Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors wish to acknowledge input from Gary Hunt and Jonathan Rubin, who are members of David Lewis's thesis committee. In addition, David Field, Thomas Power, and especially Gary Hunt provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this bulletin. David Lewis is appreciative of financial support for his graduate studies provided by the University of Maine Graduate Assistantship and the Gloria Barron Wilderness Society Scholarship. We analyze the impact of publicly-owned conservation lands on employment and population growth in the Northern Forest region, defined for the purposes of this study as a group of 92 non-metropolitan counties stretching from Maine to northern Minnesota. Our principal objective is to determine if there is a systematic relationship between the share of the land base in public conservation uses and employment growth and net migration rates in Northern Forest counties. Our main finding is that public conservation lands had little effect on the growth of local economies over the period 1990 to 1997. Net migration rates were systematically higher in counties with more conservation lands, but the effects were relatively small. We found that conservation lands had no systematic effect on employment growth over the 1990 to 1997 period. We also consider separately the effects of preservationist lands (e.g., National Parks) and multiple-use lands (e.g., National Forests), which are distinguished by the extent of restrictions on extractive uses such as timber harvesting. This analysis yields insights into whether local economies are adversely affected by the transfer of privately owned forestland into public conservation uses that involve restrictions on timber harvesting. The results reveal that neither preservationist nor multiple-use lands had a systematic effect on employment growth rates between 1990 and 1997. This is a particularly significant finding in the case of multiple-use lands, given that in the early 1990s less emphasis was placed on the production of timber on these lands and more attention was paid to conservation-oriented uses. It provides some evidence that the diversion of private forestlands for conservation uses does not impact total county employment. The results of this study suggest that economic development should not be the primary factor driving the decision to increase the amount of publicly owned conservation land in the Northern Forest region. We find no evidence that conservation lands have negatively impacted employment growth during the 1990s, despite considerable changes in the management of multiple-use lands at the start of the decade. By …