Conservation, Salt Lake economy linked

As emblems of the economic transformation unfolding in this high desert city and its job-rich suburbs, the Mount Olympus Wilderness and the Black Diamond Equipment company are hard to beat.

The wilderness is 25 square miles of steep granite, mountain brush and fir. It spills from the summit of 9,028-foot Mount Olympus down to the eastern edge of this city, which has joined others in the West — including Denver, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle — in pursuing a development strategy based on ecological ideas once widely mistrusted here: energy efficiency, resource protection, land conservation and pollution prevention.

The base of the mountain is also the home of Black Diamond, a tiny start-up when it arrived in 1991 and now a well-known manufacturer of outdoor gear. The company has taken on the Mount Olympus Wilderness, in effect using it as an outdoor product-testing center.

"We're here because this is such a natural place for our business," said Peter Metcalf, the president and chief executive of Black Diamond, which employs 300 people in Salt Lake City. "But we're no different than other businesses that are in this region. We all understand the connection with this place, how we take care of it, and how well our business performs."

Residents of this city and its suburbs, with a combined 1.2 million people, have come to view the ties between economic development and environmental conservation in a new way. They are scrubbing the air and water, building energy-efficient homes and offices closer together, constructing regional rapid transit systems, limiting new highway construction and conserving open spaces and natural resources.

Authorities on urban policy say that Salt Lake and other cities in the West, big Eastern ones like Boston and New York and smaller ones, too, like Grand Rapids, Mich., and Charleston, S.C., have become incubators of environmental ideas and programs, with tangible results. Jobs and income are increasing. Central city populations are stabilizing or growing. Businesses are cropping up.

"Environmental policy has emerged as a central organizing principle of economic growth at the metropolitan level in America," said Robert Puentes, a researcher in Washington at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. "It's a very new development, and it's logical. Being more energy efficient and more environmentally sensitive lowers costs and makes metropolitan regions better places."

It wasn't always this way in Salt Lake City. For more than a century, Utah was supported by the wealth derived from mining, ranching and energy — industries intent on exploiting, not conserving, the state's natural bounty. Those advocating green values were viewed as a threat to expansion and prosperity.