Tucked away on the western edge of the Olympic Peninsula, the small town of Forks, Washington is a four-and-a-half hour drive west from Seattle.   But in one sense, it is a world away from Seattle’s legendary engine of job creation and the city’s always-on, always-wired culture.   Forks, with a population of just over 3,000 people, for decades was reliant upon logging and lumber.   By the mid-1990s, however, our natural resource-based economy was drastically changed as we lost many, many timber-related jobs due to a restructuring of that industry and the designation of millions of acres of old-growth forest as protected areas.

In an effort to diversify the local economy, many local residents began to focus on harnessing the potential of the “Information Age” by becoming a high-tech community linked to the globe through broadband services.   The Forks experience holds great promise for the economic development of rural areas all over America.

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