What is the common denominator here? All these people are part of the “restoration economy.” And Oregon is one of the best places for it.
Generally speaking, the restoration economy is comprised of the economic activities and jobs that contribute to restoring the environment and creating ecological benefit. A 2015 study shows that “ecological restoration is a $9.5 billion industry, employing about 126,000 people directly” in the United States. Additionally, “the restoration economy indirectly generates $15 billion and 95,000 jobs, bringing restoration’s total economic output value to nearly $25 billion.”
Like the examples above, the jobs created by the restoration economy are local, skilled and provide fair compensation.
“It’s a slow and steady drip into the local economy,” said Denis Reich, Southern Oregon program director for The Freshwater Trust (TFT).
Since 2012, TFT has been managing restoration projects along southern Oregon’s Rogue River and its tributaries, such as Little Butte and Bear Creeks. The projects are part of programs that help the City of Medford manage impacts of warm-water discharge and the Bureau of Reclamation manage requirements under a biological opinion for restoring cold-water fish habitat.
For projects specifically executed for the Bureau of Reclamation in 2016, TFT’s contractors and sub-contractors totaled 54 people from local businesses in Jackson County and surrounding areas. That’s the equivalent of 1,200 hours for services such as archeology surveys, wood harvesting and hauling, site preparation and construction, fence building, well digging, irrigation system set up, and tree planting and maintenance.
Dollar-wise, the projects that TFT and its partners implemented in 2016 on behalf of Reclamation penciled out to $1.7 million for large wood structures and $655,000 for native re-vegetation.
Those are not small numbers, especially when infused into economies that once thrived on now shrinking industries, such as logging and mining.
“I’ve hired contractors who sometimes work managing forests for timber production. Now they are doing work geared toward forest health more often, and I send them out to clear invasive blackberries along creeks,” said Lance Wyss, restoration project manager for TFT. “They have a great skillset we can use for our restoration projects.”
Wyss also notes that owners of streamside property who once mined their land for gravel are now interested in restoring these sites.
“We can recruit some of these streamside properties into our riparian programs. The landowners get paid to lease the land to us to rebuild it, rather than extract from it,” he said.
Research by Max Nielsen-Pincus and Cassandra Moseley shows that between 16 and 23 local jobs are supported in Oregon for every $1 million spent on restoration. Riparian, or streamside, restoration projects, which tend to involve labor-intensive planting and fencing, supported the most jobs and wages, represented in the figure below.
