That's according to a report, "The New Economy of the West: From Clearcutting to Camping," from the Sierra Club. Using federal and state data gathered over the past three decades, the report concludes that outdoor recreation is key to the vitality of Western communities, rather than extractive industries that have supported the region in the past.

But the idea that mining and drilling ever was the heart of the Western economy appears to be a bit of a myth. "In the past, [extracting] natural resources probably wasn't as big as we thought it was," said Mark Knold, senior economist for the Utah Department of Workforce Services. "It was only about 8 percent of our economy in 1960."

In rural Utah, however, mining was huge, mostly because the nation's industrial economy demanded fuel and because mountains stood in the way of commerce. "Now, it's being shifted," Knold said. "In the technical economy, mountains aren't a barrier at all."

So the question for those pushing economic development is whether to keep the land clean and entice more people to move here or to continue with "an old industrialized structure and not maybe be able to employ as many people," Knold said.

The Sierra Club report comes down in favor of marketing beauty. Unless public land is protected, the report states, the economy can't sustain itself.

Using U.S. Commerce Department figures, the report says that Western counties where more than 60 percent of federal public land was protected grew 66 percent faster from 1970 to 2000 than counties where the same percentage of of public land was not protected.

Although the report focuses on the West as a whole, a snapshot focuses on how the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument has affected Kane and Garfield counties. A 2007 Utah State University study found that 91 percent of monument visitors also stopped in the counties, spending millions of dollars at scores of businesses and supporting hundreds of full-time jobs.

It's a case of selling what you have, said Knold, whose contribution to this year's Economic Report to the Governor supports many of the Sierra Club's claims.

Although the report makes grand statements about the Western states' economies, it's really the rural areas that benefit from scenery, Knold said. Looking again at Garfield County, numbers in the governor's report show that natural resources and mining employed just eight people in 2005 - the most recent year for available numbers - while tourism employed 859.

In Grand County, when the uranium boom has played out, workers fell on hard times until tourism took hold in Moab and its surroundings. By comparison, Emery County clings to the mineral-resource economy.

"It's hard to blame them, because they are high-paying jobs," Knold said. At the same time, "Grand County has grown. Emery has not."

In areas such as Uintah County, said the Sierra Club's San Francisco spokeswoman Kristina Johnson, most of the money leaves the region, while county governments are stuck with the bill for road repairs, waste management and burgeoning crime.

At the same time, according Utah Department of Workforce Services statistics, in 2005 natural-resource extraction employed 2,519 people in Uintah County, about 22 percent of the total number of people working. Tourism employed 929.

Carbon, Duschesne and Emery counties were the only others that employed more people in extractive industries than tourism.

Tourism's low pay remains a downside. Statewide, tourism accounted for $1.4 billion in 2005 payroll wages, compared with mining and drilling's $486 million. But the average monthly pay for an extractive industries worker was $4,778, and although tourism business owners may do well, their workers made $1,100 during an average month. Knold said that includes seasonal and part-time workers.

So, although selling beauty is a better long-term prospect than drilling for riches, rural residents could end up working in "the king's land," Knold said. Park City is a good example of where successful tourism morphed a played-out mining town into something far different but not unreservedly better.

"You'd hate to see places like Escalante and some of these other little towns" turn into that, Knold said.

phenetz@sltrib.com