UC Santa Cruz

American environmental politics has long been bedeviled by the popular belief that protecting ecosystems inevitably leads to the devastation of primary industries, but the relationships among public policy, industry change, and environmental outcomes are complex and not well understood. This dissertation examines these interactions using the North Coast redwood timber industry as a case study. Though regulations governing timber harvesting on private land in California are considered some of the toughest in the nation, sediment pollution from forest management is the leading cause of impairment in the rivers and streams of the North Coast. I analyze the reasons state Forest Practice Rules failed to protect aquatic resources; the drivers of recent changes in both timberland ownership and public policy; and the strategies new redwood timber companies are using to manage regulatory obligations and avoid direct targeting by activists. I argue that both regulatory failure and policy change are best understood as products of an ongoing struggle over whether regulation of the timber industry should be based on firms’ compliance with prescriptive rules or on the actual environmental outcomes of forest management. Divestment from the region was driven by restructuring in the U.S. forest products industry— not the cost of compliance with environmental policy.