I am coming back here more than two years and two-thousand miles from my last post. What is bringing me back is an NPR interview with some Uniontown, Pennsylvania coal-miner families. As I listened to them talk, I thought of a half-dozen families with whom I grew up, families who made their livings from the natural resources in Iron County. These Pennsylvanians were angry because their jobs are going away and their communities have become hard to sustain. They want someone to come in and make the lives they know viable again. They don't, all were clear, want to ask anyone to need to retrain at 60.
I wonder if the families would say the same. And if they did, how they would think through our historical present. The white pine are gone and the aspen can't really sustain a community. The ore that is available is costly--financially or environmentally--to get at. And new mines would be highly automated; few who worked White Pine could work a new dig without retraining. The resorts are disappearing except in Minacqua and a handful of unique places where Chicago and Minneapolis still come on vacation.
A changing climate, a global world. In what ways is Iron County linked in? Maybe silviculture offers a community sustaining path. But not one that comes without training. Managing a forest, like managing a dairy or a corn and bean enterprise happens on with a computer in a network.
We live on a crowed globe in a network. We are interdependent in ways that my grandparents could not have imagined. Living now here means learning with and for diverse others so that we can frame and solve the challenges that face us and take advantage of the opportunities that surround us.
This is what I'm now going to write about.
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