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Understanding change in
resource-dependent rural areas
Natural resource extraction is important to
national economies such as Australia’s and to
remote resource dependent areas within many
developed nations. However, social scientists
have long been concerned with the impacts of the
‘boom and bust’ nature of extractive industries
on surrounding communities (Dana; Kaufman and
Kaufman). Extractive communities’ poverty is
attributed to the domination of external actors,
specifically: 1) the state/natural resource
agency that is a significant holder of rural
resources and 2) capital, especially global
resource corporations. The external state
(bureaucratic power), capital and the national
and global economic structure (declining terms
of commodity trade and the lack of forward and
backward economic linkages in the resource
communities) affect resource production and
responses within resource-dependent communities
(Machlis et al.; Peluso et al.;
Freudenberg and Gramling, ‘Linked to What?’).
The communities’ geographic isolation also
contributes to limited economic opportunities
(Randall and Ironside), while the high but
intermittent wages encourage people to stay and
over-invest or over-specialise in resource
extraction. Local community planning and
economic development projects have little to no
impact on the global and national
decision-making environment that affects these
communities which remain impoverished, domestic
resource-producing colonies (Freudenberg).
Preserving environmental amenities may enable
the communities to shift to the service sector
and decrease poverty in the long-term
(Freudenberg and Gramling), but the
resource-dependent community (and its employment
possibilities) would change from being
extractive to non-consumptive (tourism-related)
or backdrop-oriented for industrial relocation
(Peluso et al.). Tourism may itself
lead to another form of export-led dependency
(English et al.; Schmallegger and
Carson).
Scholarship about rural change shows how
property regimes and resource demands have
shaped stages of extraction and tourism
development in the Allegheny National Forest
(ANF) region in the following ways. Firstly,
historical land use production has shaped
current landscapes as both Native American and
European settlers’ land use has led to forest
clearing for timber, agriculture and oil
(Williams; Whitney; Black). Secondly, the
ecological implications of consumption have been
recognised, including how rural resource
hinterlands have been shaped by urban demands
(Cronon). Thirdly, it has been shown that past
resource management and land use policies
precondition new rounds of development and
policy decisions as changing desires for
rural resource use are linked to broader global,
national and regional economic shifts and the
importance of the consumer becomes paramount.
Resource-driven land acquisition and
extraction in Penn’s Woods
Native Americans actively shaped the
forests of the Allegheny Plateau. Given the
amount of annual precipitation, there was a low
incidence of natural fire. Yet the land along
the Allegheny River used by Native Americans for
thousands of years as travel routes and for
habitation have forest types born of fire.
Native Americans used fire for warmth and
cooking and as a tool in both agricultural and
hunting practices. Due to their use of fire,
Native American populations had the strongest
effect on the growth of oak, hickory and
chestnut forest types in the western part of the
ANF region. Additionally black walnut is found
only in proximity to Native American villages
(Black, Ruffner, and Abrams). Thus, like the
Aboriginal people in Australia, Native Americans
shaped the landscape that European settlers
‘discovered’.
The ‘original’ or pre-European settlement
forest found in the ANF region differed greatly
from the present one. Hemlock and beech once
made up 63 percent of all trees listed in early
land surveys of the Allegheny Plateau. The
now-abundant, commercially valuable,
shade-intolerant black cherry made up only 0.09
percent of the original forest prior to 1820.
Oak types associated with Native American
settlements and white pine, whose wood initiated
the area’s land acquisition and timber
harvesting, respectively made up 5.7 and 3
percent of the pre-European settlement forest
(Marquis).
Resource-based land acquisition in the
Allegheny Plateau favoured industrial extraction
of this forest, rather than pioneer settlement.
The state of Pennsylvania purchased what is now
the north-central and northwestern parts of the
state from Native Americans in 1784-1785
(Southwest Pennsylvania Genealogical Services)
which greatly reduced the Native
American presence. A Native American settlement
on the 1791 Cornplanter Grant that the
Pennsylvania General Assembly granted
Cornplanter, a chief of the Seneca nation, and
his heirs in gratitude for his diplomatic
efforts checking the development of a
threatening alliance between eastern and Ohio
Indians against the settlers remained until 1964
when it was flooded out by the construction of a
dam on the Allegheny River (Deardoff). The lands
purchased from Native Americans in 1784-1785,
known as the Indian Land Cessions, were largely
sold in 1792 to large Philadelphia, Dutch and
British capitalists who had the financial
resources to purchase four million acres of land
in 1,000-acre warrants at 13 cents per acre
(Ross Northwestern Pennsylvania Timber
Industry). Much of this land subsequently
ended up in the hands of ‘Yankee’ New England
and New York settlers interested in resource
extraction and development (Childs History;
Groenendaal & Jones Consultants).

Figure 1: The ‘original’ forest:
Tionesta Old Growth Area, Allegheny National
Forest (Source: US Department of
Agriculture, Forest Service, Allegheny
National Forest)
Timber harvesting of the hemlock-beech which
dominated the Allegheny Plateau forests (Figure
1) occurred in distinct phases. The initial
timber harvesting phase (1800-1830) consisted
mainly of early pioneer clearings for cabin
construction and agriculture. The water
transportation harvesting phase (1830-1890) was
dominated by the aforementioned large Yankee
timber interests, who acquired large tracts of
land and organised lumber companies, and was
marked by the select harvesting of white pine
from this resource hinterland to feed building
construction in downstream Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati and New Orleans (Wilhelm). Timber
harvesting was also fuelled by the need of the
oil and leather industries. Oil, used by Native
Americans for medicinal purposes, was
commercially discovered in 1859 along the Oil
Creek Valley in neighbouring Venango County, the
birthplace of the world’s commercial oil
industry. Subsequent oil fields which required
large quantities of lumber for rig construction
were discovered and exploited throughout the ANF
region (Casler; Childs History; Ross Allegheny
Oil; Black). The capital-intensive,
steam-powered, ‘logging railroad’ era
(1890-1920) both facilitated and required
year-round clearcutting of the remaining pine,
hemlock and hardwoods (Marquis) to feed the
large-scale sawmills, tanneries and wood
chemical plants. As a result, the virgin and
partially cut forests of the Allegheny Plateau
were almost completely clearcut in what Marquis
(11) called ‘the highest degree of forest
utilization that the world has ever seen in any
commercial lumbering area’. The end of this
first stage of industrial resource extraction,
lasting from the mid-1800s up until World War I,
left behind millions of acres of bare hillsides,
ghost towns and depopulated cities and resulted
in Penn’s Woods being turned into the Allegheny
Brush Pile (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Logged hillside,
Pennsylvania (Source: US Department of
Agriculture, Forest Service, Allegheny
National Forest)
Government acquisition and transition
from the ‘Allegheny Brush Pile’ to the
‘Natural Escape’
Following unsustainable resource extraction, the
importance of tourism and the role of the state
increased as regional and local capital used
concerns about deforestation and subsequent
flooding in downstream Pittsburgh to push the
federal government to acquire the cutover lands.
Local business interests, many of whom were
large landholders and/or involved in
timber-related businesses, supported the
creation of the ANF in 1923 as the federal
government would also be a willing buyer for
deforested private timber lands that might not
be attractive to short-term private investors.
Only surface rights, not mineral rights, were
acquired since the government could only buy
land for less than US$4.00/acre (US Department
of Agriculture, Forest Service, Allegheny
National Forest). This resulted in a split
estate akin to that in Australia although with
private subsurface owners and public surface
owners on the Allegheny. The past private
ownership and liquidation of timber stands led
to state ownership of almost 50 percent of
Forest County, one of the ANF counties (Figure
3). The local business elite believed that the
ANF would reforest the acreage, develop
recreational resources (such as campgrounds and
reservoirs) and improve roads to, from and
within this isolated part of northwestern
Pennsylvania, thus making ‘a hunting, fishing
and recreation ground amidst beautiful scenery,
cool climate and gorgeous vistas, within easy
reach of the great business centers’ of
Pennsylvania and neighbouring states (Allegheny
Highway Association). The state thus replaced
capital as the dominant actor that would fuel
development of this resource-dependent area.

Figure 3: Allegheny National Forest
Region map (cartographer: Anne Gibson)
State management fostered both resource
extraction and tourism and the transformation of
the ‘Allegheny Brush Pile’ to the ‘Natural
Escape’.While ANF commercial timber harvests
largely did not resume until 1960, the
regenerating forest created ideal conditions for
deer, cementing the region’s reputation for deer
hunting. The ANF’s 500,000 once-deforested
acres, which grew to provide quality,
public-access deer hunting, drew deer-poor
residents of urban and industrial western
Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.
Production-oriented Forest Service policies that
supplied timber for post-war suburban
development also increased forest edges
resulting in cover and browse favoured by game
species (Alverson et al.), thus
satisfying the multiple use management mandate
for the national forests. In the pre- and
post-World War II era, visitors from the
region’s industrial cities such as Pittsburgh,
Cleveland and Buffalo built hunting camps and
seasonal homes on private tracts surrounding the
national forest. One prominent developer, Ernie
Matson, who first came to Forest County in 1923
from industrial New Castle, Pennsylvania, as a
deer hunter, opened 13 areas for campers in the
1950s and 1960s, the largest of which contained
over 4.5 miles of road and over 500 lots on 380
acres (Figure 4) (‘Ernie Matson’). Additionally,
historical sites tied to the ongoing extractive
industries were viewed increasingly as heritage
tourism resources (Black; Fermata). In the case
of oil heritage, such sites included the Drake
Well, the first commercial oil well in the US,
as well as the ghost town of Pithole (Figure 5).

Figure 4: Hunting Camp and Cabin
Development, ANF Region (photos by author)

Figure 5: Oil Heritage Sites
(clockwise from top left: Welcome to
Titusville, Pithole City sign, Pithole
today, Drake Well Engine House in
Titusville) (photos by author)
Yet job opportunities were limited for the
year-round residents of this natural escape,
given local and regional deindustrialization
which impacted manufacturing and tourism. One
ANF county, Forest, was eligible for US
Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS)
Economic Recovery funding for economically
disadvantaged, forest-dependent,
non-metropolitan local governments or counties
which emphasised marketing, training and advice
as well as entrepreneurship based on localised
resources and enterprise (US Department of
Agriculture, Forest Service, Economic Action
Program). Forest County had the
resource-dependency paradox of valuable
resources, and one of Pennsylvania’s lowest
median household incomes and its highest
unemployment rate. County economic
diversification projects funded by the USFS
program included tourism-focused studies to
assess the feasibility of developing (1) a
tourist cabin/camp rental business that would
use some of the 5,000 existing private
camps/cabins that were only used by their owners
for short periods during the year, (2) a Hunting
and Fishing Museum and (3) ecotourism (Che ‘The
New Economy’).
Demands on the ‘land of many uses’
Past clearcutting of the old- and second-growth
hemlock-beech dominated forest produced the
spatially unique Allegheny hardwoods forest
which has a higher commercial value today than
the remaining old-growth stands due to the
prevalence of veneer-quality black cherry (which
thrived under the open conditions) (Whitney). As
a result of harvesting this mature black cherry,
up until 1997 the ANF’s production of 80 percent
of the world’s black cherry sawtimber and veneer
used in fine furniture (Figure 6) led to its
being the highest earning US national forest.
Harvesting generated 99 percent of ANF gross
receipts, with 25 percent going in lieu of taxes
to the four counties with ANF lands. From
1987-1997, the ANF counties received a total of
US$48.7 million, or an annual US$4.42 million
average, for much needed school and road funding
(US Department of Agriculture, ANF Fact).
However, only a limited number of jobs were
generated as the valuable hardwoods were largely
shipped out as raw logs. The ANF region and in
particular the smallest ANF county, Forest, had
limited value-added facilities. Also, local
producers were outbid for the highest-value logs
by fine furniture manufacturers in Italy and
Germany, or by US furniture manufacturers in
North Carolina. Akin to Australian
resource-dependent towns in which minerals did
not stimulate manufacturing but were exported to
the highest bidders, veneer-quality hardwoods
left the region with little or no value-adding.
In an attempt to rectify this situation, the
USFS funded a waste wood recycling project to
locate Black Cherry tree crotches that were not
currently saleable overseas due to size or
defects, process them into usable blanks and
then lathe/reprocess them to create unusual
products such as upscale, large wooden bowls or
wooden fishing plugs (Figure 6). The aim was to
develop a business based on manufacturing unique
wooden bowls (Forest County Action Team).

Figure 6: Black Cherry (clockwise
from top left: Allegheny Hardwood forest
including mature black cherry with its
distinctive broken dark gray to black bark,
fine furniture utilizing veneer-quality
black cherry, black cherry bowls) (Top
photos by US Department of Agriculture,
Forest Service, Allegheny National Forest;
bottom photos by author)
However, resource extraction has increasingly
been in conflict with tourism and growing local
and regional environmental concerns. While if
not in the numbers of the post-World War II
period, the orange army of hunters still arrives
at the beginning of deer season. Non-consumptive
tourism however is growing in relative
importance as new visitors have diversified
interests including hiking, canoeing, biking,
ATVing, and horseback riding. Litigation first
brought in 1997 by the Allegheny Defense Project
(ADP), an environmental activist organization
which advocated a ‘zero cut’ policy on public
lands, dramatically reduced harvests. That year
the ADP filed the first lawsuit against the
forest and successfully halted Mortality II, a
reforestation project developed in response to
the deaths of insect-defoliated trees. Mortality
II included seedling plantings, herbiciding,
overstory thinning, erecting deer-proof fencing
and tree harvesting on 18 tracts on more than
5,000 acres (Steiner and Steiner). The ADP won
the case on procedural grounds that an
environmental impact statement, not the less
comprehensive environmental assessment, should
have been performed (Hopey). Mortality II did
not consider the cumulative effect of extraction
across multiple tracts, which omission is akin
to Australian mineral extractors’ not taking
into account the effect of multiple projects.
Timber harvests fell dramatically again as a
moratorium on harvesting occurred from late
1998–1999 due to the capture of a live,
endangered Indiana bat (Figure 7).

Figure 7: The Loggers Speak:
‘Beware of Tree Huggers in Bats’ Clothing’
(photo by author)
Different conceptions of the forest,
community, and Native Americans
Timber harvesting resumed shortly afterwards.
But the timber conflict, which was rooted in
different views of community, the ideal forest,
and Native Americans held by environmentalists
and local communities tied to resource
extraction, continued. While ‘dedicated to
finding community-based solutions for restoring
the ecological integrity of the region and
building sustainable economies benefiting the
health of all forest communities of the
Allegheny National Forest’, the ADP’s
proposition of tourism as ‘a replacement
rather than a supplement to logging’
(italicised by author) would alter many lives,
particularly those involved in resource
extraction (Guilyard 1996). Although few Native
Americans lived in the ANF region—hence the lack
of an Indigenous perspective—the ADP’s concept
of community would encompass them. The
organization’s long term goals included building
a coalition with Indigenous peoples ‘based on
their respect for the earth’(Allegheny Defense
Project). The ADP view echoes the popular
signification of Indigenous Australians as a
‘simple, timeless, ecologically sustainable
society’ (the eco-angel myth). Waitt, in his use
of Barthes’ framework for analysing myths,
argues this and other significations of
Indigenous peoples make their portrayal as
‘primitive’ an effective marketing tool
underpinning the Australian Tourist Commission’s
(now Tourism Australia) international
advertising strategies. For the ADP the desired
forest was the native, pre-European settlement
forest with ‘symbolic species’ such as the grey
wolf, bison and mountain lion. These would need
to be reintroduced since no viable populations
of those animals were near enough to the ANF to
naturally migrate there. The ADP has a
‘set-aside’ approach, which advocates
protection/no logging and leaving nature to
manage itself (which Native Americans did not
do). This approach will not, however, support
the maintainenance of eastern old-growth in the
ANF, which probably most closely approximates
the native forest. In the ANF’s Tionesta
Research Area, which had never been clearcut,
old-growth hemlock has declined over the past 60
years from 63 percent to only 45 percent or less
of the canopy (Center for Rural Pennsylvania Pennsylvania
Ecotourism).
Forest-dependent Forest County also connected
with Native Americans. Forest County has long
utilized this link as part of its tourist
appeal. The Tionesta Indian Festival was its
largest event, attracting 20,000 people to its
500+ person county seat. Started initially in
1963 by the West Forest Business Corporation,
the event aimed ‘to promote a festive atmosphere
and provide eight days of fun for both Forest
County residents and visitors’ by using an
Indian theme, as its original inhabitants were
the Seneca Indians (Munsee tribe). The festival
initially featured an Indian princess contest,
mock battle between settlers and Indians, and
games and events for teens (Childs ‘Tionesta
Area’). Local and seasonal residents were
participants, not Native Americans. Under the
leadership of a white Tionesta resident, Jack
McMichael, it incorporated more Native content.
McMichael who wanted to learn more about the
Seneca was eventually adopted by the tribe1
(‘McMichael Adopted by Seneca Indians’). His
clan sister, Thelma Shane who had long been
selling Indian Ghost Bread at the festival, said
that although some Seneca Indians do not
appreciate being imitated, she found it ‘a
compliment to my race that other people want to
be Indian. They put in a lot of time and effort
into trying to be authentic and they do it with
respect for the Indian’ (‘McMichael Adopted by
Turtle Clan’). Although participants remain
largely non-Indigenous Forest County residents,
there have been presentations by Seneca Indian
dancers (Figure 8). Ultimately, the Tionesta
Indian Festival is a small town event which
raises significant funds from tourists for
non-profit community organizations.

Figure 8: Tionesta Indian Festival
(clockwise from top left: Tionesta Indian
Festival parade, Princess and Brave float,
Seneca Indian Dancers, Tepee and Brave float
bowls) (photos by author)
However, on the resource conflict issue, this
connection with Native Americans played out
differently in conceptions of the community and
forest. The chairman of the Forest County Action
Team, a group of local citizens who organised to
access USFS funds for economic diversification
projects, wearing his hat as Forest County
Conservation and Planning District director
wrote in his weekly column of the shutting down
of Mortality II by the ADP, supposedly to help
local citizens and the forest:
What we face is the same kind of blackness
the Native American did, when they first said
to themselves (as the pilgrims pulled up)
‘There goes the neighborhood’. Our
neighborhood is being overrun by green
uniforms, green camo fatigues, and green
ideas, which derive from pagan philosophy
rather than modern reality. Real stewardship
begins with an investment of a life. Lots of
the citizens of Forest County have made the
life investment, they are stewards of the
land, good stewards already! (Carlson,
‘Conservation’3).
A connection was also made between the current
local resource management and use and that of
Native Americans. Locals are following in the
footsteps of Indigenous peoples, ‘who did not
set aside land but managed it wisely, beginning
with fire for hunting, both to draw game with
new growth following fire and to drive game
towards hunters, and for agriculture to clear
the ground’ (Carlson, ‘Pristine Wilderness’ 9),
thus resulting in the aforementioned oak stands.
According to Carlson, the Native American was:
… NOT an environmentalist or any number of
the modern day off-shoots of environmentalism.
The Indian used nature and what the earth
provided. He did not protect it nor did the
Indian destroy it. To protect is to save and
not use. To destroy is to disrespect and act
in an ignorant or selfish manner. The
Amerindians did not view the earth in either
way.... Conservation IS the WISE USE of
natural resources. The first conservationists
in America were the Indian people. (‘Doin’ the
Indian’ 17, capitalised in the original)
However, identifying with Native Americans and
recognizing their conservation practices did not
mean going back to the myth of the primitive
past-tense noble savage or the pre-European
settlement forest envisioned by the ADP. Carlson
writes, ‘Where do we go from here? Like my
brother says, “Hey, this is our country now, we
stole it fair and square!” Another more famous
person put it in another far better way, “You
can’t go home again.” Instead of looking back,
we need to look at the future’ (Carlson, Pristine
Wilderness). The future to the
local community reliant on resource extraction
would involve continual harvesting and
reproduction of black cherry, a valuable pioneer
species, and not allowing the forest to be
eventually dominated by climax species.
Continued resource conflicts in
‘Pennsylvania Wilds’
However despite these conflicts, timber
production constrained more by the GFC and the
US housing downturn may be more compatible with
tourism than other forms of resource extraction.
The ANF region, along with much of the Northern
Tier of Pennsylvania, has been branded and
marketed for outdoor recreation and heritage
tourism as Pennsylvania Wilds, a 12-county
region containing hundreds of miles of land and
water trails and the largest block of public
land between New York City and Chicago. The
Pennsylvania Wilds recreation plan which
recognised the region’s hardwood forests and
forest products industry would also implement
the interpretive plan of the Lumber Heritage
Region (within the Pennsylvania Wilds region)
(Fermata Inc., ‘Lumber’; Fermata Inc.,
‘Recreation’).
By comparison, expanded oil and gas production
over which there is less regulation due to the
split estate on the ANF may lead to greater
environmental conflicts and conflicts between
resource extraction and nature-based tourism and
recreation. While the ANF is in the middle of
the Marcellus Shale region which is, given the
technological advance of hydraulic fracking,
seen as the newest frontier of natural gas
production in the US, most of the oil and gas
wells drilled to take advantage of rising oil
prices have been the traditional shallow ones
(Center for Rural Pennsylvania) (see Figure 9).
Organizations representing private oil and gas
interests which own the subsurface rights have
sued the ANF over its management plan. They have
opposed the ANF’s intention to undertake NEPA
(National Environmental Policy Act) analysis to
protect surface resources, including those for
tourism and wildlife, prior to issuing notices
for oil and gas development on the forest. In
order to proceed, according to the Pennsylvania
Oil and Gas Association and Allegheny Forest
Alliance, Forest Service notices need to
restrict access to subsurface mineral rights, a
right the agency does not have as they claim it
is required by law to ‘accommodate oil and gas
development on lands with privately owned OGM
(oil, gas, and mineral) rights’ (Ferry,
‘Lawsuit’). Subsequently, a judge has issued an
injunction preventing the Forest Service from
halting new drilling on the national forest
until environmental impact assessments can be
performed (Schellhammer). The US Department of
the Interior (DOI) has proposed new oil and gas
drilling rules which would require companies to
publicly disclose the chemicals they use in
hydraulic fracturing on the US Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) managed mineral estate which
includes 700 million subsurface acres of federal
estate and 56 million subsurface acres of Indian
mineral estate.2 As over 93 percent
of the ANF subsurface is privately held, only
drilling on the less than seven percent federal
estate would be subject to these rules (Ferry,
‘Fracking Rule’). To address the problem with
the split estate, another environmental
organization, Friends of Allegheny Wilderness,
is driving an effort to purchase the subsurface
mineral rights under 5,200 acres in a proposed
wilderness area in the ANF, but such rights
would cost an estimated US$1,000-2,000 per acre
(Wells). The legacy of the split estate on the
ANF will have a lasting impact on surface land
uses including tourism.

Figure 9: Pennsylvania Oil and Gas
Wells Map (Source: Center for Rural
Pennsylvania)
Summary and concluding remarks
On the Allegheny Plateau, past human use has
reshaped the land and established the property
regimes and conditions for future land uses.
Resource-based land acquisition in the Allegheny
Plateau favored industrial extraction, a
consumption linkage between urban and rural
ecosystems. Although the almost complete
clearcutting and historic oil extraction of the
Allegheny Plateau left behind millions of acres
of bare hillsides, ghost towns, and polluted
waterways, a new forest seemingly miraculously
arose from the ‘Allegheny Brush Pile’. Past
private ownership and liquidation of timber
stands led to the state, in the form of the US
Department of Agriculture Forest Service and
ANF, replacing capital as the largest landholder
in Forest County, Pennsylvania. The ANF, like
other national forests, was legislatively
required to manage the land for favorable water
flows, provide continuous timber supplies for
the nation, stabilise forest-dependent
communities and, later, manage the land for
other multiple uses including outdoor recreation
and wildlife. The state used federal
reforestation, highway and flood control
programs to establish the timber and
recreational resources (campsites, reservoirs,
deer habitat) which attracted those from
industrial cities and fueled post-World War II
seasonal home development on adjacent private
lands.
However, resource extraction and tourism have
increasingly been viewed as conflicting, not
complementary uses. More recently, harvesting of
the mature Allegheny hardwoods, which replaced
the ‘original’ hemlock-beech dominated forest,
has initiated battles over land use. Such
battles are rooted in different views of the
desired forest. For resource-dependent
communities, a forest dominated by pioneer
species like black cherry that reproduce under
the open conditions produced by logging is
ideal, while environmental activists like the
ADP wish for the pre-European settlement forest
dominated by climax species. In these land use
battles, largely non-present Indigenous peoples
have alternately been symbolically envisioned as
respecting the earth through preservation or as
wise users of resources. Yet timber production
may be more compatible with tourism than other
forms of resource extraction when policy and
management frameworks are in place. Branding the
Northern Tier of Pennsylvania as ‘Pennsylvania
Wilds’ recognises the present hardwood forests,
currently managed harvests on public and private
lands, and the hardwoods industry as well as its
lumber heritage. While historic resource booms
are evidenced in the Victorian mansions,
theatres, churches and municipal buildings built
with oil and timber wealth in towns and cities
throughout the region, current oil and gas
extraction may pose the greater threat to
tourism. As the state acquired only the surface
rights, not the mineral rights, of cutover
timber lands in the 1920s to create the ANF,
regulating extraction of private subsurface
resources which impacts the public surface ones
is constrained by the split estate.
Historical analysis of shifting, sometimes
conflicting, land uses that have shaped and been
shaped by property regimes in the ANF region can
inform decisions regarding resource extraction
that are being faced in Australia, with its
split estate scenarios and regional resource
dependency. In the ANF case, costs largely
preclude purchasing expensive private subsurface
rights other than under particularly treasured
proposed wilderness areas. In Australia, where
the state owns the subsurface, similarly rare
National Heritage rulings in mineral-rich areas
may be one of the few ways to preserve
Aboriginal heritage.
In the likely situations where resource
extraction will occur, issues regarding
management and regulation of resource extraction
as well as questions about who benefits from
extraction must be addressed. As previously
noted, US counties with national forest lands
have received 25 percent of the relevant
national forest’s gross receipts in lieu of
taxes for schools and roads. Given the
variability of timber harvests, the Secure Rural
Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of
2000 (SRS Act) was passed to stabilise funding
as well as fund investments in projects that
enhance forest ecosystems and improve
cooperative relationships. Under the amended SRS
Act (2008), these counties can accept either a
newly modified 25 percent seven year rolling
average payment of receipts from national forest
lands or a share of the individual state payment
calculated with a formula using multiple
factors, which include acreage of federal land
within an eligible county, the average three
highest 25-percent payments and an income
adjustment based on the per capita personal
income for each county (US Department of
Agriculture, Forest Service). The latter option
to some degree decouples payments from the
harvests. The SRS funding recognises the impact
of federal government lands and resource
extraction on local communities. Of real concern
is how Australia’s minerals, which are owned by
the Crown (in the right of the state), will be
managed for the greater national benefit and for
local communities. The state has not maximised
the national benefits from these publicly-owned
resources, offering tax breaks and often selling
the resources off cheaply to corporations. While
the state provides local communities with
services, they do not necessarily compensate for
impacts, particularly those from fly-in, fly-out
mining (see Carrington et al. in this
issue of Australian Humanities Review).
Policy and legal frameworks need to be developed
so that surface owners and surrounding
communities accrue benefits from mining, akin to
the percentage of receipts in SRS funding, not
just the costs.
Past and current extraction shapes
possibilities for future land use and can impact
the quality of life. Under ANF administration,
the state turned the ‘Allegheny Brush Pile’ into
a ‘Natural Escape’. Following regeneration,
timber harvesting did not follow the earlier
‘cut-and-run’ practices of the pre-ANF,
industrial harvesting era. The quality of life
has in part derived from over 500,000 acres of
public land that has attracted tourists as well
as tourism and value added manufacturing
entrepreneurs to the ANF region. Past high
manufacturing and extraction wages in
paternalistic, dominant resource and
manufacturing industries created disincentives
for entrepreneurship and educational attainment.
Accordingly, amenity-based development may
depend on amenity migrants who can help overcome
pervasive pessimistic feelings held by long-term
residents of resource-dependent areas that new
economic development activities won’t work. Many
of Forest County’s current entrepreneurs in
tourist-oriented businesses (outfitters and
sporting goods retailers, for example) are urban
in-migrants who first came to the area as
tourists and seasonal residents and have decided
to live and raise their children there.
Similarly the business location decisions of
Pennsylvania’s small-scale, value-added hardwood
manufacturers ranked an area’s lifestyle,
community attitude towards industry, and
personal ties (that is whether people previously
resided in or had family connections to the
area), as more important than traditional
economic factors (such as tax and regulatory
considerations, infrastructure, services and
utilities) (Bodenman et al.;
Bodenman). While state and privately managed
timber harvesting has coexisted with
recreational land uses on the ANF, this
coexistence may be more difficult to achieve
with oil and gas drilling there, or with mining
in Australia. In Australia, mining threatens
both the environment and Indigenous culture,
significant bases of different types of tourism
(see Wergin and Muecke’s introduction to this
issue). It is critical to protect Indigenous
cultural capital, which is invaluable, truly
unique to Australia, integral to its branding, a
differentiating draw for international tourists
(Franklin; Muecke; Waitt) and a contributor to
the quality of life which can support local
economic development.
At the same time, while preserving
environmental and cultural amenities and
capturing benefits from extraction can enable
communities to shift to the service sector and
decrease poverty in the long term, tourism
itself may lead to another form of export-led
dependency. Like tourism in remote Australia,
tourism in Forest County was impacted by
external fluctuations. However, unlike that in
the ANF region, tourism in remote Australia is
dominated by large external players focused on
external mass markets, which is in part due to
government policies. In Yulara outside Uluru,
the Northern Territory government replaced
competing accommodation operators with a single
one to maximise its return on investment and
grow tourism most rapidly (Schmallegger and
Carson). As a result, many Aboriginal-owned,
small-scale cultural tourist enterprises are not
able to access the international market (Waitt).
Such resource-dependent places in Australia
could, like those in the US, benefit from
planning, if sustained, decentralised marketing
assistance; training and advice are provided by
the government that would aim to increase local
involvement in tourism. As Altman argues, there
needs to a better understanding of Indigenous
customary activity, and whether Indigenous
peoples are producing for their own use or for
commercial exchange such as in tourist
encounters. But, as he notes, state institutions
could be redesigned to better support their
efforts. Planning could involve State guidance
of Indigenous development as it has done for
non-Indigenous people in remote Australia.
On-going assistance to build local resources and
linkages could encourage local amenity-based
business development and help Indigenous and
non-Indigenous communities to escape the
treadmill of resource dependency, as it is
shaped by property regimes and historic land
uses.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Carsten Wergin, Stephen
Muecke and the anonymous reviewers for their
constructive comments on earlier drafts of this
manuscript, which clarified and strengthened
this article. I am particularly grateful to
Carsten Wergin, who provided comments, guidance,
encouragement and support throughout the
publication process. I would also like to thank
the Center for Rural Pennsylvania and the
Allegheny National Forest for permission to use
their images. Thanks also to Anne Gibson for
cartographic assistance.
Notes
1
Such adoptions are not likely to occur in the
future as tribal membership disputes and
disenrollment have escalated nationwide, in
large part due to the division of casino profits
and bonuses as well as health insurance,
educational scholarships, and other benefits
among tribal members (Dao).
2
The Indian mineral estate refers to the 57
million acres of subsurface minerals estates
that are held in trust by the United States for
American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska
Natives and that are administered and managed by
the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an agency
of the US Department of the Interior. The BIA
also manages 55 million surface acres of Native
lands. Native Americans have sued the BIA and US
Department of the Interior over billions of
dollars missing and unaccounted for in the
Indian Trust Fund.
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