mill, to process raw wool into anything.  We could, but we don't.

This is also true of the milling industry; i.e., flour milling.

 Old elevator in Sheridan Wyoming. This elevator belonged to the Best Out West flour mill, and apparently this was the mill. The hotel next to it is named after the mill.  From Painted Bricks.

Wyoming grows a fair amount of grain, and grows it all over, even though we often do not seem to realize it.  Major agricultural areas can be found in southeastern Wyoming, west central Wyoming, northeastern Wyoming and northern Wyoming.  We grow a fair amount of wheat and corn and if milling facilities were here, we could go the next step.  We don't, however.

We've done better with sugar. We do have some sugar facilities serving, in particular, the Big Horn Basin. Those, it should be noted, are owned by co-ops that formed to operate them with the sugar companies pulled out of that area.  Elsewhere we haven't done as well with that.

Probably the one area that we've done well at recently that might point the way forward a bit is in the category of alcohol.  

A bottle of Wyoming Whiskey, depicted in a thread here on Lex Anteinternet.

I addressed the introduction of a local bourbon some time ago, indeed quite some time ago, on a thread that was once one of the most popular here on this page, that being The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' & Beer and Prohibition.  That thread also addressed, a bit, the history of local beers.  On the whiskey, I noted; 

Wyoming Whiskey is a new brand of whiskey that's distilled in the tiny Hot Springs County town of Kirby.  It came about, according to what I've read, as the Meads purchased farm ground in the area in order to have a steady supply of corn for their cattle operation, and then hit upon the idea of distilling whiskey in the county.  Hot Springs County is otherwise famous for, well, hots springs, and is of course the location of Thermopolis, which features the same.

This trend has really continued since then, and there's apparently some sort of distillery in Teton County now as well, and there is one that is distilling a couple of different types of hard alcohol here in Natrona County.  I can't opine on the Teton County one at all, and I'm only aware of it as the state government recently turned down the request of an Idaho distiller for a grant to help relocate its headquarters over into the county, as another distiller opposed it.  For that matter, my experience with the local Natrona County distiller is limited to having had a single shot of its vodka, given to me by a friend as proof that not all vodka is bad.  While my position on vodka remains that the difference between the best vodka and the worst is the price, I have to say that I was impressed because . . . well, it didn't taste like vodka.

It's not only hard alcohol that's making inroads into Wyoming and processing the state's agricultural produce. Beer has made an amazing return in these regards.

Snake River Brewery in Jackson Wyoming.

I've commented on this before, but here too the trend has really developed.  And to an amazing extent.  There are now breweries in quite a few Wyoming towns putting out a really high quality product.  This industry has gone from one which, a few years ago, would have required a person to hunt for a Wyoming beer (and a few years before that there were none) to one in which a person could easily buy beer on any occasional and always find a high quality Wyoming beer of any type.  It's really amazing.  

Indeed, Wyoming beer is even canned now.  That may not seem so amazing, but a brewery has to put out quite a bit of beer before they begin canning it.  But that's now going on.  Indeed, beer is the Distributist Economic champion of Wyoming.

This revival, it should be noted, represents a return of an industry that once was all over and very local.  Casper, which recently saw local beer return at The Wonder Bar, an bar that dates back forever in Casper's history, once had a regional brewer in the form of Hillcrest Brewery.  

Bottles from Hillcrest Lager Beer, a beer that was once brewed locally but is no more. Casper doesn't bottle any beer anymore, but it does brew it once again.

There are even a couple of wineries in Wyoming. I don't know anything about them, other than that they exist, but this is additional evidence that at least in terms of processing a local agricultural product into a finished one, alcohol leads the way.

Okay, its one thing to point all of these things out, but what of it.  We don't have packing plants, mills, etc.  What, a person might ask, do you propose?

Well, I'd propose something that Wyomingites hate, state assistance for private enterprise, or even direct involvement in it.

Now, before people have their hackles up too much, let me point out that we only oppose this to a limited degree.  We're actually okay, based on our track records, of supporting start ups with grants.  We're also okay with investing in doubtful technologies, if they relate to the mineral industry.  Witness there all the money the state is sinking into Clean Coal Technology.  I'm not opposed to that by any means, but we must admit that the chances of it ever paying off are remote.

So, before we get too much further, let us consider North Dakota Mill and Elevator.

Eh?

Postcard of the North Dakota State Mill, 1915.

While nearly a neighboring state (it doesn't border us, but you can sprint across the corner of South Dakota and be there in no time at all), North Dakota, which we will return to when we discuss education, has a really different cultural history compared to Wyoming.  With a heavily Scandinavian immigrant population from early in the 20th Century, North Dakota had and still has a political culture that, quite frankly, was occasionally sympathetic to socialism.

Now, let me be frank, I'm not terribly sympathetic with socialism, but we can take a page out of an example of something that works, if it works.  And here's something that has worked for North Dakota.

It's a state owned operation, formed to address problems that farmers were experiencing, but it doesn't receive a subsidy from the state and its self supporting.  

This is the same model used by the other Dakota, South Dakota, for South Dakota Cement, an operation so successful that it has expanded even recently and markets its product in every state bordering South Dakota.  It even had a plant, at one time, here in Casper.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we need state run or owned industries everywhere.  But perhaps we can take an example where there isn't a private industry.  Critics would say, and they should be listened to, that if a private industry isn't operating it's for a good reason. But, we also have to admit that there are a fair number of industries that get their start from some sort of government support.  Indeed, the entire transcontinental railroad was such an example, getting state support in the form of massive land grants, which is essentially the same as a massive infusion of capital.  There's no reason to pretend otherwise.

So, where we don't have a local industry, perhaps we should consider if the state should help. The state's already helping the coal and petroleum industries via various studies at the University of Wyoming, including clean coal.  The very day I wrote this part of this entry, Governor Mead was appearing on the front page of the Tribune at a state funded facility studying clean coal.  And let's not forget the pile of administrative entities that help business one way or another, from the Farmers Home Administration to the Small Business Administration.

So, suing the North and South Dakota models, could the state infest in the infrastructure for milling, packing and wool processing?  Perhaps it could. And, after an initial start up, perhaps it could require those industries to run on a self-sufficient basis.

We could make a shift of this type, but as noted, it's going to take some outside the box thinking.  One thing it would also take is some inside the state, state investment.   And we have to do that now, like Frank Pantangeli has it in The Godfather Part II, "while we have the muscle".

What that would mean is that we actually do some thing that we claim we've been going to do forever, and diversify the economy, but in a way that we can actually do it, rather than on some wild hypothetical.

And we do have the cash, i.e., the economic muscle, right now.

Part of the evidence of that is that the state has been wasting money on long shot lawsuits to try to bend Montana and Washington to our will in order to ship coal to a coal shipping port yet to be built and which never will be.  That appears likely to come to an end here soon, as even Trump Administration didn't support Wyoming in the case pending in front of the Supreme Court (the Biden Administration may very well oppose Wyoming at that level, if it can).  And that's not the only place Wyoming is applying case even in an era in which we are stripping money from everything we can.  Wyoming gets the concept of strategic spending, but it's not strategically spending for a new economy, but in attempts to preserve the old one which has such an uncertain future.  Packing plants to process the state's livestock, grain mills to process the state's grains, wool mills to process wool, and other modern agricultural sector investments should be made right now.

People will look at this and thing "oh no, that's old fashioned", but the truth is that agriculture is the economic base of some states that do at least as well as we do.  And we have to build with what we have and, more importantly perhaps, what people want.  Right now the signs are there that people aren't going to be wanting petroleum the way they once did, and they don't want coal anymore at all.

Nuclear power would offer another opportunity to Wyoming as well, if only we could overcome the bizarre negative mindset about it, which we've also addressed  here before.

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste: Debate continues about nuclear power's role in electricity production, particularly as it revolves around climate change. As a zero-emissions source of

Interesting article on this topic.

Nuclear power should be something that Greens, particularly radical Greens, should be screaming for night and day.  Indeed, any really scientific thought on energy that was designed to address safe, sustainable, and clean energy, would be based on nuclear power.  Opposition to it is so unscientific as to make Godzilla movies look like actual paleontology.  

Suggesting the state build a nuclear power plant is really going big, so to speak, but perhaps we really need to ponder the state getting into that somehow.  I can't see the state building one, although just a few months ago we were read to invest in the checkerboard lands to an extent that would have exceeded building a nuclear power plant.  Perhaps we should ponder it.  We should at least ponder backing one, and backing one or more in locations where others have just shut down.

And yes, I can hear the cries "Socialist!"

Now, granted, this is a species of socialism, albeit of an odd type that differs from the classic economy destroying the government owns everything variety.  The concept would only be, on sort of  Distributist basis, to form those entities aiding major Wyoming industries where we aren't able to finish the product ourselves on an reasonably economic level.  We can't, for example, create refineries and have them compete.  Nor power plants. But packing plants are another matter, and mills are a demonstrated different matter.  This wouldn't bring in an economic miracle by any means, but it would allow us to further make use of the resources that we do have, right here. And there would be a market for the product, including a small market right here, in that the state is already in the lunch business for kids up to age 19.  Moreover, tags like "Wyoming beef" do have a local price and maybe even a regional one that could be useful for a product grown and finished here, and that is already the case.

M'eh

We're going to have to do something, and do something with what we've got the resources to do that something on.  Doing nothing is never an option unless failure is.  

So what about Alaska?

Well, it seems its challenge is similar, but with different resources. The way out seems about the same.

Assuming it is a way out. But it seems to me it is.  Working in a flour mill or packing plant no doubt wouldn't be as lucrative as working on a rig, but its work.  Right now, with four rigs, it isn't as if there's that much work in that sector.  And a successful economy builds on itself.

So, we could do something about where we are heading, which is to focus on what we have, and where the future seems headed.  But will we?

I sort of doubt it.  

In today's Tribune there's an interesting op ed by Mike Leman, the Catholic legislative liaison in Wyoming, which had this interesting quote.

For decades, many who follow the legislature have quipped that Wyoming is the most conservative socialist state in the country. How so? Because we Wyomingites have never been averse to true benefits that come from government programs, but we have preferred to let the oil and coal industries pay for them, rather than reaching deeper into our own pockets. Due to declining revenue from mineral severance tax, local government agencies have been cutting services and putting in place hiring freezes for years. Last November, Governor Gordon announced an additional $500 million in cuts, which include layoffs.

The quote is amusing in that there's more than an element of truth to it.  Proud of our independence and conservative values, we sometimes fail to appreciate that we've had it good, except when we had it bad, because of the extractive industries upon which we've nearly solely relied for everything.  Even those who don't work for those industries do in some fashion, one way or another, as everything is dependent upon them.  We're getting a clear warning that we're going to now have to look elsewhere, and even if Leman doesn't really have the definition of subsidiarity really right, in my view, the principal is there and now its applicable to us in spades.

But that will require an overhaul of our thinking.  And that would require us to face grim reality that things are pretty rapidly changing.  There's no sign whatsoever that coal will "come back" and blaming that on the government or pinning hopes on a lawsuit pending at the Supreme Court level is hoping against hope.  The energy economy is rapidly evolving and with it transportation technology is rapidly evolving as well.  

We have, however, other resources upon which we rely.  We could build on those.

My prediction is, however, we won't.  Instead, we're going to hear, in this bizarrely polarized era, how the Federal Government must give the Federal lands the state forever eschewed when it became a state, to the state, based on strained theories. And we're going to hear railing against the Biden Administration, which is going to be blamed for everything.  The GOP will either unite in the state on those points or rip itself apart as some harbor the fantasy that there was some way that Trump could have received another term, if "only if", in spite of the rejection by over half the electorate, a half that has no sympathy whatsoever with Wyoming's economic woes.  We won't be building packing plants when we could, or flour mills.  And we'll continue to tolerate a situation in which agricultural land is needlessly busted up into patches that don't raise a single cow, and the passing of large ranches to out of state owners who hold them as playgrounds.

At some point, we'll ask the satirical question, "is this why we can't have nice things?", when in fact we have them, if only we had the vision to see that we do.

*Which is a reason, I'd note, that people who claim to speak for "Wyoming values" ought to be given a second glance, as often they don't have all that stout of connection with the state.

Related threads:

There are a lot of threads on the economy of Wyoming on this blog.  Here's a few, however, that are closely related to what we posted on here.

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1. The Economy

Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (a). The Economy again. . . the extractive industries

Looking at the nature of Wyoming's economy again