From The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 2002, p A1

Northwest Logging Heads South
The harvesting of federal forests is minimal - leaving them untended
and vulnerable

By MICHAEL MILSTEIN, The Oregonian
The timber war is over. The vast federal forests of the West, long
the theater of bitter fights over logging and wildlife protection,
produce so little timber anymore it's barely noticeable.
Federal forests once provided more than a third of the wood cut in
the timber belt of Western Oregon - and a reliable flow of cash to
what was once Oregon's No. 1 industry. Those forests yielded just 1
percent of the cut last year.
Private lands now claim more than 80 percent of the Northwest's
output. But even that plays a paltry role. The Southeastern United
States far surpasses the Northwest as the nation's top producer of
commercial timber, most of it from private lands.
These are among key findings in a draft report by the U.S. Forest
Service's Pacific Northest Research Station in Portland due for
pulibcation in 2003.
As a result of the logging collapse, pulibc lands will increasingly
be transformed into untended reserves of aging trees while private
plantations of young, fast-growing trees in the South and other
nations feed an ever-increasing U.S. appetite for wood, the report
says. And the decline of Western logging may leve little means to thin
overgrown public forests prone to wildfire and disease.
The report's findings are blunt:
- National forests hold a third of the nation's timberland, including
most remaining old growth, but will produce less than 4 percent of the
nation's wood by 2010. These trees will grow and age, nearly doubling
the volume of standing timber in 50 years.
- Wildlfire danger in the West will escalate because there are too
few sawmills left to process the small, flammable timber that poses
the greatest hazard, and there is no market for it.
- U.S. consumption of wood will rise by almost 40 percent over the
next 50 years.
- An ever-larger share of the nation's wood will be imported from
countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Chile and Russia.
- Logging in the United States will steadily shift to the Southeast,
which now turns oiut four times as muchwood as the Northwest. Georgia,
Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina each produce more wood
products than either Oregon or Washington, much of it pulp used in
making paper.
- Urban growth may consume 5 to 20 million acreds of forest in the
South and West in the next 50 years, but native forests nationally
face no dire threat.
For all the debate surrounding moves by the Bush administration to
accelerate logging on public lands in the Northwest, the figures show
it's a matter of fighting over scraps.
Federal lands hold more than half the forested acres in the region
and turned out 57 percent of Oregon's timber at the height of the
logging boom in 1988. But mounting wildlife safeguards pressed by
environmental groups and the courts hae pushed them out of the
equation. The same lands today supply less than 5 percent of the
statewide cut.
Private lands provide 84 percent of Oregon's cut, feeding about
one-twentieth of the nation's lumber demand, according to the Oregon
Department of Forestry.
"Certainly the federal lands are essentially irrelevant now," said
Darius Adams, a professor of forestry at Oregon State University who
worked on the report.
That's clear enough to Fred and John Krauss, whose family has run
Rough and Ready Lumber Co. in Southwest Oregon's tiny Cave Junction
for almost 60 years.
More than 80 percent of the pine and fir surrounding their small
sawmill stands in federal forests that always had provided a steady
stream of logs. But lawsuits by environmental groups have slammed the
door on logging so hard since the mid-1990s, they say, the federal
timber program is all but over - and so it their mill.

Foreign timber cheaper
It's unlikely loggers will get to salvage many of the federal trees
burned in the summer's big Bisuit fire because most of the timber lies
within reserved areas, they say. That shows no one can count on
cutting public timber whether live or dead, making it impossible to
compete with foreign tree farms rolling out cheap wood.
If the Krausses cannot find a buyer for their mill in the next month,
they will shut it down. About 145 jobs will go with it.
It's "the hardest decision that we have ever had to make," the
brothers said in a statement to employees.
Each side of the timber debate sees the trends as ammunition,
illustrating how far apart they are. Forest activists, for example,
contend public lands logging is so minimal and public opposition so
great, there's no need for cutting at all - and they continue to
pledge protection for any old growth against the chain saw.
But federal forests "already area trivial in terms of wood, and they
will continue to be so because the public puts such a high priority on
them," said Doug Heiken of Oregon Natural Resources Council. "It's the
last place that hasn't been wrecked yet, so the value of these native
forests is far out of proportion to their area."
Timber industry officials see the declining federal output as
evidence the nation is letting productive forests deteriorate when
they could be contributing essential resources.
"The crisis is not that we're losing forests to cutting, the crisis
is if we don't do something, we're going to lose them to fire, insects
and disease," said Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council
in Portland.
Many of the findings reflect a logging industry that has shuddered in
recent years from depressed prices, international competition and
envrionmental controversy. But the findings also underscore
uncomfortable and largely unnoticed questions about whether the United
States, by far the world's largest consumer of wood products, is
saving its public forests at the expense of private and foreign ones.
"It's simplistic to just be shifting harvest from one part of the
world to another," said Douglas MacClery, a senior policy analyst with
the Forest Service. "It's not the evil timber industry that's doing
it. They're just feeding our needs."
The Forest Service report, known as a Resources Planning Act
assessment, is a kind of state-of-the-forests document delivered to
Congress every 10 years. Two years in the making, it involves
scientists from across the country and weighs forest trends to predict
the condition and use of forests 50 years into the future.

Assumptions made
The report assumes current forest policies and trends such as
population growth will continue, and is designed to help the public
weigh the consequences.
"We're on the cusp of somthing now that might cause people to rethink
how we manage public lands," said Richard Haynes, a research forester
and lead author of the report.
Bruce Lippke, a professor of forestry at the University of
Washington, puts it another way: "The battle from the standpoint of
timber supply is over. The battle over how to manage the public lands
is not."
Diverging directions for public and private forests will create two
extremes, the report says. Private lands will conain mostly young
trees, cutand replanted on short cycles to maximize timber production.
Such tree plantations will encompass 10 percent of the atnio's
forestland, but will yield almost two-thirds of its timber.
On public land where wildlie protections carry greater weight trees
often planted thickly after clear-cutting grow faster than they are
logged, creating a condition of overgrowth. That does not mean natural
conditions will return. Instead, their average age will steadily
increase in what some describe as a uniform "wall of wood," lacking
the variety of ages and dead and downed wood seen in pristine forests.
By 2050, more than four-fifths of the timber in Western national
forests will be older than 85 years.
"A forest isn't static," Haynes said. "If you're not cutting, you've
got 100 million acres of timber that's all going to grow old together.
You end up with mostly old timber on public lands and yoiung timber on
private land, with not a lot in between."
He said that could be seen as a "privileged approach" to forestry,
especially on public lands in the West.
"We're saying, "We're just going to live among our old-growth gardens
and let the rest of the world provide for us,'" he said.
Conservation groups that have fought broad-scale logging on public
lands now support limited cutting to thin ad diversify dense stands
that are a legacy of rapid-fire clear-cutting and other poor forest
practices, Heiken said. But it must promote the forest's biological
value rather than its commercial worth as timber, he said.
Giving up profit-driven logging on public lands - especially of
dwindling tracts of old-growth giants - might help revive depressed
timber prices, encourage conservation of wood products and cement a
public preference for getting wood elsewhere, he said.
"Why don't we just be done with it?" Heiken said. "There's no role
for it today. It's not needed for any legitimate reason."

Forest Service criticized
Haynes said the Forest Service has become so entwined in controversy
surrounding logging and other land issues, it no longer takes the
leadership role in trying to resolve questions of forest stewardship.
In the meantime, other regions and countries seized wood markets the
Northwest lost when its timber industry collapse amid protection for
imperiled species such as the northern spotted owl.
In 1986, the Northwest produced more than a quarter of the pine, fir
and spruce in the country. By 2050, it will supply about 10 percent,
the report predicts. Over the same span, softwood production in the
Southeast, - with almost four times as much timberland as the
Northwest, will grow from 44 percent to more than 70 percent of
national totals.
U.S. consumption of timber will rise with population, with the
average American using 1,565 pounds of wood and paper products a year
over the next 50 years, equal to about half the weight of a Volkswagen
Beetle. More logging in the South and East will feed much of the
increase, with the balance made up largely by increasing imports from
quickly expanding tree plantations in the Southern Hemisphere.
About 29 percent of the lumber used in U.S. homes, buildings and
elsewhere came from abroad in 1998, a figure that will rise to 38
percent by 2010.
In U.S. forests, the volume of standing timber will grow by 53
percent over the next 50 years. On public lands, it will expand by
more than 70 percent - enough wood to fill log trucks stretching from
Earth to the moon more than 15 times and enough to supply U.S. demand
for wood for more than 40 years.
Much of that will take the form of crowded, flammable tinder.
Even if federal agencies permitted loggers to immediately clear such
tinder from the overgrown forests of the West, no one may want it.
What needs to be cleared most are small trees that are less than eight
inches across. But to break even, loggers in Northeast Oregon need at
least two-thirds of the trees they cut to measure 11 inches or more.
Nearly half of the sawmills that might handle such wood have closed in
the last decade and area unlikely to reopen because of the uncertain
future of public land logging.
"This is a region where the timber industry was huge and important,"
Haynes said. "Now it's a region where the industry is still important,
but not huge."

Posted as a courtesy by
Daniel B. Wheeler
www.oregonwhitetruffles.com

In article ,
says...
From The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 2002, p A1

Northwest Logging Heads South
The harvesting of federal forests is minimal - leaving them untended
and vulnerable

It looks like Mike reads alt.forestry. Just about everything in that
article has been discussed here in the last few weeks.

Larry Caldwell wrote in message t...
In article ,
says...
From The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 2002, p A1

Northwest Logging Heads South
The harvesting of federal forests is minimal - leaving them untended
and vulnerable

It looks like Mike reads alt.forestry. Just about everything in that
article has been discussed here in the last few weeks.

Maybe the regulars in here should band together and apply for a
Federal grant, like the Quincy Library Group. I'd say we can do a damn
sight better than that bunch of Yahoooos G.

Larry

(Larry Harrell) wrote in message . com...
Larry Caldwell wrote in message t...
In article ,
says...
From The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 2002, p A1

Northwest Logging Heads South
The harvesting of federal forests is minimal - leaving them untended
and vulnerable

It looks like Mike reads alt.forestry. Just about everything in that
article has been discussed here in the last few weeks.

Maybe the regulars in here should band together and apply for a
Federal grant, like the Quincy Library Group. I'd say we can do a damn
sight better than that bunch of Yahoooos G.

Maybe Michael is getting his information from Yahoo? Or perhaps he's a lurker?

Daniel B. Wheeler
www.oregonwhitetruffles.com

In article ,
says...
(Larry Harrell) wrote in message . com...
Larry Caldwell wrote in message t...
In article ,
says...
From The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 2002, p A1

Northwest Logging Heads South
The harvesting of federal forests is minimal - leaving them untended
and vulnerable

It looks like Mike reads alt.forestry. Just about everything in that
article has been discussed here in the last few weeks.

Maybe the regulars in here should band together and apply for a
Federal grant, like the Quincy Library Group. I'd say we can do a damn
sight better than that bunch of Yahoooos G.

Maybe Michael is getting his information from Yahoo? Or perhaps he's a lurker?

I havent yet found a forester willing to admit he reads this group.
Pretty odd since most everybody is on the net now. The article sums up
the PNW well.