Tribune Editorial: Don't forget Utah, Outdoor Retailers. The future is still ours.

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Utah's 22-year run as the home of the twice-annual Outdoor Retailer trade show ends this week.

Utah's position as one of the premier locations for outdoor recreation, tourism, economic development and sustainable growth never will. The people who run the businesses that are upping stakes after Saturday, and transferring their flag to Denver, know that. They are just worried that the people who run Utah don't get it.

With respect to our soon-to-depart visitors, the fact is that most of us get it just fine.

But it is also not that surprising that the official line taken by so many of our elected officials — officials disproportionately chosen by rural-dominated gerrymandered legislative districts and far-right party conventions — would lead people to think otherwise.

The outspoken opposition to national monuments such as Grand Staircase-Escalante, designated in 1996, and Bears Ears, proclaimed only last year, comes from a minority of people who hold either an irrational fear of the federal government — aka the people of the United States — or a unrealistic dream of a boom economy based on oil, gas, coal and ranching.

There is room for some of all those pursuits. But they are not the future of Utah.

The end of coal, particularly, is driven not by federal clamp-downs or environmental extremists. It is the result of the cold-hearted logic of the market, a logic that is progressing through plentiful, cheap and relatively clean natural gas to an era of sustainable and decentralized energy, an industry that already far outstrips coal mining as a source of steady jobs.

The rise of an economy that takes full advantage of Utah's natural beauty is unstoppable. Jobs in that sector will never pay what a coal miner used to make. But, between the shift in the energy economy and the fact that what coal is dug up in the future will be excavated by ever larger and more powerful machines means that there will be a lot more tourism-based jobs, and they will last a great deal longer.

The song sung by Utah's leaders, the one that just assumed that the Outdoor Retailers would hang around no matter how much they were abused, is already ringing hollow.

So long, Outdoor Retailer. It's been fun.

Give us a chance to get our own house in order, and then consider coming back. We'll still be here.