A new study finds that protection of the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest led to as many as 32,000 timber job losses, compared to the 130,000 jobs the industry predicted.

Last month, the Biden administration indicated it would reverse changes to the Endangered Species Act made by President Trump, which had opened up a large chunk of the threatened northern spotted owl’s habitat in the Pacific Northwest to logging. The move fueled a decades-old debate between industry and conservationists in the region—a tension that is broadly characteristic of the Endangered Species Act’s history.

“The history of the Endangered Species Act is marked by a contested choice: Should we save wildlife, or jobs? The northern spotted owl is the poster species in that debate,” says Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. “But that decision is often made without needed evidence. And if we don’t quantify the costs of species protection, direct or indirect, we end up assuming they’re infinitely large.”

Frank has cowritten new research that examines the impact of the 1990 listing of the northern spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act on employment in the timber sector.

The findings, published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, show the listing did lead to job losses—but the losses were just a small fraction (less than a quarter) of the maximum of 130,000 jobs that the industry had predicted could be lost.

Read the full article about protecting the northern spotted owl at Futurity.