A Different Kind of Harvest: Can California’s Forests Grow Jobs, Too?

State and local support grows for the “restoration economy”

by Elise Cox, MendoLocal.News, March 24, 2026

[excerpt:]

At dawn, the forest sounds the same as it always has: the low churn of truck engines, the whine of saws, the crack of timber under pressure. But on a narrow ridge above the Pacific, a different kind of work is underway.

A crew in hard hats moves slowly through a stand of second-growth redwoods, cutting only the smaller trees. Behind them, other workers scatter branches, stabilize a dirt road that is no longer used, and check a stream where salmonids are hatching.

This is not logging as Mendocino County has long known it. It is something closer to what foresters and economists are beginning to call “a restoration economy”— and its promise is not just ecological revival, but jobs.

For decades, timber has been treated as a pillar of the North Coast economy. Yet in reality, its footprint has shrunk to a fraction of what many imagine. In the region’s four major timber-producing counties, logging accounts for about 0.3 percent of all jobs, according to an analysis presented by the Pacific Coast Science Symposium in 2016.

Even in the heavily forested lands of Jackson Demonstration State Forest, where residents have been debating logging practices for decades, timber work represents a sliver of the broader economy. Tourism alone supports roughly 20 times as many jobs in Mendocino County as logging, according to environmental analyst Evan Mills.

What has changed is not just the number of trees, but the idea of what forests are for.

. . .

“We’re not pushing loggers out of the forest,” said Melody Myer, conservation attorney at the Environmental Protection and Information Center, EPIC, which is one of the bill’s [AB 2494] sponsors. “We need them to do this management, this important management to keep our community safe and to make sure our forests are healthy.”

Advocates for the billl, like Myer, are painting a picture of an alternative future, where one day soon, on a hillside above Caspar Creek, a worker will pause as a small tree falls, its branches catching briefly in the canopy before settling to the ground. Around her, the larger redwoods stand tall.

In the quiet that follows, the difference is almost imperceptible. The forest is still being used. It is still being logged. But the goal, increasingly, is not just what can be taken from from the forest —but what can be reclaimed, and who might find work to support themselves and their families in the process.

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A Different Kind of Harvest: Can California’s Forests Grow Jobs, Too?