Abstract
This article explores Oregon’s attempts to transcend the boom/bust cycles of its historically natural resource–based economy to establish a more diversified, resilient economy based upon advanced manufacturing and sustainable technology and practices. Drawing upon Fredrick Turner’s and Harold Innis’s theses of North American development, I explore Oregon’s economic dynamics through state and federal data and Oregon’s recent economic initiatives. Results reflect an Oregon still reliant upon natural resource and industrial commodities, leaving it highly vulnerable to global markets. Efforts toward “greening” the state’s economy, although embryonic, show signs of setting Oregon on a more independent, self-reliant economic trajectory.
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