The New Natural Resource Economy: Environment and Economy in Transitional Rural Communities

Abstract

Recent developments in resource management suggest an important opportunity to address the declining socioeconomic health of rural communities struggling to fill the gap left by the transformation of primary production in agriculture and natural resources. Commodity production creates direct links between producers and urban centers, bypassing rural communities and making them economically redundant. A range of activities have emerged in the last 20 years—watershed restoration, community forestry, sustainable agriculture, and ecosystem services, for example—that constitute a “new natural resource economy” (NNRE) that can help diversify rural economies while also enhancing environmental, social, and cultural assets. Constituent components of NNRE have been studied, but there has been no attempt to map the whole territory. In this article we report the findings from a scoping survey and three case studies, as a first cut at describing the NNRE economic sector and identifying barriers to its development.

Keywords:

• community economic development
• community resilience
• healthy environments/healthy economies
• multifunctionality
• natural resource management
• sustainable rural economies

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Ford Family Foundation, Roseburg, Oregon. An earlier version was presented at the 52nd Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, Salt Lake City, UT, October 13–16, 2011.

Notes

This discussion is drawn from Hayter (2003), Igler (2000), Smithers et al. (2005), and Stoll (1998).

For more information regarding agriculture of the middle, see http://www.agofthemiddle.org and http://www.cias.wisc.edu/category/economics/ag-of-the-middle.

Information for this case is based on fieldwork conducted by the authors in Grant County during 2008–2010, for an applied research project supported by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (Hibbard and Lurie 2012), and follow-up interviews in 2011.

http://pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.prc/files/Grant_CT2000.pdf.

http://oregon.reaproject.org/analysis/comparative-indicators.

Information for this case is based on site visits and interviews, supplemented by document analysis.

See http://www.orsolutions.org/ for details on Oregon Solutions criteria and processes.

Information for this case is based on document analysis supplemented by site visits and interviews.

http://oe.oregonexplorer.info/rural/CommunitiesReporter.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/41/41059.html.