George Pyle: Who is attacking rural Utah? Its own leaders

We know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts.

– Mark Russell

We know that rural Utah is under attack, because those pointing it out are the ones who are leading the charge.

Phil Lyman is the San Juan County commissioner who has announced he will seek the seat in the Utah House of Representatives being vacated by fellow Sagebrush Rebel Mike Noel.

Yes, the same Phil Lyman who had a federal misdemeanor conviction hung on him for his role in organizing an event where a bunch of folks, some of them heavily armed, made a point of driving their ATVs on land they don’t own because, well, if you can’t play with your toys anywhere you want, are you really a man?

“Rural Utah is under attack like never before,” Lyman wrote in announcing his candidacy on Facebook, “but we also have opportunities like never before, including an administration that respects our right [to] work; to ranch, farm, log, mine, recreate, hunt, and access public land.”

While it is not explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights, clearly Lyman is exercising his constitutional right to blame the federal government for trends in rural life that are a product of the very free market that he and his fellow Republicans supposedly respect above all.

Yes, the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and other federal agencies have tons of laws, plans, rules, public comment periods, lawsuits and other bits of paper that are difficult to wade through and easy to blame for the decline in population, wealth and power that many rural residents feel.

But the reason there are few or no oil rigs, timber mills, cattle drives, uranium mines or other such things in rural areas of Utah — or of many other states — is that there is no market demand for them. At least not at prices that would make those extractive economy pursuits worth the effort.

The leaders and would-be leaders of southern Utah who blame an overly active federal bureaucracy for the loss of economic legacies — following the blacksmith and the harness-maker out of business — are living in the past. And promising to take their followers with them.

It’s very much like the promises that come from the occupant of the Oval Office, the ones promising Rust Belt coal miners and steelworkers that their jobs, their middle-class security, their whole industries are coming back — thanks to him. When it is clear that no such thing is going to happen.

The other day I happened across an article on the website of a newspaper I used to work for that mentioned a street I used to frequent in a town where I used to live. That led to maybe an hour of click-throughs and curiosity googling about other streets I used to know, towns I used to live in, newspapers I used to work for.

A significant portion of those streets are home to boarded-up buildings. The towns are shrinking. The newspapers have changed hands two or three times, shifted from daily to weekly or gone out of business altogether.

And it isn’t the fault of the federal government. Because there, except for the Air Force base to the south and the Army base to the north, there is no federal land to speak of.

The same is true in every state. Even those with no federal landlord to blame. Small towns get smaller. Small schools merge or close. Post offices — federal government post offices — are often the only buildings with the lights on. Kids go off to college and don’t come back. Grandma leaves the small town or family farm and moves to the (relatively) big city because there were no doctors or hospitals or drug stores left back home.

Federal meddling? Not a bit of it. Globalization. Concentration. Bright lights, big city. It’s happening in Blanding, Utah, and Beloit, Kan., and Benkelman, Neb. Two out of those three are nowhere near any significant federal property. And only one of them, the one surrounded by the evil federal government, has seen its population grow in the past 16 years.

Wealth and growth, like power and oil spills, naturally conglomerate on themselves. In places such as Salt Lake City and Las Vegas — metro centers in public lands states — where a critical mass of money, educational facilities and government services provide the gravitational pull that fuses dust clouds into stars.

Turn our land over to drillers and miners and the result would be to turn our precious environment into a kind of Hunger Games District 12, where nobody wants to live and the powerful never visit.

George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, has a lot of wonderful small-town memories in his past. But probably not in his future. gpyle@sltrib.com