We Must Complete Transition From Cut-And-Carry Forestry

The economic development community is encouraging high-technology companies to locate and thrive in our region but it has lost interest in the forest products industry, which is rapidly losing its economic impact.

Forest products represent merely 2.2 percent of the jobs in Washington state and only slightly more in Oregon and Idaho. Federal forests supply only about 15 percent of the lumber in Washington and that figure is shrinking. Nationally, it’s less than 4 percent.

To those who cry that if we quit logging in the national forests we will cause great economic hardship, I caution: Don’t say the sky is falling until you have a piece of it in your hand.

The future is not in dwindling raw materials. The forest products industry is like the buffalo hunters who thought there would always be another herd just over the next hill.

All the easy stuff is gone. What’s left is on steep terrain or in small dimension. And nothing is more laughable than the idea of cutting the trees down to save them, the so-called forest health campaign.

True concern for the forests would mean cutting the brush and small trees to avoid fire danger and leaving the bigger ones standing. But where would be the profit in that?

The facts show that the government, through the Forest Service, has been paying the forest industry to take the trees out of the national forests.

Republican Rep. John Kasich of Ohio has described these huge subsidies as corporate welfare. With an incredible 400,000 miles of roads in our publicly owned forests, $8 billion in maintenance is needed just to keep them from washing away into the streams below.

Timber communities, as well as the rest of us, need the sponge created by our forests for clean water. They clean the air and create good habitat for our fish and wildlife.

As wood products become less of a factor in the economic health of our greater Columbia Basin domain, we look to other attractions that the forests provide.

The national forests receive three times the number of visitors that our national parks get. The revenues that are received from them as tourist attractions for their scenic beauty and tranquillity represent real revenue, not the illusory money that the subsidized timber sales represent.

But what about the timber workers who lose their jobs? Unemployment is at an all-time low and it is our social duty to assist workers who are dislocated by this transition. In fact, many workers from the forest products industy have already transitioned into new jobs in the construction business. They are earning better yearly income than they got cutting up trees.

In the past decade we have added 10,000 health-service jobs, 1,200 trucking jobs and 500 communication jobs, all at about the average pay of wood products workers.

Will the voting public support this change to conservation of our natural world? A number of polls indicate that people will.

A recent Republican poll by Frank Luntz showed that 88 percent of Americans are worried that special places may be lost unless we act to protect them. Another GOP polling firm, American Viewpoint, found that, by a two-to-one margin, Americans oppose logging, mining and other industrial activities on National Forest lands.

Republicans for Environmental Protection believes it is our responsibility to carry forward the conservative environmental vision of Theodore Roosevelt.

REP points out that roadless areas total 60 million acres - one-third of the national forest system. These areas are important environmental and recreational assets but are not protected from exploitation. The present proposal to set aside 40 million acres is a move in that direction.

It’s time to stop treating our national forests as lumber warehouses. We now see the values of the whole forest and not just the commercially valuable trees.

We need to keep that vision. It will serve our economy and our children well.