An argument for logging
By Daryl L. Hunter, Unfiltered 10-19-06
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There have been few characters of American folklore with the stature of Paul Bunyon. This legendary hero of an earlier day possessed strength, speed, and skill that matched the vastness of North America. According to legend, Paul Bunyan and his giant blue ox, Babe, left many a mark on the landscape, receiving credit for creating Puget Sound, the Grand Canyon, and the Black Hills, among others. A lumberjack hero admired by all who read or heard of him.
On the third, full weekend of June Encampment Wyoming hosts the annual Rocky Mountain Champion Lumberjack Completion where loggers come from all over the country to compete for the coveted title. Chips fly during this competition using chain saws, axes and hand saws, the men and women competitors cut down trees competing in events that include: Tree Felling, two-man handsaw tree felling, two-man handsaw, two-woman handsaw, power saw log bucking, one-man handsaw, man & woman handsaw team, choker setting, axe chopping, pole throw, axe throw, power saw log bucking, power saw log bucking, and the mad loggers chainsaw throw.
It is refreshing to hear that this proud profession is still celebrated despite its vilification by America’s tree huggers who have turned a blind eye to their need for timber products in their crusade to reserve our forests for the Bark Beetle and fire.
Scientists and forest managers continue to tell us proactive forest management is a solution for overcrowded, unhealthy, and fire-prone forests. Thinning and logging reduce fuels and can make wildfires far less devastating while making mountain communities far safer. But some refuse to listen.
Estranged Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore in his effort to bring sanity to the debate has published Pacific Spirit; The Forest Reborn, and Greenspirit: Trees Are the Answer, two books that bring science and ecology to the discussion on the importance of using the forest resources in a pragmatic and responsible way. Moore says that, above all, sensible environmentalists rely on scientific evidence. They believe in compromise and cooperation, and work hard to find constructive solutions to real issues. A tactic his former colleagues of the environmental movement find hard to swallow.
Proof that Patrick Moore’s approach is bearing fruit is the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), a comprehensive system of principles, objectives and performance measures developed by foresters, conservationists, and scientists that combine the perpetual growing and harvesting of trees with the long-term protection of wildlife, plants, soil and water quality. There are currently over 150 million acres of forestland (equaling 24 Yellowstones) in North America enrolled in the SFI program, making it among the world's largest sustainable forestry programs.
Here in eastern Idaho and western Wyoming it is a shame that logging has come to a screeching halt. Due to our overabundance of squeaky wheels here in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem our forests are being managed for recreation only. This has triggered the death of our forest products industry which dates back to the time of our settlers.
Throughout the Bridger-Teton and Caribou-Targhee, National forests vast stands of bug-killed trees are increasingly visible. Our recent draughts have made our trees susceptible to Bark Beetle infestation. Decreased tree moisture prevents the manufacture of tree sap which is the trees protection from Bark Beetle infestation. Our draught has abated for now but we are still left with millions of bug-killed trees and a thriving population of Bark Beetles seeking another opportunity for exponential growth during our next dry spell.
When we choose not to log our forests, by default we are choosing to look at burnt forests instead. Vast stands of dead timber are fires waiting to happen and when they do vast stands of healthy forest will burn with them.
Trees of our national forests are a natural resource. When a tree is cut down, we plant another. Renewability makes the forest different from many other resources. Since 1950, nearly 95 million acres has been replanted nation wide. Since then Western timber resources have increased each year. Properly managed, forests will last forever, while still supplying the wood products we all need. It’s a never-ending sustainable cycle.
Whoever wins the Rocky Mountain Champion Lumberjack Completion has achieved an accomplishment that Paul Bunyon would be proud of. All who compete can be proud of keeping a fine tradition alive. All who have the tenacity to carry on the honorable tradition of logging in our woods deserve our gratitude for risking life and limb to harvest products we need and making our forest homes a safer place, not our wrath for harvesting products we need and making our forest homes a safer place.
Daryl L. Hunter Publishes "The Upper Valley Free Press"
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Comments
I find it somewhat ironic that Mr. Hunter would chose New West as a forum. The term "New West" was initially popularized by writer Raye Ringholz, journalists Timothy Egan and David Olinger, geographers William Riebsame and Peter Walker, historians Patricia Limerick and William Wyckoff, economists Ed Whitelaw and Thomas Power, and law professor Charles Wilkinson. The term has come to denote the declining importance of resource extraction and the rise of the Internet, light industry, and tourism/recreation.
Yet readers should be under no illusion that Mr. Hunter is offering anything more than a very slanted perspective and incomplete history of resource extraction in the West. Take for example, his praise of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. A more thorough reading of the matter shows that the SFI is not a seal of environmental approval; it’s more of a public relations program. For example:
1. The SFI doesn’t prohibit logging and purchasing of old growth or endangered forests;
2. The SFI doesn’t limit or prohibit the conversion of biologically-diverse natural forests to monocultural tree farms;
3. The SFI allows clearcuts the size of 116 football fields and some clearcuts can be much larger.
4. The SFI's "cut a tree, plant a tree" model of forestry is making sure the logging industry sustains fiber flow, but does nothing to sustain forest ecosystems such as wildlife habitat and species diversity.
5. SFI standards don’t account for differences between private lands, public lands, or even the U.S. and Canada, even though legal frameworks are radically different, such as the U.S. Endangered Species Act;
6. The SFI doesn’t prohibit genetically modified trees;
7. Most of what the SFI does protect or prohibit is voluntary, rather than systemically required.
Mr. Hunter then implies that squeaky-wheeled conservationists are to blame for the loss of logging jobs and timber mills in the West. There's no discussion of industry trends like mechanization in the woods, lack of investment in stateside mills, competitive advantages overseas, the lure of vast tracts of forest in Siberia, Canada and our own private forests in the Southeast – all easier and cheaper to harvest than forests in our dry, mountainous and slow-growing West.
Mr. Hunter further states that " When we choose not to log our forests, by default we are choosing to look at burnt forests instead. Vast stands of dead timber are fires waiting to happen and when they do vast stands of healthy forest will burn with them."
What, no discussion about how complex forest ecology has evolved in response to fire, that forests burn naturally? No acknowledgement that industry-backed federal policy of fighting any and all fires has resulted in unnatural fuel loads? No science that shows when fuel-loaded forests burn, they burn with such ferocity and heat that soils are sterilized? No research that shows that harvesting fire- or beatle-killed timber causes more damage to the forest than leaving it alone?
Mr. Hunter's implication that logging equals safe forests is historically untrue: Look at Peshtigo, Wisconsin, October 8, 1871. Twenty years earlier, (before Paul Bunyan), there was unbroken forest covering 200,000 square miles in the North Woods. Extractive logging for lumber, railroad ties and clearing lands for agriculture left mountainous slash piles and dog-hair regrowth in its wake. A slash pile fire got away, burned 1.25 million acres of pine forest and killed 1,500 people. (The great Chicago Fire, a day later, grabbed the headlines.)
We have regulatory agencies, regulations and conservationists because cowboys have overgrazed, loggers have overlogged, miners and wildcatters have walked away from gawd-awful messes. Children stories about Paul Bunyan and Babe, or logging celebrations do not undo the reality and history of taxpayer-subsidized logging in the West, hundreds of thousands of miles of logging roads that fragment wildlife habitat and wildfire policies that have turned Western forests into a tinderbox.
Sustainable forestry in the real, not fake sense of the term, is possible. It just costs more, or at least is less profitable to the big timber companies. It is possible for loggers to have jobs, for mills to run and for us to have functioning forests that are more than tree plantations. But that's the New West, not Old West folk tales.
Secondly, reforestation efforts on National Forests include species-diverse seedlings selected because they survived within the historic range of variablility for the logged site. Monocultures are definitely non-sustainable and detrimental to the forests--that's why today's foresters select diverse species that are natural to the site.
Finally, what on God's green earth are you talking about: genetic modification of seedlings? Can you provide ANY evidence that genetically modified seedlings are being used on public lands at all? I live down the street from a Forest Service nursery--believe me, those are not genetically modified seedlings.
It's just fine to have a dissenting opinion, but I take offense at some of the misinformation in your post.
The New West is fun because it isn’t monolithic; the posts come from every view. It is important for those that wish to change the West to have a complete understanding of what they are changing.
It is easy to vilify faceless corporations but the big St Anthony ID villain, Louisiana Pacific did business with about a hundred independent subcontractors including timber fallers, skidder operators, truckers etc. many third and fourth generation people, logging folks with families. When the environmentalists got the mill closed they didn’t hurt a corporation, they hurt a community composed of grandmothers, babies and hardworking fathers, they do have faces. It is the same at mills everywhere. Liberals claim to be the populists, I disagree.
Since the New West isn’t monolithic maybe we will hear from some loggers as we heard from the cowboys in my cowboy threads.
What I do know is that Daryl's postings are getting more and more like Marion's and Craig's and Baden's and Geddes' and even the occasion zinger from "Kyle the Hemp Boy," none of whom seem to have personal expertise, training, or experience with the isuses on which they post, and I don't believe that their coordinated attraction to a site like NewWest is coincidental. For that matter, what exactly does Daryl do for a living that provides him enough money to rent a horse pasture in the Hole?
Casey, you're right that the Peshtigo fire couldn't happen today.
And yet, the Peshtigo fire can be viewed as the dark, flip-side to the benign, Disneyesque Paul Bunyan mythology about the business of logging. Somewhere between these two extremes are today's realities. Peshtigo is also the logical consequence of laizze faire, unrestrained, unregulated logging, which some elements of the logging industry have been calling for since Reagan.
Regarding monocultures – by species or age group. You're right that enlightened foresters avoid monocultures, but monocultures are still very attractive to some of the big timber/fiber/paper companies, simply because it fits in with their industrialized view that forests are crops to be managed and harvested. They do so on their private forest farms and would love to do so in our national forests.
As for genetically modified trees, the United Nations reported last year that there were 225 outdoor field trials of GM trees worldwide in 16 countries. Most of the research is being focused on Poplars (47%), Pines (19%) and Eucalyptus (7%). The main traits being studied are herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, wood chemistry (including reduction of lignin content), and fertility. Industry, academia and yes, the U.S. Forest Service, are all researching GM trees. There are 27,300 entries in Google under "genetically modified" AND "Forest Service research"
Busy, busy, busy.
Mr. Hunter: it is NOT "easy to villify faceless corporations." One has to do one's homework, read annual reports, academic research and the business press.
Consider Thomas Power, economics professor at the University of Montana: "One way to get a more accurate perspective of these local mill closures is to look outside the region and to national business analysts who do not have particular local political axes to grind. What we experience in the Pacific Northwest often does not have its origins within our region. Because we are integrated into the national and international economies, we are regularly buffeted by economic forces that have nothing at all to do with particular decisions made in here. Blaming local policies you happen to disagree with for changes that are driven by economic forces originating in international markets is simply self-interested scapegoating."
For the better part of 30 years, I have lived in small towns that have lost their primary employers – mines and mills. I have seen the human face of pain, confusion and unemployment among neighbors and friends. Yet, the conventional wisdom at the coffee shops and bars was, is that it is always the fault of environmentalists. There is little or no discussion about how market forces, domestic or foreign competition or over-production might have played a role in how or why corporate leaders pulled the plug.
Professor Power also notes that "partisan political bickering makes two fundamental economic errors. First, it assumes the problem lumber mills face is lack of access to raw material rather than a surplus of raw material that is driving prices down. Second, it assumes that gaining access to the most costly sources of supply at the very time that the prices mills can get for their products are at record lows would some how help the mills. Logging the timber in roadless areas is costly because it is located in isolated, steep, remote timber stands that require new road systems and special harvesting techniques; to compound the problems with these areas, in general, they are dominated by relatively low valued trees. This is the opposite of the type of supply that would currently be useful to mills, at least if they were asked to carry those costs rather than shifting them onto US taxpayers.
"Riding the roller coaster of international commodity prices is an unavoidable feature of a natural resource economy. Our farmers and ranchers, our mines and smelters, and, of course, our forest products mills have been doing it for a century or more. The consequences are not pleasant for any of us. The economic instability and insecurity that these commodity price cycles bring to our communities ultimately make them and their residents poorer. That is the reason that most of those over-specialized communities are currently focused on trying to diversify their economies."
With the world marketplace playing such a roll in devastating our logging communities I guess that the environmental movement can call off the dogs and kennel their pit bulls of Earthjustice, Earth Liberation Front and Earth First. Maybe they can denounce Edward Abbey’s monkey wrenching and quit the deadly practice of spiking trees.
An official at the Bridger-Teton National Forest told me timber sales were politically unfeasible in the Bridger-Teton because of squeaky wheels. The town of Three Sisters in Oregon nearly burnt down in 2002 because the dangerous tinderbox that abuts it wasn’t being logged because of an ongoing Earthjustice lawsuit.
The government shouldn’t subsidize public land logging. As a firm believer in a marketplace economics the logging companies should cover the cost of production, and pass the cost along to the buyer, and let it succeed of fail according to marketplace conditions. Gratuitous litigation shouldn’t be part of the price. In many places the skidder and yarder should be replaced with the helicopter. When you say: “laizze faire, unrestrained, unregulated logging, which some elements of the logging industry have been calling for since Reagan”. Brodie, because of politics they must ask for more that they want in order to achieve a reasonable compromise, if they only ask for what they need they will get an unreasonable compromise – politics.
Mike - I believe that where I grew up in San Luis Obispo California may qualify as the west. Having spent several years in Phillipsville California I learned a lot about logging although my learning was mostly over a beer at the Riverwood with my logger friends, I continue to learn from my friends (former loggers) in Idaho and Wyoming. Anecdotal lessons over a beer are limiting so I delve deeper with research.
Mike, as a political wonk with an unending curiosity of my world I learn about many things, then I write about them, but I don’t make much money at it so I augment my income with photography, web design, and a few web sites of my own. I have had hundreds of jobs including, fishing guide, snowmobile guide, tour guide, construction worker. bartender, wrangler, etc. and yes for a short time in a log mill, this has given me a wide range of experiences to draw on. Like Brodie, for most of my adult life I have lived in small mountain towns in California, Alaska, Wyoming and Idaho, that are under assault by environmentalists. I have seen the human face of pain, confusion and unemployment among neighbors and friends, and unlike the environmentalist, it emotionally effects me! As an adventurous vagabond I would just move on but those with roots in these communities were stuck with unkind realities.
Like you Mike, I am concerned about my world, we just view it differently, my concern for it is why I write. What I write about concerns me so I research it. I don’t have to be what I write about. I may be a charlatan writer but I do write, and people read it and some pay me to do so.
Casey – I rather enjoyed Mike’s coordinated attraction conspiracy paranoia. :)
Mike, the New West kept coming up on my Google News alerts and I liked what I saw and thought that I might be able to make a contribution of an under represented point of view. Like it or not, many like me are a part of the West and should be a part of the dialogue about how it is to be renewed. It would be a shame and a loss if the New West morphed into moveon.org.
Oh, and Mike, Casey is right, your posts would be better if they were more thoughtful, less accusatory, and less vitriolic like Brodie’s.
Brodie – Everything I advocate needs to be carried on in a responsible and sustainable way as we need to take care of our world as well as our people as the two goals are symbiotically linked. My hope is for my retro perspectives is to trigger empathy for endangered culture that is unfairly vilified by agenda driven, tunnel visioned, activists. I find a gross paucity of empathy from the liberals that have migrated to the west.
Point well taken (walk a mile in my moccasins...), but the number of people who've worked timber sales (either for the Forest Service or for a timber company) are very, very few compared to the larger population. I'm a natural resources policy wonk, so I sometimes know more than the general public, but bow to specialists, who thankfully take pity on me and cut through jargon, pointing out what is essential, rather than merely important information.
The political pressures are considerable for timber sale administrators, and the vast majority are admirably professional. I do not envy them.
Uh, well, actually I have. (I'll bet you totally didn't expect that.)
I've been a harvest inspector on an Idaho national forest on five different timber sales, most recently in 2003. Administrators and inspectors generally do not write the mitigations (that is the role of the NEPA team and silviculturalists coming up with a prescription for the area and working closely with presale foresters), and the BMPs were not designed by us, but we accepted those designed by the State Department of Environmental Quality. So I do need to point out, Schmalenberg, that your stated roles and duties in your comment were not really pertinent in the situations I was in (and I'm not sure they'd be pertinent on any of the other National Forests in this region). The role of the administrator and inspector is to take the contract and assist the contractor in making sure that all the requirements are met.
I'm no longer in that particular career field, but Brodie, thanks for the kind words about the job timber sale administrators do. Working logging jobs was one of the happiest times of my career, and I have tremendous respect for those involved--whether it is taking a stand to ensure what you value is protected (wild spaces, old growth, etc.), or if it is the sawyer on the ground trying to make all his ends meet and stay alive in a very dangerous job.
"The Eco-Tally-ban". Sorry, but he's got zero credibility.
Trees have been planted in excess numbers to make sure there was complete reforestation of logged areas. Absent management, there is no precommercial thinning, no commercial thinning, no harvest cuts. The trees are now crowed, using all the available water and nutrients, and in the tyranny of the majority, all are suffering from the inability to fend off insects, to grow with thrift. The previously logged, planted areas are now tinder for stand replacement fire. I hardly think that is what reasonable people want from forest management: fire fighting costs of next to two billion dollars annually, and no off setting revenue. Wonder where the camp ground maintenance money, the trail improvement money, the road money now goes? To pay the fire fighting bills.
I don't think anyone is advocating logging old growth till its gone. Indians managed the forest for upwards of 15,000 years by fire, by moving plants, by moving animals, by using useful elements and burning the undesireable elements. Europeans did not find "wilderness", but a managed environment. And began to change how that management would happen, not always in old Indian ways. We can probably thank lawyers for most of the landscape management changes, because it is only since their arrival that we have had strict meets and bounds tort concerns.
I do think, however, that any land that has been logged and the vegetative response determined by directed planting, needs to have management, species thinning and removal. Doing nothing has turned out to be a disaster. On the Oregon coast there are doug fir planted in the fog belt which is best suited to spruce, hemlock and cedar, and that doug fir annually loses most of its needles to Swiss needle cast while the other species prosper. Those doug firs need to be logged as soon as they can grow large enough to have value, and indigenous species planted to replace them. The doug fir monoculture in that area is a disaster. I am sure there are millions of acres of lodgepole or ponderosa pine overstocked, waiting to burn.
On a global basis, I cannot believe that all the wood going into Montana's McMansion ranchettes is from a recycle bin somewhere. Most probably comes from Canada, where British Columbia, by itself, outproduces the US west of the Mississippi in terms of lumber production, mostly on Crown lands. Millions of board feet of lumber from managed forests in the Baltic states comes to the US, as well as all the usual suspects selling tropical hardwoods sold to buy weapons in African and Asian war zones. Native forest land in Chile and Argentina, as well as New Zealand have been planted to radiata pine, ponderosa pine and doug fir, the lumber finding markets in the US. It is still trees being cut, just not in my backyard. We just get the smoke from fires, the suppression bill, the rehabilitation (the comedy hour) bill, and all those good feelings about how we are saving the environment.
Every new home is built on former farm or forest land, with materials that provided habitat for plants and animals. Only by subscribing to a retroactive vasectomy plan, or the wisdom of the atomic weapon armed jihadists, will humans not have an impact on this place for a very long time. We can use the solar energy of plant growth, and its renewable apsect of regeneration over time, to provide for our continuation of species and life on earth. No or not or never, somehow the protectionist mantra concerning all logging, is not reasonable or prudent, now or before or in the future. bear bait
In my quest to save the jobs of the people of the Greater Yellowstone Region, something GYE liberals don’t give a damn about, I did in 2001 refer to the radical environmentalists that are possessed with religious like zeal ‘The Eco-Tally-ban’. (environmentalists that want to tally up as many bans as possible) a play on words, if you will. Since I first published ‘The Eco-Tally-Ban’ I have toned down my rhetoric but if the shoe fits, wear it!
K – you have to admit that at the time of publication in 2001 environmentalist, monkey wrenching, anarchist, saboteurs had killed more Americans than the Taliban. They have credibility as terrorists.
For those who wish to read the article.
Damn it, just when I thought I was getting some credibility – K - goes and blows it for me!
I must have missed those 24 deaths.
Also, as a response to your 10/22 post. There is no town of Three Sisters. There is a town of Sisters, but it was never threatened in 2002. The resort community of Black Butte Ranch was threatened by the Cache Mountain fire in 2002. But having worked at the ranch in the fiery summer of 1979 (Tollgate fires), it wasn't the first time.
When you build a resort adjacent to the Deschutes National Forest (http://www.reedbros.com/index.cfm?select=blackbutte/showdetails&area=SH&lot=10), which has a historical fire return interval of 15-25 years, you're going to get threatened every once in a while.
If we've proven anything with our forest management, it's that you cannot prevent fires by logging.
Hyperbole may make for excite the base, but it should at least be accurate.
Go Beavs!