Place, Identity, and Work

In Sunday's Washington Post there was a fabulous article about Chesapeake Bay and the slow erosion of the oyster and fishing communities.  

The loss of oyster and fishing jobs on Chesapeake Bay is less about losing a way of life and more about how our culture has evolved from valuing working with our hands, being based in place to a service culture, where placed based work has become irrelevant.  

And in my opinion that is not good.  It is yet again another sign that our economy is not healthy.

One of the consequences that we are seeing in transforming our economy from place based work to service work is the over development of areas like Chesapeake Bay, or Puget Sound, or the Oregon Coast, or Bozeman, Montana, where homes displace fishing, cattle ranching, oystering, yes, even logging.  Our natural resources in some sense become destroyed because of people building where they think they  can appreciate the natural resources.

Perhaps part of this new new economy should address these issues.  Instead of helping people become more mobile, maybe we need to figure out how to help people stay.