Libraries are something near and dear to my heart. I spent a lot of fourth grade recess sessions in the library. My husband and I spend many of our weekends there. They’re peaceful, they’re beautiful inside and out, and they’re full of books. They are holy places.

Which is why the following two data points hit me the way they did.

For Delta Librarian, The End (Los Angeles Times) “After decades of doing battle with illiteracy, poverty, racism and the elements in Mississippi, Ronnie Wise is walking away.”

Largest library closure in U.S. looms (San Francisco Chronicle) “Federal funding dries up, leaving 15 branches in Oregon county on brink.”

The story out of Mississippi isn’t so much sad as sobering. It’s not about Wise retiring (the library will go on, after all) as it is about the importance of a library. Any library. The sheer number of people who learned to read because of Wise is staggering. And literacy literally saves lives.

Read that–and then read about Jackson County’s library system closing down.

Source: SFGate.com

Southern Oregon isn’t the richest place in the world by any means. Some pockets of Jackson and Josephine counties are as desperate as the Delta. I’ve lived there, just up the road in Selma (pop. 1,934). The area’s a tourist attraction, but its job market quite frankly stinks. We were living paycheck to paycheck. Some people in our circle of acquaintances were living odd job to odd job. It’s hard to afford to buy books when you’re struggling to make rent and keep your wood stove burning through the winter. Books look like a luxury from there. Reading looks like a luxury. It’s libraries that bring them within reach.

Now, imagine losing those libraries.

But here’s another angle: Jackson County also has Ashland, home of the Brit Festival and a thriving University. With education and culture given high priority in the county, how does the library system run out of funding?

The problem has roots in more places than just Jackson county. The SFC article follows the money trail back to the federal government: last fall, Congress cut off a $400 million annual subsidy to 41 states meant to help the local economies in rural counties. As a result, Jackson county had to decide between libraries and public safety. The article also cites a connection with the cessation of large-scale logging over environmental concerns. As one resident put it, “The federal government stopped making money off of Oregon trees, so they stopped sending money to us.”

I don’t really know how to wrap up this information with a neat moralistic bow. I’m not a fan of the logging industry. The ten-foot-wide stump on my mother-in-law’s property was the saddest sight in Selma, as far as I was concerned. But when logging is the only leg your state’s economy stands on, a six-year “safety-net” subsidy isn’t going to be enough to replace it when the Endangered Species Act shuts that industry down. And then the county has to decide which public services to sacrifice. And libraries are always going to lose when the alternative is closing down, say, the fire department.

Books or forests? Library preservation or endangered species preservations? What kind of choice is that to make? Did it even have to be made at all? Not, presumably, if promises had been kept:

“While promising to come up with rules for a more ecologically friendly logging method, Congress agreed in 2000 to continue “safety net” payments to rural counties for six more years. But no one did the hard work of figuring out how to balance the timber industry with nature. So the checks stopped in December 2006.”

If you live in Jackson County, there’s a property tax levy on your ballot in May that might save your libraries. It can only pass if at least 50 percent of registered voters participate in the election.

If you live elsewhere, this might be worth writing your Congresscritter over.