Secession, County by County,
Part 1: Oregon

The Origins of the Wise Use Movement
“The Battle to Claim the New West”
Jeffrey St. Clair
Counterpunch, Jan. 8-10, 2010

The county power movement, as it’s called, is centered on some 70 western counties that are surrounded by the public domain and are defiantly declaring their independence. It’s a kind of mini-secessionist movement, charged by anger at federal authority and environmentalism. No better example of this insurgency can be found than in Wallowa County in eastern Oregon. Bounded on one side by Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in the United States, and on the other by the serrated, snow-capped peaks of the Wallowa Mountains, Wallowa is one of the most remote and isolated counties in the nation—fifty miles of hard driving from the nearest highway.

Forty years ago, ranching, logging and mining formed the economic backbone of Wallowa County. Over the past two decades, however, Wallowa County has been undergoing a dramatic structural transformation. First, the small sawmills closed, victims of their own rapacious appetite for old-growth Ponderosa pine, which had been nearly eliminated from the region’s mountains by the late 1980s. Then in the early 1990s, the corporate mills, owned by transnational timber giant Boise-Cascade moved out. While the corporate executives blamed the closures on environmental regulations and lawsuits, the prime factor was a desire to find more efficient locations (such as the forests of the Sierra Madre in Mexico) for their new high tech mills.

Meanwhile, here in the heart of cowboy country, there are only 46 ranchers left in a county nearly the size of Delaware. And, according to one economic study, total farm income in Wallowa county represents only about eight percent of total employment. Of this, ranching represents less than two percent. For at least the past twenty years, the biggest single employer in Wallowa County (and most of the rural West, for that matter) is the federal government—in this case the Forest Service. Oh, the irony.

Wallowa County’s demographics are also changing, Young people are fleeing the county for better paying jobs in Spokane, Boise and Portland. This is a phenomenon at work across the entire region. Indeed, the contemporary West is much more urban-centered than the East or the South. More than 80 percent of Westerners live in cities.

As the children of ranchers, loggers and sawmill operators scramble towards the cities, new kinds of urban refugees are moving into the county. For example, the small town of Joseph, named after the famous Nez Perce Chief who was born in a cave near town, now resembles a kind of yuppie colony with art cooperatives, herb farms, an organic farmer’s market, designer coffee shops and microbrew pubs.

In short, Joseph has become a vacation retreat, a wannabe Jackson, Wyoming. And the old timers don’t like it one bit. They fear rising property taxes, pressures from mortgage holders, displacement from traditional lifestyles. All they see are urban-transplants throwing cash around while they lose their jobs in dying industries.

The way the town elders see it, it’s the federal government that’s to blame for their deprivation. In 1994, county residents voted to adopt an ordinance aimed at kicking the federal government off lands they insist belong to the state of Oregon, and in so doing, turned Wallowa County into a Firebase Charlie of the West’s war against the federales. . . . Read the whole article.