Recreational Vehicle Bust vs. Alternative Energy Boom

Here in Northern Indiana the recreational vehicle industry has been the manufacturing "King of the Road" for decades. This year's slowdowns, layoffs, and shutdowns have reduced our reigning champ to what looks to some to be a sprawling knockout. Large numbers of unemployed RV workers may be drawing state checks for some time. It will be anyone's guess just how long it will take for consciousness, and the industry's return to it's feet. While contemplating these turn of events "the pain", my memory goes back to the last recession in Elkhart County circa. 1972-76. Everyone then said," We should not allow the RV Industry to be the major backbone of Elkhart County economics". Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. One may say" What would replace so lucritive a business and so many lost jobs"? First, what Elkhart County needs to replace is not the RV Industry, but the mindset which continues to take us down the road of recession based upon tight credit conditions created initially by high fuel prices. The present low fuel prices may yet give way to something worse, fuel shortages brought on by Mideastern instability. My answer, alternative energy resources developed independently from oil company concerns and privately funded by new startup industry. The Department of Energy and oil company interests are too often one and the same. Northern Indiana has begun alternative energy development of methanol and bio-diesel. Indiana universities produce some of the most creative, intelligent, and capable minds in the world only to loose them to outside job markets, because we have a mindset which is not alternative energy industry and technologically forward thinking. If we start thinking in terms of the State of Indiana as the Midwestern energy, technology, industrial hub and invest resources in revolutionizing how we do business here, recession for us would become a thing of the past.