Federal Timber Harvests and Local Employment

The timber industry and its allies in the Bush Administration have launched their promised assault on the Roadless Area Conservation Policy that the Clinton Administration put in place. Roadless areas must be open to commercial timber harvest, they argue, or small communities throughout the West, including Montana, will face massive job loss and economic decline. Their basic argument seems plausible: These roadless areas do have trees in them. Harvesting and processing trees does employ workers. Therefore, putting these areas off limits to logging must reduce employment, triggering negative ripple effects throughout the local economy.

If that is what happens, there should be plenty of evidence around us to document these negative impacts of reduced federal timber harvest. After all, federal timber harvests in Montana and throughout the nation have plummeted since 1987. The reduced employment and rising unemployment predicted by the timber industry should be quite evident after those 15 years of declining harvests. But they are not.

In Montana, timber harvests in our National Forests decline by 65 percent since 1987. Western Montana was not pitched into a depression by this. Instead the counties adjacent to National Forests added almost 100,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate in Montana fell to historic lows. The unemployment rate in 1987, the year of peak National Forest timber harvest, was 50 percent higher than it was in the year 2000 when those harvests were at historic lows.

This lack of connection between federal timber harvest and local employment has been found repeatedly in studies across the nation. A recent study of the Northern Forest Region, encompassing the forested lands stretching from Minnesota to Maine, looked at the impact of the presence of National Forest lands on county economies during the 1990s when timber sales fell 42 percent in the eastern National Forests and 22 percent in the Lake states’ National Forests. Going county-by-county, it found that the decline in National Forest harvest had no impact on total employment in those counties. Despite the decline in federal timber harvests, National Forest land had a significant positive impact on employment growth; the more of a county’s land that was in National Forests, the higher was the rate of job growth.[1]

Other analysts have looked at the “timber-dependent” regions of Oregon where National Forests make up 50 percent of forested lands to see if overall employment in the forest products industry could be explained by changes in the level of federal timber harvest. As National Forest harvests fluctuated, there was no measurable impact on overall forest products jobs. The researchers’ conclusion was that “national forest policy is ineffective at generating additional…employment.”[2]

Forest economists have also studied whether the Forest Service could stabilize the economies of Western Montana communities by guaranteeing a constant rate of harvest. They too found that Forest Service harvest levels were not the prime determinant of overall community employment; total employment was little affected positively or negatively, by heroic efforts by the Forest Service to keep harvests constant.[3]

Alternatively, one could look at the experience of the State of Washington as the spotted owl decision and other environmental choices caused total forest service harvest to plunge 70 to 90 percent. Despite those losses in timber supply, economic vitality was especially evident in the largely non-metropolitan timber counties adjacent to National Forest lands in eastern and southwestern Washington. Although about 3,000 forest products jobs were lost, more than 500,000 jobs were added outside that sector. The counties adjacent to the National Forests were not driven into economic depression as a result of the dramatic declines in federal harvests. Instead, average real income, employment, and population expanded significantly.

The research results are clear: Declines in federal timber harvest not only do not bring economic catastrophe but are consistent with ongoing local economic vitality. In addition, stabilizing or boosting National Forest harvests will not stabilize our timber dependent communities.

Those facts should leave all of us scratching our heads over the political hyperbole swirling around the Roadless Area Conservation policy. Whatever the hysterical rhetoric is all about, it has nothing to do with local economic vitality and health. It is about the historical privilege that certain powerful financial interests have had in access to the public’s natural landscapes. Those private interests want to keep their privileged access to the public’s resources. They see a political opportunity to turn back the clock to the bad old days when citizens could not challenge what those industrial interests were doing to our lands. It will be up to us to stop that pointless retrograde political movement.

[1] Lewis, David J., Gary L. Hunt, and Andrew J. Plantinga. 2001, “Public Conservation Land and Employment Growth in the Northern Forest Region.” Forthcoming, Land Economics, Department of Resource Economics and Policy, University of Maine.

[2] Burton, Diana M. 1997. An Astructural Analysis of National Forest Policy and Employment. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 79(August):964-974; Burton, Diana M. and Peter Berck. 1996. Statistical Causation and National Forest Policy in Oregon. Forest Science 42(1):86-92. They were studying the pre-spotted owl period.

[3] Daniels, Steven E., William F. Hyde, and David N. Wear. 1991. Distributive Effects of Forest Service Attempts to Maintain Community Stability. Forest Science 37(1):245-260.