If only you believe like I believe, baby (If only you believe like I believe)
We’d get by…
If only you believe in miracles, baby (If only you believe in miracles)
So would I…
— ‘Miracles’ by Jefferson Starship, 1975
The miracle has not yet happened here in Pagosa Springs… but, if only we believe in miracles, so will the the remaining members of Jefferson Starship, and maybe many other people besides.
The miracle to which I am referring is the miracle of an export economy, something that Pagosa Springs had in spades, many years ago, but then it disappeared, and we probably need a miracle to get it back.
The main reason to have an export economy is because all successful cities and towns have one. If you can produce something in a large enough quantity — and prevent the local residents from using it all up — you can sell it to other communities for probably more than it’s worth, and thereby create a sustainable economy.
Back in the day, Pagosa Springs exported cows and timber. In fact, at one point in Pagosa’s history, the entire county was pretty much covered with cows and timber, and everyone got along famously, because the cows hung out where there was no timber, and the timber grew everywhere there were no cows.
But then, people invented tofu and almond milk, and the cow business has never quite recovered.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the government — which owns pretty much all the trees — decided that scenery was more valuable than timber, and the lumber mills shut down, and that was essentially the end of Pagosa’s booming export economy.
Scenery is nice and all, but you can’t export it. Yes, you can post pictures of it, on social media, but that has proved to have almost no economic value, in spite of the number of ‘Likes’.
But all is not lost. As America has advanced out of its agricultural and industrial misery, various cities and towns have discovered ways to export things that you might not normally think of as ‘exports’.
Los Angeles, for example, exports movies. This has helped Los Angeles grow so large that you can hardly drive from one end to the other. Particularly, not during rush hour. With the vast amounts of money they make exporting their primary product, they’re more able to buy more of the things they desperately need, such as gasoline and tires.
Nashville — which used to be a little hole-in-the-wall — has experienced fabulous growth, exporting country music, which is now consumed in vast quantities in grocery-store and shopping-mall sound systems, to distract customers, and keep them from noticing how much money they are spending.
New York exports several unusual items, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. Also Broadway musicals.
Washington DC is known for exporting red tape and, most recently, vaccination mandates. It’s not clear how they make money on those items, however. But they make up for it by exporting income tax forms.
According to the economists and other people who understand economies, a town or city cannot expect to grow and thrive without some type of export industry. You simply cannot depend entirely on importing everything you need, and still expect to be successful as a community over the long haul. You can fool yourself for a while — the same way you can fool yourself, taking out a student loan — but in the end, you will have to come to terms with the necessity to develop some type of export.
As I mentioned, Pagosa once exported cows and timber, but to tell the truth, those required a lot of physical work — sawing and chopping, and roping and branding, and so forth.
Better to have an export that doesn’t require too much effort.
From what little I understand about the universe, miracles don’t require a lot of effort. They just happen. Which is why I think we need a miracle.
The miracle I’m thinking about is ‘the birth of a huge and profitable export industry’ for Pagosa Springs.
We still have trees, but we’re no longer allowed to chop them down.
We still have cows, but how do you compete with tofu? To say nothing of free-range chickens… and sardines with Omega-3 fatty acids?
But there’s something that we have, in abundance, that could easily be exported. And it’s something that a lot of other cities and towns want.
Tourists.
We have a lot of tourists. More than we could ever need. It’s not just American cities that want them, either. They are wanted in many places, from Europe to the Middle East, to Southeast Asia, to Japan, to Australia, to South America.
They’re wanted everywhere, practically. (Not Hawaii, though.)
And tourists are relatively easy to pack into buses, or shipping containers. Give them a granola bar and some bottled water, and they are ready to be exported.
I haven’t worked out all the details (as you could probably tell) but I think this might be the miracle that would save the Pagosa economy.
If only we believe.