by Glenn Hurowitz
With
Congress and the White House considering spending scarce dollars to jump-start
employment, they’ll need to get the biggest jobs bang for the buck to give
Americans confidence that they’re spending our money wisely. Probably the biggest
jobs generator of all, and one of the least recognized, is investing in forest
and land restoration and sustainable management, with conservation, watershed
projects, and park investment coming close behind.
Heidi
Garrett-Peltier and Robert Pollin at The Political Economy and Research
Institute of the University of Massachusetts report the following numbers for
jobs created per dollar of investment.
To
summarize, reforestation and restoration outperforms even the second-most
jobs-intense activity analyzed by 74 percent, and conservation exceeds other
major jobs alternatives, including especially new highway construction, Wall
Street, and conventional energy sources like oil and nuclear.
See full jobs table here [pdf].
This
means that if the government is serious about creating jobs, it’s got to pass
clean energy and climate legislation and a new jobs bill that includes powerful
incentives for reforestation, revegetation, sustainable forest management, and
conservation.
This
legislation can perform the equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the
extremely popular New Deal program that put millions of people to work in
forestry and conservation.
Why
are forest investments such good job generators? Restoring forests (as well as rivers,
wetlands, peat bogs, and prairies), requires people, which means jobs: soil
scientists, tree planters, equipment operators, water engineers, and people to
nurture the trees over time.
Conservation—investing in, for instance, the expansion of National Parks and other local,
state, and federal recreation areas through, for instance, the Land and Water
Conservation Fund—isn’t too far behind. Some of the direct jobs in this
sector include park rangers, park transportation workers, and other park
personnel.
Relative
to other spending options, investments in forests and parks tend to go towards
wages rather than capital investments—providing the greatest benefit to
communities, especially in economically difficult times (since Nature largely
provides the materials that go into making a tree or a prairie grow for free,
you don’t need the same kind of capital as you do for, say, building a
highway).
The
actual jobs impact of forest investment is actually significantly greater than
what’s represented in the above table. A variety of other studies have analyzed
job creation through conservation and found dramatic indirect effects. Expand a
national park, national forest, river or local recreation area, and spending on
and employment in outdoor recreation—everything from birdwatching and hiking
to fishing and hunting – is dramatically increased.
A 2006 report for the Outdoor
Industry Association found that the availability of active outdoor
recreation generated $289 billion in retail sales and services across the
United States, with a total of 6.5 million jobs supported by the recreation
economy overall. Other reports focusing on roadless
areas, national
forests, and privately-owned forests have found similar results: the National
Alliance of Forest Owners [pdf] reports that every hundred acres of
privately owned forests supports eight jobs and the FAO reported last
year that investing in sustainable forestry management could create ten million
new, good-paying jobs worldwide.
Of
course, jobs aren’t the only reason restoration and conservation are a good
idea: forests and other wildlands suck pollution out of the air, provide
wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities—allowing America to put
people back to work, and giving them somewhere beautiful to go when they’re
done.
Olivier Jarda, a
policy associate at the Center for International Policy, assisted with the
research for this post.
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