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This article is a response to a critique by professor Matthew S. Carroll and colleagues to a longitudinal analysis of logging industry job losses. The critique by Carroll and colleagues has two main parts. The first involves questions of scientific and technical judgments, the second has to do with what is sometimes called the moral exclusion literature and with the perceptions of those who live in the logging-dependent communities of the Pacific Northwest. There are a number of statistical and inferential problems with their argument. At the outset, however, it is worth pointing out that the arguments of Carroll and colleagues ignore the extensive work that has been done by historians who have explicitly examined the logging industry of the Pacific Northwest. Those historians, including Carroll's respected Washington State University colleague Paul Hirt, have reached a very different set of conclusions. In Hirt's memorable terminology, the ready embracing of optimistic assumptions, combined with the failure to note the more ominous warning signs, amounted to a veritable conspiracy of optimism. Still, like another distinguished historian of the forests of the region, Nancy Langston, he notes that the conspiracy was not a matter of straightforward venality. Instead another crucial consideration involved the realm of psychology.

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 American logger. In spite of the widespread agreement on this point, however, it is not clear just how many jobs have been endangered, over just how 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 has been most intense, to determine the length of time over which such environmental protection efforts have been creating the loss of logging and milling jobs. There are three potential key "turning points" since the start of high-quality employment data in 1947--the 1989 controversy over the federal "listing" of the Northern Spotted Owl under the Endangered Species Act, the earlier increase in environmental regulations accompanying the first Earth Day in 1970, and the still-earlier "locking up" of timber after the passage of the Wilderness Protection Act in 1964. We also examine the effects of two other variables that have received considerable attention in the ongoing debates--levels of U.S. Forest Service timber harvests and the exporting of raw logs. We find that the 1989 listing of the spotted owl has no significant effect on employment--not even in the two states where the debate has been most intense. Instead, the only statistically significant turning point came with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. The direction of the change, however, was precisely the opposite of what is generally 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 environmental regulations," ... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]