I dislike tourism as a general way of making a profit, but I also acknowledge that it can be one method for a community to support itself. People have to travel for work reasons, other people enjoy traveling on holiday and for other reasons, and the end result is that people are moving from place […]
Category: Fort Bragg
Your Extra-Moldy Foreclosure Special, Courtesy the Marijuana Industry
The successive waves of foreclosures rippling through the economy are more acute in some markets than others, and some markets have some extra special problems that come along with their foreclosures. Banks are not just taking possession of homes in these regions, they are taking possession of environmental disasters that need to be cleaned up. […]
Environmental Issues: We’re In the Shit Now, Folks
One of the books I read during the Book Project that left an unexpected legacy was Bottlemania, by Elizabeth Royte. Although the book was primarily about the rise of the bottled water industry, one of the things it touched upon was the fact that water processing facilities for municipal water are growing increasingly outdated and […]
Urchins and Indicators
Fun fact: Fort Bragg used to be a major sea urchin fishery. These prickly (and delicious) creatures made a lot of people rather wealthy in the 1980s, and the urchin fishery was a large part of Fort Bragg’s commercial fishery. Then, a strange thing started happening. Urchins became much less plentiful. Fishermen insisted they weren’t […]
On ‘Small Town Values’
Like ‘family values,’ ‘small town values’ is a very popular codeword on the political scene in the United States. I see it getting thrown around in all kinds of directions, and I’m not really sure that people know what they mean or are trying to convey when they use it. Around 75% of this country’s […]
The False Promise of Tourism
I’ve been following NPR’s coverage of the proposals to increase broadband penetration in the United States because it’s a topic of interest to me, and recently they did a feature which dovetailed nicely with another interest of mine: The damage that tourism does to communities. An NPR reporter traveled to Trinity County to talk with […]
Buy Local Or Else
Every now and then, it seems like another little “buy local” bubble burbles up. It’s happening again here; I see signs in store windows, and people exhorting me to buy local in various articles, and, as usual, it’s evoking a series of emotions in me. You’d think that I might be all about the Buy […]
Destruction in the Name of Tourism
For many years, the residents of Fort Bragg, like those of many coastal communities, tossed their trash over the headlands. There was a designated and accepted dumping spot, and the garbage just sort of accumulated there. Eventually, someone decided that this wasn’t a terribly bright idea, and a more sustainable method of waste disposal was […]