Cary Hegreberg - November 20, 2008
Montana Contractors Association
Back to Basics
It’s time we get back to basics. Americans, including Montanans, have been living in a dream world of voracious consumption, borrowing against tomorrow to fulfill our desires of today. The entire nation is paying the price of living beyond our means, with financial markets imploding, unemployment escalating, consumer confidence plummeting, and federal government debt skyrocketing as it attempts to throw tourniquets around the economy’s bleeding appendages.
Getting back to basics will mean rethinking some of the myths we’ve come to believe in.
Luxury hotels, for example, tell us we can save the planet by reusing our bath towels. Then they provide us with glass bottles of artesian spring water that was imported from Norway on ocean freighters, and then trucked to the hotel by a Peterbuilt.
We’re saving a tree by going paperless, with the aid of more electricity and high-tech gadgets manufactured in Third World nations, using thousands of tons of mineral alloys gouged from the earth and processed in coal-fired smelters far from where we can see or smell them.
The tree we’re saving, by the way, is being ravaged by bark beetles and will burn up next summer because we would rather close our sawmills and instead import our lumber from Canada, where again, the impacts are out of sight, out of mind for smug Americans.
Through our daily latte habit, we’ve caused the devastation of thousands of acres of Rain Forest by creating a demand for coffee beans. But we convince ourselves we are doing some thing good if the paper cup we sip from carries a little stamp certifying it was made from recycled fiber and that the coffee inside is both organic and fair trade.
We delude ourselves into thinking a bunch of whimsical windmills erected like corn rows on the horizon can somehow replace the hundreds of millions of tons of coal burned in power plants around the nation. Sure, wind power is a great way to augment our energy needs, but who wants to rely on it during those sub-zero days in January when there is not a wisp of a breeze?
Our vast holdings of federal land are largely off-limits to oil development, under the auspices that drilling and pumping will somehow degrade the pristine environment. If one species of plant or animal isn’t impacted, we can certainly find another that will be irreparably harmed. Then we scream like banshees when OPEC squeezes us to pay $4/gallon for gas.
We want it all, and up until recently, we pretty much thought we had it.
People who are unemployed or who have watched their net worth collapse, however, tend to look at things a bit differently. They begin to question why Montana laws and Montana courts allow environmental groups to continually block a legitimate new power plant in Great Falls. They hear about cement plants around the country closing down, and wonder if maybe burning tires using an EPA approved process at the facility in Trident might keep it competitive and able to keep employing people at high wages. They see Home Depot brimming with Canadian lumber while yet another lawsuit is filed in the Bitterroot to stop the harvest of bug infested trees. People start to question if sage grouse really are threatened by oil and gas development on the prairies of eastern Montana, or if this is our version of the Spotted Owl hoax? And perhaps a truly objective look at drilling on the Rocky Mountain Front might demonstrate it actually can be done using good stewardship principles.
This nation is experiencing an economic crisis unlike any most of us have ever endured. It will force us as a nation, and as a state, to re-examine the need to produce stuff not just services. Montana, with our abundant mineral, timber, agricultural, and energy resources, is poised to prosper in a reincarnated capitalistic economy that also embraces sustainability and responsibility. Our communities can provide high-quality jobs and a tax base that supports good schools and functional infrastructure.
It will not happen, however, if we continue the status quo—which is fostering a system that allows every Friends of the Neighborhood group that pops up to harangue, stall, delay, and halt the latest economic development project.
We can have economic prosperity by responsibly extracting resources and producing things for the rest of the nation and the world. We need policies that reflect this goal, and elected officials who pursue those policies.
So, to reverse a trendy bumper sticker phrase, lets think local and act global. Drink tap water instead of bottled water from France. Buy gas that comes from a Billings refinery instead of from Saudi Arabia. Build a deck using lumber from Deer Lodge instead of from Alberta. Use electricity from a power plant in Great Falls instead of Wyoming. Let’s take advantage of this opportunity to build Montana.
I’m Cary Hegreberg with the Montana Contractors' Association. Thanks for listening.
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