Population loss is a problem plaguing almost all of the Mountain State. (The Eastern Panhandle and part of North Central West Virginia are not experiencing the same challenges as the rest of us).

According to a report by The Daily Athenaeum — West Virginia University’s student-run newspaper and one of the newsrooms in which I honed my skills a loooooong time ago — the school’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research has some ideas on how to face and then address the issue.

If only lawmakers would listen.

It’s a multi-faceted problem, of course. But let’s start with the problem of our best and brightest needing to leave the state to find good-paying jobs in careers that fit their education and skillset.

“To bring new businesses and new jobs to the state, we need to convince potential businesses that we have the workforce that they need,” bureau director John Deskins told The Daily Athenaeum.

But we have an abysmally low workforce participation rate — 67.8%. We have a rapidly aging population with poor education, poor health outcomes and substance use challenges.

“The Eastern Panhandle, for example, looks very different. North Central West Virginia looks very different, where we have more diverse, industrialized bases where we have a younger population, a growing population, in some cases,” Deskins said, according to the DA. “A population that’s healthier, not as plagued by the drug abuse crisis, and better educated or better for the workforce.”

So, we’ve got to keep and attract more young individuals and families AND we’ve got to attract better employers — perhaps as part of a more diversified economy — while making efforts to improve transportation, education, health and other quality-of-life factors that make West Virginia a place worth working in.

Easy, right? Clearly not.

“We don’t have many people coming here for jobs from outside of the state. So, it’s all about creating momentum in certain parts of the state. Momentum builds the better job opportunities, higher-paying job opportunities, the state will be more attractive to young people, but it’s really hard to get that momentum to grow,” Deskins told the DA.

We know what we need to do. Why is it so hard to do it, here?

I tend to think a big part of it is our politicians’ willingness to cling to a backward-looking philosophy that appeals to some voters’ tendency to want to return to a golden age West Virginia never had.

Rather than focus on progress, change, improvement … anything at all that would lift West Virginians, they are all too happy to maintain a status quo that is quite literally killing us.

I shouldn’t be so negative; there are signs of hope.

One of them is the reporter — Kylie Tuttle — who did such an excellent job on the Daily Athenaeum story from which I pulled my information.

There are thousands like her, in many fields in institutions of higher learning all over the state. Will we decide to build a place they want to stay? Or will we let elected officials keep doing their best to push them away?

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A representative of Living Carbon contacted me this week to give me more information about their work.

“Living Carbon plants native local hardwoods selected in partnership with its landowners,” said Maddie Hall, CEO and founder. “Living Carbon has active research to further improve biomass yield; however, its carbon business is separate.”

It is encouraging to know the project also focuses on ensuring native species of trees are used, rather than what Nash referred to as “precision breeding.”

Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com.