Premium
The Environmental Consequences of Rural and Urban Population Change: An Exploratory Spatial Panel Study of Forest Cover in the Southern U nited S tates, 2001–2006
Author(s) -
Clement Matthew Thomas,
Ergas Christina,
Greiner Patrick Trent
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
rural sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.083
H-Index - 65
eISSN - 1549-0831
pISSN - 0036-0112
DOI - 10.1111/ruso.12056
Subject(s) - afforestation , geography , deforestation (computer science) , population , forest cover , panel data , population growth , rural area , government (linguistics) , socioeconomics , forestry , demography , political science , ecology , sociology , economics , linguistics , philosophy , computer science , law , econometrics , biology , programming language
This exploratory study examines the effects of rural and urban population change on forest cover at the local level across the southern U nited S tates. Using county‐level data from the N ational L and C over D atabase and other U . S . government sources, we regressed the total area of forest cover on rural and urban population size in spatial panel models with two‐way fixed effects. When we controlled for several other factors, including the number of forestry operations at the county level, regression results indicate that urban change had no effect, but rural population size was positively related to total forest area, and this effect was most pronounced in and around G eorgia. Thus, in areas of the southern U nited S tates, rural growth was associated with afforestation, not deforestation. We speculate on how this unusual finding contributes to the debate between ecological modernization and urban political economy implicated in previous cross‐national research.