The Changing Timber Industry Loggers On The Move - From Nw Letters Foretold Decline Of Nw Timber Industry
After spending a long summer searching through searing attics and forgotten storage rooms, Nancy Langston unearthed an antique paper trail predicting the current demise of Inland Northwest sawmills.
U.S. Forest Service correspondence predating World War II said mills would begin closing in eastern Oregon by the late 1980s, said Langston, now a University of Wisconsin professor.
Langston dug through the forgotten archives for her doctoral research at the University of Washington in 1992 and later recounted her treasure hunt in the book, “Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares.”
She learned the Forest Service knew, 60 years in advance, that at the rate timber companies and the agency preferred to log, the trees would run out and timber companies would have to move on by the late 1980s.
The letters Langston discovered were one of the early hints that timber would not rule the region’s economy forever but would rise, fall and, much of it, depart. That departure is well under way.
“I just looked at 5.5 million acres in eastern Oregon and Washington,” Langston said. “But I expect it was the same in North Idaho and Western Montana.”
Similar archives weren’t available for national forests in northeastern Washington, North Idaho and Western Montana. Still, historians and economists say they aren’t surprised Northwest timber companies are moving to the southeastern United States or to South America or are converting timberland to lakefront ranchettes instead of clearcuts.
“It’s always been a migratory industry,” said Washington State University historian Paul Hirt. “We’re never going to see the timber industry leave the Northwest, but this decline was inevitable, was predicted. We can’t go back to the golden age, and if everyone recognizes that, we can go forward instead of backward.”
For timber-dependent communities in Washington, Idaho and Montana, this means recognizing the economic shift to retirement and service industries, which have overtaken the region’s economy in recent years.
Going south
The future of the timber industry is thousands of miles away. Last winter, timber giant Weyerhaeuser put 600,000 acres and its sawmills in southern Oregon up for sale. A few months later, it bought 661,200 acres and four sawmills in Louisiana and Mississippi.
This spring, Plum Creek Timber Co., second only to Weyerhaeuser in its private land holdings, advertised the sale of between 80,000 and 100,000 acres of Montana land it deemed more valuable for selling as recreational property than timber. The company almost simultaneously announced it wanted to buy more productive land - in the southeastern United States and on the West Coast.
The Plum Creek acreage in Western Montana likely will be converted to lakefront ranchettes and other subdivisions if conservation groups are unable to buy it for wildlife habitat. If stockbrokers are right, more vacation homes will sprout on timber land. One stockbroker bought a newspaper advertisement saying as much as 200,000 acres of Plum Creek’s land is “located in recreational areas or near expanding population centers.”
Other timber companies are moving to Canada, Russia, Argentina and even Tierra Del Fuego - at the southern tip of South America.
The migration also is part of a long-term trend of timber companies going south, where trees grow faster, labor costs are lower, and most timber is on private land - unfettered by many environmental regulations.
Not only is this shift expected to continue, it has been occurring longer than most people realize, in part because tax laws and federal agricultural programs encouraged Southerners to switch from cotton crops to trees.
Southern dominance nothing new
By some measures, The Inland Northwest hasn’t been a significant timber player, compared to the rest of the nation, for decades. The Southeast produces nearly five times as much pine and other softwood when compared to the Inland Northwest.
In the last decade, lumber production in the Western United States has fallen nearly 3 billion board feet, from 1986 production of 10.2 billion board feet. The Southeast has more than taken up that slack, now pumping out nearly 15 billion board feet a year.
Tennessee alone lists 50,000 wood products workers, in part because of its furniture trade. Washington state has only 35,000 in lumber and wood products and has little of Tennessee’s furniture manufacturing.
The Canadian question
As the South climbed to timber dominance, Canada invaded from the north, capturing a third of the U.S. lumber market. The threat is significant enough to prompt congressional hearings, threats of trade wars, and plenty of rhetoric. A new trade deal signed this spring will levy tariffs on the lumber Canada sends southward, once those exports exceed 14.7 billion board feet.
Tariffs or not, Canada will want to send lumber south as long as a strong dollar beckons. Canada shipped 16.1 billion board feet of lumber to the U.S. last year, enough to build more than 1 million homes.
The Western Wood Products Association expects Canada to send 17 billion board feet this year, three times the Inland Northwest’s production.
Keeping what remains
Some argue that keeping what’s left of the timber industry depends upon opening much more of the national forests.
“The key is timber availability,” said Charles Keegan, director of forest industry research at the University of Montana. Since industry land and private land are running out of logs, “where the industry goes depends upon what the national forest does.”
Stan Smith, a small logger who helps run his family’s timber land near Plummer, Idaho, also believes more national forest logging is vital to keeping any timber industry here. But he wants to see a lighter touch on the land.
“They are going to have to open the federal forests and manage them on a true, sustained-yield basis,” Smith said. Companies “can’t go on with the same version of clearcutting.”
Plentiful trees are only one part of the question, said Haynes, the Forest Service economist.
“The lumber industry wants to tell you the problem is supply,” he said. “The other part of the problem is prices never recovered from the recession of 1990-91. It’s competitive pressure compounded by low (lumber) prices.”
Restrictive regulation not the culprit
Repealing all of the environmental regulations and making every acre of the national forests available for logging won’t keep the industry from migrating. It might temporarily delay the inevitable, historians argue.
The bottom line is there’s no way to return to the high harvest heydays that stretched from the 1960s to the 1980s. Most of the remaining prime timber is more difficult to reach and more expensive to buy, said Hirt, the WSU historian.
Public attitude will restrict how much of the last old-growth timber from public land in Idaho, Montana and Eastern Washington is turned into plywood and dimension lumber.
“You have to go farther and farther to get more trees, and you have to clear-cut larger and larger blocks to get the same volume,” Hirt said. “You have to go to steeper and more unstable country and that’s making more and more people angry.”
There also is increasing opposition to publicly subsidized timber sales, which comprises the bulk of what comes from the region’s national forests, he said.
Personal costs, long-term solutions
Number crunchers, historians and industry experts share one common worry: what happens to the every-day people who still look to the timber industry for their income?
“For people in some rural communities, this is a depression, as bad as the depression of the 1930s,” historian Hirt said. Rather than discard timber workers as expendable, “we owe them some consideration, compassion, retraining.
“But we don’t owe them something we can’t deliver - harvest levels of the 1960s through the 1980s,” Hirt said.
Simply put, it time to deal with the change, economists and historians argue.
If the Inland Northwest refuses to understand the problems that led to the demise of the timber industry in Western Washington and Oregon, the same lesson will be forced upon it, Haynes said.
“The Forest Service and the industry haven’t studied the spotted owl wars, so they are doomed to repeat them,” he said. “There’s a shift in public values, where timber supply isn’t the primary focus of the national forests.
“People are going to refuse to recognize the change in social values,” Haynes predicted. Sadly, “the only way the Forest Service and the communities are going to get the message is to cut it off.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Graphics: 1. Time to grow 2. South is the softwood leader
The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Ken Olsen Staff writer Staff writer Eric Torbenson contributed to this report.