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Social Context

Primary Question (chapter 7): What are the attitudes and values of southern residents toward forests and their management, how have they changed over time, and how do they differ among demographic groups?

Related Question (chapter 9): What motivates private forest landowners to manage their forest land, and how are their management objectives formed?

The population of the United States roughly doubled between the late 1950s and 2000, and the population of the South has grown at an even faster rate (fig. 14). The South’s population grew by 13.7 percent between 1990 and 2000, and the share of the U.S. population living in the South grew from 30.7 percent in 1990 to 32.5 percent in 2000. Much of this growth has been focused in urban areas such as Atlanta and Miami and along the eastern coastline. The population of the 13 Southern States stood at 91,486,129 people on April 1, 2000.

Historical data show that population contracted in rural areas and expanded in urban counties from the 1950s to the 1980s, but growth was spread across nearly every county in the region between 1990 and 2000 (fig. 15). As a result, even the population density near rural forests has expanded and will likely expand in the future. The very few areas experiencing depopulation between 1990 and 2000 were in the most rural areas of the South.

Along with economic growth have come changes in the various attributes of the region’s population. The population has continued to increase in racial and ethnic diversity (fig. 16). Mean incomes have increased since the 1980s, but much of these gains have been concentrated in the urban areas, primarily in the eastern half of the region (fig. 17). Increases in education levels followed the same spatial patterns. Poverty rates have fallen in the recent past and are approaching U.S. averages (fig. 18).

The population has become older in many parts of the region. Compared to the national median age of 32.8 years, Florida’s is 42. The population is expected to age in all States, changing the demand for various services, but the increase in median age will be especially large in retirement destinations such as Florida and the Southern Appalachians. These changes portend changes in the demands placed by resident populations on forests for aesthetic and recreational uses.

Upward trends in population along with change in other demographic variables reflect changes in the way southerners view and use forests (chapter 7). Especially in the urbanizing areas of the South, there is an unambiguous trend toward increasing scarcity of certain forest services in urban areas as populations increase rapidly coincident with a decline in the area of forests (especially large contiguous forests). Perhaps reflecting this increasing scarcity, public values about forests and their management have changed over the past two decades. Survey-based studies show values have shifted from a largely commodity-oriented, anthropocentric perspective on forest management toward inclusion of natural biological factors in a biocentric approach (chapter 7). Southern residents generally favor additional funding of environmental protection. Perhaps surprisingly, we found little significant differences between the attitudes and values held by rural and urban residents. However, young people had more biocentric views than older people, placing more value on scenic beauty and less on wood production (chapter 7).

Surveys of forest owners (chapter 9) and the public in general (chapter 7) indicate that conservation ranks high as a value with both sets of people, and recent changes in attitudes reflect a growing concern for environmental quality in addition to the commodity benefits that flow from forests. It is clear that forests play both direct and indirect roles in determining quality of life in the South.