The “Other” Montana: An Economic Vision for Eastern Montana

It is hard to talk about the “Montana” economy as a single, well-connected, economy both because of Montana’s huge sprawling size as well as the divergent paths that the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains portions have been on.

If you separate the state into two large pieces primarily along the mountains stretching from the Billings area west to the Yellowstone Park area and then north towards Glacier Park, you also separate the state into one region that has generally been in decline for most of the twentieth century and another that has been gaining population and economic activity, especially over the last three decades. During the 1990s, the western Montana part would have been among the top ten states of the Union in terms of population and job growth; the eastern Montana part would have been in the bottom ten states by the same measures, actually losing population.

Rural eastern Montana joins the rest of the rural Great Plains states, stretching from the Dakotas down to the panhandle of Texas, in this economic stagnation and decline. This has lead to demoralization and, sometimes, desperation within the rural Great Plains with some areas offering up their land for toxic waste dumps, their communities for regional prisons, and their farms for industrial hog production. Those with energy resources eagerly promote any and all types of development, no matter what the environmental damage. Coal bed methane in Wyoming is just one example.

To the extent that a good part of the economic vitality found in Western Montana and the other Mountain West states is attributable to the amenities associated with attractive natural landscapes and recreational opportunities, this only adds to the demoralization. Many residents of the rural Great Plains cast the landscapes they inhabit in terms as negative as those used by outsiders who are just trying to get across this huge sprawling region: monotonous sameness, a vast land ocean of emptiness, ceaseless winds, extremes of climate, etc. Who would want to live here, they ask. And the out-migration over a seventy-year period seems to confirm that bleak view.

It is interesting during the celebration of the bi-centennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, that the description given by the early European visitors to the northern Great Plains did not describe the region in those negative terms. They saw impressive rolling grasslands teaming with wildlife and a diverse landscape of river valleys, badlands, grasslands, island mountain ranges, and wetlands. In some ways their descriptions matched later pictures of the African Serengeti Plains. The early visitors were challenged by the scale of the landscape but not bored!

In some ways, it was the commitment of almost the entire Great Plains landscape to private commercial economic activity that has changed perceptions of it. The prairies were plowed, the wetlands drained, the river valleys flooded behind dams, the teaming wildlife almost wiped out, and where possible, the land committed to industrial scale energy development.

Where that did not happen or where natural amenities survived despite the exploitation of the land, one sees the same attractive landscape forces on the northern Great Plains that have supported economic development in the Mountain West. The only counties in the northern Great Plains that have been gaining population recently have been high natural amenity areas like the Black Hills region of South Dakota or the broad Missouri River valley stretching through both North and South Dakota.

These days, the desert southwest and the Mountain West are assumed to have “charismatic” landscapes that draw people like magnets, while the Great Plains has nothing of the sort and is disadvantaged because of that. But that is a very short-term view. The desert southwest was once assumed to be a completely uninhabitable, dangerous, “dead” land. Now it is the “land of enchantment” and is praised for its subtle colors and intricate natural systems. Of course cheap electric air conditioning helped a lot too! Something similar could be said for the Mountain West. Those mountains once were seen as a dangerous, nearly impassable landscape where there was almost no flat land to settle and inhabit. The vast bulk of the land, then and now, was steep, inaccessible forest, granite, and ice. Only tiny meandering river bottoms could be settled. Many people had penned in, claustrophobic, reactions. Only gold and pursuit of mineral wealth brought them here. When that ran out, they deserted the area leaving hundreds of ghost towns, including a couple of Territorial Capitols in Montana, behind.

The point is that people’s appreciation of landscapes changes and develops. To the extent that residents of the Great Plains focus some of their efforts at reviving their natural landscapes so that people can again stand in awe as Lewis and Clark did at a bountiful land inhabited by diverse wildlife, other American’s may also begin to see the Great Plains differently. But first, at least some of the industrial landscape that agriculture and energy have left behind has to be repaired. It would not take a major reversal of American attitudes towards the Great Plains to begin to stabilize and modestly repopulate the region. Over the last 50 years, the rural Great Plains has lost 20 percent of its population. But that totals only about 500,000 people. We are a nation now of 275 million people. Only a tiny fraction of the population need develop an appreciation for the Great Plains to stabilize its population and lay the basis for ongoing economic vitality.

The prerequisite for this, however, is for the existing population and its political leadership to have confidence in the unique characteristics of their homeland and its potential. Beggars who think that they cannot afford to be choosers and who are afraid to take risks in their pursuit of a vision for the region that is tied to its natural landscape and social values, will not inspire others to believe that the Great Plains has something special to offer residents. Still worse is the pressure, fed by a feeling of desperation, to damage the landscape even further in hopes of generating a few more jobs or a few more dollars of income.

More of the same is not economic development. The ability of an area to hold and attract new residents is increasingly crucial to local economic vitality. That means that economic development efforts have to move a different direction, despite the perceived risk, towards protecting that which holds current residents and in the future will attract and hold others: The land, the natural prairie landscapes, the rivers and wetlands, the people and their communities. Abusing any of these in the name of “economic development” is both economically wrong-headed as well as wrong culturally and ethically.