ABSTRACT
I Introduction Stretching from northern Minnesota to Maine, the Northern Forest is one of the largest forested regions in the United States. The Northern Forest occupies a broad transition zone between temperate and boreal forests that supports a diverse array of animal and plant life. Most of the land in the region is used to grow timber for wood products production, the dominant manufacturing industry. In contrast to the western United States where a large share of the forestland base is owned by the federal government, most of the land in the Northern Forest region (78 percent) is privately owned. Although the Northern Forest region is sparsely populated, with only about 1 percent of the U.S. population living in the region, it is easily accessed from major metropolitan areas to the south. Almost 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in a Northern Forest state or a state bordering a Northern Forest state. The Northern Forest region is a valuable source of recreational opportunities for local residents and the millions of people who live in nearby urban areas. For example, Acadia National Park in Maine has one of the highest visitation rates in the National Park System. Moreover, there are a number of important wilderness areas within the region (e.g., the Adironack Forest Preserve in New York, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota). Nevertheless, given that commercial timber production is the predominant use of the land, there are many who argue that non-market goods such as recreation and wildlife habitat are underprovided. A proposed solution to this problem is to increase the amount of public conservation land in the region. Environmental groups are promoting the creation of a national park in northern Maine and biodiversity reserve systems in New England and the Lake States region (Kennedy and Sant 2000). In recent years, voters in Maine and Michigan approved ballot initiatives providing funding for the acquisition of conservation lands and the federal government has funded land purchases in the region through the Land and Water Conservation Fund. As with many environmental issues, debates about increasing public conservation lands in the Northern Forest region frequently center on a perceived tradeoff between jobs and the environment (Dobbs and Ober, 1995). Opponents
of more public conservation lands argue that reduction in the land available for timber production will adversely impact local economies, particularly employment in wood products manufacturing. Proponents of conservation lands emphasize the benefits from increased public access to recreational resources and the provision of public goods associated with wilderness preservation. Not surprisingly, support for land conservation efforts tends to be strongest in urban centers and opposition is mostly from rural residents from within the region (Dobbs and Ober 1995). The objective of this chapter is to analyze the impact of public conservation lands on employment growth rates in the Northern Forest region. Following Greenwood and Hunt (1984) and Greenwood et al. (1986), we estimate a model of simultaneous employment and net migration growth with county data for the period 1990 to 1997.1 The county share of land in public conservation uses in 1990 is included in the set of exogenous variables. Our model structure allows us to test for direct and indirect effects of conservation lands on employment growth. In the first case, we evaluate the claim that diverting private forest lands to conservation uses has a direct negative impact on employment. Our model also provides insights into the employment impacts of conservation lands through their effect on migration. A consistent finding in the migration literature is that natural amenities positively influence migration decisions (e.g., Knapp and Graves 1989, Clark and Hunter 1992; Treyz et al. 1993; Mueser and Graves 1995; McGranahan 1999). We test if public conservation lands attract migrants and, thereby, have an indirect effect on employment growth. The management of public conservation lands may influence the effect they have on employment and population. For our purposes, public conservation lands can be grouped into two broad categories-preservationist and multipleuse lands. On preservationist lands, which include national and state parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges, timber harvesting is largely prohibited. Multiple-use lands, including national and state forests, are managed for timber in addition to non-commodity outputs such as recreation. Given these differences in timber management practices, we might expect preservationist and multiple-use lands to have differential impacts on employment and net migration growth. Accordingly, we test for separate effects of preservationist and multipleuse lands. We also identify and explore a solution to a “timing” problem that has not been acknowledged in earlier studies (e.g., Duffy-Deno 1998). In most cases, public conservation lands were established long before the period for which we have data. Accordingly, we should not expect the effects of these conservation lands to be fully reflected in recent employment growth rates. For instance, the creation of the Adirondack Park in the late nineteenth century should not continue to have a negative effect on wood products employment a century later. This has implications for the interpretation of our results. In particular, a finding that public conservation lands have no effect on recent employment growth rates does not support the conclusion that the establishment of new conservation lands does not impact employment. In order to measure these effects, we
model recent changes in management practices on national forests. Declines in national forest timber sales during the early 1990s provide a “natural experiment” that identifies the employment effects of diverting commercial forest land to conservation uses. The next section provides an overview of the study region and a brief historical review of public land management in the region. In Section 3, we present the econometric model of employment and net migration growth and, in Section 4, our estimation results. Section 5 is devoted to extensions of the analysis in which we explore potential differences in the effects of preservationist and multiple-use lands and a solution to the timing problem described above. Section 6 presents discussion and conclusions.
