Challenging the notion that protecting public land locks it up, more than 100 economists, including three Nobel laureates, are calling on the president and Congress to create more parks and other protected preserves in the West as a way to bolster state economies.
The economists also urge the creation of something similar to the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, which built trails and maintained infrastructure in national parks.
“We urge you to create jobs and support business by investing in our public lands infrastructure and establishing new protected areas such as parks, wilderness and monuments,” they wrote in a letter. Such areas “attract innovative companies and workers, and are an essential component of the region’s competitive advantage,” they added.
The drafting of the letter was organized by Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit organization that studies the economics of natural resources, with a tilt toward preservation. Ray Rasker, an economist with Headwaters, cited a study by his organization that found that Grand County, Utah, home to the tourist mecca of Moab, has been doing quite well: jobs there grew at a 7 percent annual rate in the 1990s and have been growing 2 percent annually during the current recession.
“In the last 40 years, the fastest growth in the West has been in communities adjacent to protected public lands,” Dr. Rasker said. “This is what’s creating jobs currently at a time of high unemployment — we need policy that creates jobs.”
The idea of expanding preservation does not go over well among everyone. Many people in Western states see the creation of new federally protected areas as putting land off limits to mining, logging and other uses and potentially harming the economy.
Ryan Yonk, an assistant professor of political science at Southern Utah State in Cedar City who worked with two other economists on a different study of protected lands and their economic impacts, expressed skepticism about the evidence underlying the economists’ argument. “The economists who signed the letter are making a policy statement,” he said. “That’s fine. Where it goes off the rails is saying there are universally positive effects” from protecting federal land.”
His study, carried out with Brian C. Steed and Randy Simmons of Utah State University, found no evidence of a positive economic effect from protecting public land, Dr. Yonk said. “And we find split evidence of a negative effect,” he added.
In a study focusing on Kane County, home to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, “we can find no effect in the local economy,” he said.
Granting protection to wilderness and other lands is an enduring political issue in the West and surfaces frequently during election campaigns.
The Headwaters study drew criticism, for example, from a spokesman for Representative Denny Rehberg, a Montana Republican who is challenging Jon Tester, a Democrat, for his Senate seat in 2012. “The faulty assumption that creating new national parks, wilderness or monuments always creates jobs is like saying an oil rig will always produce oil no matter where you put it,” said the spokesman, Jed Link. “It just isn’t true.”