Editor's Column

Guest Columns

Woods Wisdom

Notes From All Over

By: Jim Petersen

We must always consider the environment and people together, as though they are one, because the human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on Earth

One of four beautifully illustrated “Lumber” posters distributed by Coca Cola to the nation’s classroom teachers in 1943 (Gifted to Evergreen, Hermann Brothers Logging Co., Port Angeles, Washington).

In this issue we write about timber harvesting in America’s privately owned forests. “The Bountiful Harvest: Securing America’s Forest Future” is one of the most uplifting stories we’ve told in the 16 years we’ve been publishing Evergreen Magazine.

Most Americans equate timber harvesting with egregious environmental destruction. Small wonder. It’s been more than 20 years since the forest products industry mounted a serious and well-funded campaign designed to explain the role harvesting plays in the management and protection of the nation’s privately owned forests. The last such effort involved “Green America,” a quarterly publication of the now defunct American Forest Institute. It was both the inspiration for Evergreen and a dependable source of perspective for this writer during his years as a working journalist.

In the years since AFI closed up shop the industry’s altogether too small communications budget has been diverted to other seemingly more important matters. But what could be more vital to forestry’s future than seeing to it that each new generation of Americans grows up with a bedrock understanding that periodic timber harvesting is good for forests?

Not so many years ago even nontimber companies took on the job of explaining forestry to the nation’s schoolage youngsters. In war-torn 1943, the Coca Cola Bottling Company distributed four beautifully illustrated “Lumber” posters. Designed for use in classrooms, each “Our America” poster highlighted a different sector in what was then one of America’s most admired and strategically vital industries: the forest products industry. No. 1 in the full color series [reproduced nearby] highlighted logging; No 2 transportation; No. 3 wood uses and No. 4 developing new uses for wood.

It would be wonderful if Coke would re-issue these historic posters, if only to show just how far forestry has come over the last 60 years, but the refreshing candor they convey can’t even be found in timber industry literature today. Such is a measure of just how far our feel good culture has waded into the political correctness swamps. In this issue of Evergreen we hope to light the way out of the swamp.

In the course of our two-year investigation we traveled to 17 states, conducted more than 100 interviews, reviewed more than 200 scientific studies and took more than 2,000 photographs. We could have easily written a book covering what we learned, but ever-present budget constraints limit our report to a smattering of history, science and from-the-scene reports written in a conversational style that we hope stimulates your further interest in the role forest management is playing in providing our nation with forests that are tangibly and intrinsically abundant.

Begin with this one fact: there are nearly ten million private forest landowners in the United States. Their forestry objectives are as diverse as the 358 million acre landscape they own. Many own forests for the simple pleasure they bring. Others with names like Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade are big-time lumber and paper producers and are constantly on the lookout for ways to increase forest productivity. But Forest Service surveys reveal most of the nation’s private landowners own forests because they enjoy wildlife and hunting. For these landowners, timber harvesting is the tool of choice for creating, protecting or enhancing game habitat.

No matter the motive, timber harvesting is a vastly different enterprise than it was a generation ago. Gone are the days when luck and determination were all that was needed to propel a young man—often a high school dropout—to success in the logging industry. Chainsaws that cost a few hundred bucks have given way technologically advanced light-on-the-land logging systems that cost more than one million dollars. Bankers who thought nothing about financing pickups and saws think long and hard before financing such machines. Business plans and pro forma’s are necessities, and advanced degrees in business, finance, forestry, engineering, even biology, are increasingly common among successful loggers.

Rick and Deb Smith, husband and wife logging team from Kalispell, Montana, beside one of two late mechanical harvesters they own.

This issue’s many facets are made more meaningful if you start with the knowledge that in the late 1800s fear of a wood famine was so widespread that Congress created the National Forest system to insure that the nation would not run out of wood. Today, thanks to the billions of public and private sector dollars invested in science and technology, America’s forestland base is still 70 percent the size it was when the Pilgrims landed in 1620, and now lumber and paper are traded as commodities rather than the luxuries many feared they would become. This despite the enormous and still expanding wood fiber demands of a U.S. population that has grown from an estimated 3.9 million in 1790 to a surveyed 248.7 million in 1990. So the irony: it is the abundance of wood fiber—not its scarcity—that makes the public debate about “saving forests” possible. To the extent that some environmental groups continue to promote conflict
and refuse to acknowledge the capital investments that loggers and landowners are making in forest stewardship, the nation’s access to this abundance is at risk, for in the global marketplace capital is both fleeting and easily exported. As one logger suggested, “The question is not whether we will log, but what language we will speak on the job.” The connect-the-dots message for Americans who are worried about their forest legacy is simply this: landowners who are not permitted to manage their forests for the assets they value most will eventually sell to land developers, further limiting public access and perhaps irreparably damaging large expanses of wildlife habitat. This possibility is already a looming fear in the Northeast.

As is our custom, we have laid out this issue to be read from front to back. Each story builds on the next one, adding new perspective to your understanding of what it has taken to create this nation’s forest bounty.

We begin with “Whither Sustainability,” a short piece in which we point out that while public interest in protecting the environment is at an all time high, no country on earth consumes more wood fiber on a per capita basis than the United States. Many scientists believe the nation should be producing more of the wood fiber it consumes, but there is scant public support for such self-sufficiency.

Thereafter, in “Photosynthesis: Harnessing the free energy of the sun,” New Zealand scientist Wink Sutton explains how trees make wood, and why wood should be the structural building material of choice for a society concerned about its impacts on the environment.

Our main story, “The Bountiful Harvest: Securing America’s Forest Future,” is actually 13 stories in one. Nature, history, science, technology, politics and personal choices help shape a reprise filled with hope and resolve. Though not long, “Logging Comes of Age” might well be the most surprising story in this issue. Few people realize just how profoundly the logging industry has changed over the last 20 years. Technological advancements have speeded the transition, but it is the arrival of a new generation of business-first loggers that is driving a culture turned profession into the new century. The hell-roaring days are gone. Safety, conservation, productivity, efficiency and sustainability are the new watchwords.

There simply is not sufficient space in a 40-page magazine to use all of the information we gathered in the course of our long investigation. But thanks to a grant from Timberjack we now have a fine website, www.evergreenmagazine.com. For additional perspective be sure to log on and read “A Word About Frankentrees,” “Forestry at the Millennium,” “Certification in Oregon” and “Certification Wars: Why SFI Will Win.”

As is always the case, we have a great many people to thank for their help with this issue. Among them, Richard Lewis and the members of the Forest Resources Association. Minus their support—and that of the Oregon Logging Conference, Timberjack, Caterpillar and the Washington Contract Loggers Association—this project would never have been completed.

We thank them—and take pleasure in calling your attention to our Page 37 story about Log A Load For Kids, a remarkable charity that now enjoys wide support
among loggers and forest landowners.

Thanks also to Bob and Bart Depratu of Depratu Ford, Whitefish, Montana and Terry Andreessen, Timberline Auto Center, Libby, Montana for their roles in persuading the Montana Ford Dealers Advertising Association to donate a new 2001 Ford F-250 pickup to The Evergreen Foundation. See Page 38.

Bill Hagenstein, a friend of 30 years, read the entire manuscript at my request. At age 85 he is beyond doubt forestry’s greatest living historian. I asked him to make certain we told a story that was both accurate and reflective of historic and political nuances that are so often missing from today’s reporting. He says we did. I am again in his debt.

Finally, we want to thank Rick and Deb Smith for appearing on the cover of this issue. The Smiths are the first husband and wife logging team to ever appear on an Evergreen cover. We posed their photograph—another Evergreen first—because they rarely work side by side. Most days Rick is in the woods before daylight while Debbie stays behind to answer phones, take care of the company books and chase parts for the woods operation. Their business typifies today’s small family-owned logging company. We write about them in Chapter 13 of our main story.

If you take only one lesson away from this issue, take this one: where harvesting, public concern and forest policy converge we have many more choices than the Eden-or-Armageddon scenario so many Americans seem to have embraced. Science and technology provide an array of management choices that is unprecedented in forestry’s American experience. These choices, freely exercised by the nation’s private landowners, are the reason why America is blessed with such an abundance of productive and biologically diverse forests. From where we sit, America’s forest future is in good hands.

Onward we go,
Jim Petersen, Editor