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writers on the range

A timber mill's demise shakes everyone up


Rick Bass
Troy Mont.
Sunday, January 19, 2003 - I recently had the privilege of listening to the
business manager of a lumber mill in Seeley, Mont., talk frankly about what to
do when a small town's major employer pulls the plug. Comptroller Loren Rose of
Pyramid Lumber was invited to Libby, Mont., because that's where Stimson Lumber
had just laid off 300 workers. It is a huge blow to the town of 3,000.

The reasons Stimson gave for shutting down did not include the usual reason: a
dearth of available big trees. In fact, Stimson Lumber had a year left on a
guaranteed timber contract with Plum Creek. Instead, the company cited a global
collapse in the price of plywood, foreign competition and rising insurance
premiums caused by asbestos-related lung disease. More than 200 people have
died of asbestosis in Libby because of their exposure to verniculite ore, which
was mined for decades in the town.

Yet here was Rose, invited to bring a message of hope to residents battered by
bad news. Seeley Lake had managed to keep its lumber mill open, under pressure,
he said, and maybe Libby could, too. But that night in the gym, faces looked
somber and subdued. There had been a lot of gatherings about Libby's plight,
and undoubtedly there would be more. As one resident said, people were
"meetinged out."

Loren Rose's advice seemed helpful. First, he told the crowd, don't burn
bridges to Stimson, no matter how angry everyone gets about the layoffs.
Second, he counseled, don't forget the environmental site concerns - the
toluene, diesel, creosote and asbestos still present at the mill site. They
represent real liabilities and dangers.

Don't get emotional when making business decisions, he continued. If you do,
"you'll be wrong." Then he added, "You can't get in a hurry. When you get in a
hurry, you tend to make mistakes. And you need to build consensus. You need to
reach out."

He advised against holding a grudge toward banks or investment partners who ask
hard questions, or who choose not to participate in what comes next.

Rose attributed part of his resurrected mill's success in Seeley to a
collaboration with area environmental groups, as well as national groups such
as the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, which visited his logging
operations and were impressed.

"You're going to agree way more than you disagree," he predicted. I could only
second that approach. My area's local environmental group, the Yaak Valley
Forest Council, supports both permanent protection of roadless areas and a
sustainable local economy based on the area's natural resources.

But one county commissioner, who's invested a huge amount of time and energy,
asked rhetorically if local meetings might be a waste of time since some
environmentalists had sued Forest Service managers of the Kootenai National
Forest for failing to protect old-growth trees.

Throughout the process, we've been impressed by the relative absence of
finger-pointing in the local community, which, frankly, has not been known
historically for such absences. People here seem to agree that the Champion and
Plum Creek private lands are relatively moon-scaped, having fed all their big
"peelers" to the plywood mill for the last few decades; that the chipboard
market is killing plywood manufacturers worldwide; that Canada and Russia, to
name only a couple of countries, have cheaper and greater quantities of big
logs; that our 485-acre mill site in Libby is contaminated with several
different types of toxins; that the Libby mill's workforce is the best in the
industry; and that it's unthinkable that there won't be some kind of
wood-processing facility in Libby to capture the local market and availability
of wood.

Many people are also talking about the town becoming an incubator for new
lumber products, such as the gathering of "character" logs (particularly Pinus
contorta) for log homes. There's also a potential market for molding, flooring,
trusses, Presto logs, furniture, cabinetry and other niche products. What you
don't want to do, Rose said, is duplicate what the big companies do.

I'd met Loren Rose before, late last year, and remembered an exchange he'd had
with Steve Thompson, an environmentalist who works with loggers. Thompson asked
Rose if his logging company would be willing to commit to protecting "the
backcountry."

"Absolutely," Rose replied, and then he asked Thompson if he would be willing
to commit to working together in the "front-country."

"Absolutely," Thompson replied.

In Libby, Rose boiled down that approach: Find areas of agreement, and plug
away at those. As for the conflict areas, "Forget about it."

From my environmentalist point of view, I couldn't agree more. We want to help
Libby, and we're looking for investors in a new, more sustainable sort of
community mill.

Rick Bass lives in Troy, Mont., belongs to several environmental groups and is
the author of numerous books about the West. He is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia. For more information,
visit kootenet.com/healthy_communities.htm.