…Also last month, an interesting new report was released on the economic benefits of protected public lands. The study was created by Montana-based nonprofit Headwaters Economics. It showed that places with a higher percentage of protected public lands had much more job growth between 1970 and 2010 than places with lower percentages of public lands.
In particular, the study found that non-metro counties in the West with more than 30 percent public lands saw job growth of 345 percent while counties with lower percentages of public lands saw 83 percent job growth…