ASHLAND OREGON: A TOWN IN CRISIS

 Located just a few miles from the border with California, Ashland Oregon is a lovely little town of around twenty thousand people.  With beautiful mountainous views and nearby state parks, it's a great place to visit.  Although the city has a college, its main attraction is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the oldest Shakespeare festival in America.  Founded in nineteen thirty four, it has thrived over the years, expanding from just one outdoor theater to two more indoor ones.  With an average of four hundred thousand people visiting each year, the festival is the driver for the town's economy, with hotels, stores, cafes and restaurants lining the streets outside the theaters.  Warm summer nights are usually very lively in the town, with tourists milling around the crowded sidewalks near the theaters while live music plays.  

I have been going to the festival for over twenty years, and I have seen some wonderful productions there, not only of Shakespeare plays, but of many others too. (They started performing non Shakespeare plays back in nineteen sixty). In recent years  the festival has  even started  embracing new plays by young authors, along with performing many of Shakespeare's lesser known plays and the results are often striking.  Despite the high quality of shows the festival has provided over the years, I think the future of the festival, and the town of Ashland itself, is in doubt.

The pandemic has obviously hit Ashland hard, with the Shakespeare festival all but cancelled for over a year except for some online shows.  But the pandemic will eventually subside. Unfortunately, there is something else affecting the town that is not going to subside: climate change.  In the last few years, increased heat and drought conditions have led to forest fires all over the state of Oregon.  Sometimes these fires threaten the town itself (as one did in 2020), but even when they don't, they lead to smoke from the fires pouring into the city.  At times the smoke is so bad that health regulators recommend that people should avoid going outside entirely.  Not surprisingly, these conditions can wreak havoc on the festival, especially in the open air theater, which is the largest of the three.  Even in the days before covid, the festival had to cancel precious shows due to the poor air quality.   And shows being cancelled means less people visiting the town.  To make matters even worse, the fire season happens during the Summer, which is also the height of tourist season.

Now, the festival has been trying to adjust, with some outdoor shows being moved into different venues, and there's even been some talk of putting some kind of retractable dome over the open air theater.  But, these just seem like stopgap ideas that don't deal with the real problem ahead.  Even if they can still perform the shows, people are not going to want to travel to a town that's sometimes surrounded by fires and that has poor air quality.  You can't blame tourists for staying home when your town is inside a so called "heat dome", as Ashland was earlier this year.  And when the tourists stop coming, the economy of the whole town will suffer.  I hate to say this, but in a few years this charming, seemingly vibrant city could become a ghost town.

In many ways, the sad story of Ashland is one that is being echoed in many small towns all over the world.  Climate change has gone from something that naysayers could dismiss into a horrifying reality, with millions of people facing drought, fires, floods and other natural disasters on a scale unseen in human history.  It's a tragedy that will make future generations wonder why we did so little to stop it.