…It’s easy to conclude that federally managed lands impede economic growth.
But a new study by Montana nonprofit Headwaters Economics shows that’s not necessarily the case. Overall, rural Western counties with more federal land performed noticeably better by four key economic indicators than counties with less public land. Not only that, but counties with land protected as national parks, wilderness, national conservation areas, national monuments or national wildlife refuges — land with little or no extractive resource production — fared best of all for personal and per-capita income growth.
“We’re data-driven, and our reflex to hearing (recent anti-public lands) rhetoric is to look at the data,” says Megan Lawson, the study’s author. “There are certainly rural places that are struggling, but that’s not the primary story we’re seeing across the West.”
