40 YEARS OF SPOTTED OWLS - A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF LOGGING INDUSTRY JOB LOSSES

The protection of habitat for an officially designated ''threatened'' species, the Northern Spotted Owl, is widely seen as having endangered the survival of a very different ''species,'' namely the rural Americ an logger. In spite of the widespread agreement on this point, however , it is not clear just how many jobs have been endangered, over just h ow long a period, due to the protection of spotted-owl habitat and of the environment more broadly. In the present paper, we analyze longer term employment trends in logging and milling, both nationally and in the two states of the Pacific Northwest where the spotted-owl debate h as been most intense, to determine the length of time over which such environmental protection efforts have been creating the loss of loggin g and milling jobs. There are three potential key ''turning points'' s ince the start of high-quality employment data in 1947-the 1989 contro versy over the federal ''listing'' of the Northern Spotted Owl under t he Endangered Species Act, the earlier increase in environmental regul ations accompanying the first Earth Day in 1970, and the still-earlier ''locking up'' of timber after the passage of the Wilderness Protecti on Act in 1964. We also examine the effects of two other variables tha t have received considerable attention in the ongoing debates-levels o f U.S. Forest Service timber harvests and the exporting of raw logs. W e find that the 1989 listing of the spotted owl has no significant eff ect on employment-not even in the two states where the debate has been most intense. Instead, the only statistically significant turning poi nt came with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. The direction of the change, however, was precisely the opposite of what is generall y expected. Both nationally and in the Pacific Northwest, the greatest decline in timber employment occurred from 1947 until 1964-a time of great economic growth, a general absence of ''unreasonable environment al regulations,'' and growing timber harvests. The period since the pa ssage of the Wilderness Act has been one of increased complaints about environmental constraints, but much less decline in U.S. logging empl oyment. If logging jobs have indeed been endangered by efforts to prot ect the environment in general and spotted-owl habitat in particular, what is needed is a plausible explanation of how the influence of the owls could have begun more than forty years before the species came un der the protection of the Endangered Species Act.