A Response to “Forty Years of Spotted Owls? A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry Job Losses”

One wonders if the spotted owl controversy will ever really end or if it will simply migrate from current policy forums to the arena of historical debate, where it may continue virtually forever. Some day it will provide a fascinating subject for a sociological retrospective on conflict. The article by Freudenburg, Wilson, and O'Leary (1998) may well mark the transition from current policy to historical analysis, and for this we should perhaps be grateful to Freudenburg and his coauthors. Unfortunately, they misrepresent a significant part of the story. The analysis is oversimplified and the conclusions misleading. In many ways this reminds us of the sociology methods textbook example of a high statistical correlation between violent crime rates and the frequency of churches. The punch line of the story is that once one controls for population density, the crime/church correlation disappears. We contend that Freudenburg et al. have committed an analogous error in their analysis of the relationship between timber harvest reductions, technological change, and wood products jobs. Further, we suggest that their analysis of the literature concerning forest products workers and moral exclusion misses the central point of that literature. We will address each of these contentions in turn.