Editor's Column

Guest Columns

Forest Facts

By: Dave Skinner

Continued from Part Three

Looking for a future

Along US Highway 26 between Unity and Austin Junction, this load of Idaho logs has crossed the Snake River into Oregon on a 200-mile plus haul. There’s one more hill to climb before arrival at either the Prairie City Wood Products or Grant Western mills owned by D.R. Johnson Company.

Aware that steady economies don’t stand on one leg, especially one dead, burnt or rotten, northeast Oregon’s elected leaders are striving to diversify the jobs base in northeast Oregon.

Wallowa County Board of Commissioners chair Mike Hayward married a local girl in 1978 and has “been here ever since.” Although Mr. Hayward has a degree in forestry from Washington State University, he’s been a tire monkey for Les Schwab, a ranch hand, and owned a resort at Wallowa Lake, so he knows a thing or two about economic diversification.

For Mr. Hayward and his peers, the economy is the issue, one these leaders think about deeply: “We have six counties in the state’s northeast Oregon economic analysis area. The significant number is the average wage per job. We are the lowest in the reporting area which is the lowest in the state, at about $23,800 per job, compared to the next lowest in our area at around $26,000 per year. The jobs have shifted from mill and other family-wage jobs to jobs that are either seasonal or barely over minimum wage. And no benefits.”

Union County Commissioner Colleen MacLeod backs Mr. Hayward: “For example, in 1979, we were at almost 90% of national and state income averages. In 1997, we were at 70%. The impacts of this low income are unlike anything I can think of since the Dust Bowl.” Commissioner MacLeod also points out that 21% of the jobs in the Union County/LaGrande area are sawmill jobs, and asks: “If those people in rural Oregon lose their jobs, where are they going to go? They’ll go to the big cities, what with existing transportation problems, housing costs, you name it, adding problems to urban communities that can’t handle what they’ve got already.”

On U.S. Highway 26 east of Dixie Summit, these two ghost trees keep close company with what may be tomorrow’s ghosts. The live trees are nicely green, as they should be in a streamside area in spring. However, they are competing intensely for water and sunlight, literally sucking each other (and the stream) dry, and the canopy is interlocked from the ground all the way to the tree tops. This is not a good place for a summertime lightning strike or errant cigarette.

There have been successful attempts at diversification. Mr. Hayward tells about a local kid who went to college and then Boeing. “He discovered he could do his job in Elgin. Now they make airplane components in Elgin.” Another company in Joseph makes specialized tires for bush planes, and Mr. Hayward hopes there is “some potential in making aviationrelated high-skill products here.”

Grant County’s Judge Reynolds brags up another success. Grant County and the City of John Day invested in a smallbusiness park to attract what he calls “small, non-conglomerate employers.” In the park is a company that makes archery bowstrings. The company began with two employees, quickly went to six, moved to the park, went to 13, now has 23 employees, and expects to start construction of its second building soon.

The owner “grew up here, went to school here, his parents are here, if he was gonna make it, it would be here, but he got a contract with Cabela’s.” If the business park had not been available, this prospering company would have had to move elsewhere. Judge Reynolds hopes to keep this firm, and perhaps build the same sort of “clustering” potential for hunting in Grant County that Hayward hopes to see for Wallowa County in aviation.

The town of Joseph has built a national reputation as a bronze artcasting center. Mr. Hayward tells how that came about: “There was a guy here who had a vision, and an artist who needed the service. They got their heads together, and the guy with vision also had some money, and started the business. That could happen again in some other industry.”

Which industry, nobody knows for certain. As encouraging as these new ventures may be, the jobs created so far are a relative handful. Community meetings have been held to look at options, what sort of businesses to recruit, but in Judge Reynolds’ view, “it doesn’t make a bit of difference what you want your community to be, it’s what it can be—based on what’s going on around it with the resources that are so plentiful. There’s a reason why John Day is where it is. Our communities exist here because there simply was a resource that provided economic opportunity. Communities should identify the purpose for which they exist. Once they identify that, they can build on it.”

The America that America forgot

This story would not be complete without a discussion of the social implications of the Iron Triangle and what will be lost if the Forest Service fails in the task it faces. How to describe it? Just imagine, slouched in the motel room, bored to tears, to the point where rooting through the police blotter looks entertaining: “Wallowa County Sheriff: No incidents to report; Enterprise Police Department: No incidents to report.” None? Cool!

Commissioner MacLeod echoes the sentiment of many: “This is still a pretty strong family area. Kids don’t get lost in small communities. In a big city you can lose kids. Things are a little slower out here. Parents aren’t busy doing other things.” Mr. Hayward, her counterpart in Wallowa County, proudly notes “this is a very good place to live and raise a family. Despite the challenges economically, we still rank Number One in Oregon in terms of third- and eighth grade reading and math. We still have a safe place.”

Some may argue that a “new economy” will materialize if the mills disappear. “You can’t say we’ll just go high-tech, there isn’t the population or skills to make a billion-dollar chip plant,” warns Kevin Tracy, a recent immigrant from Boise, home of Micron and Hewlett-Packard centers. Call centers? Mr. Hayward: “A few people thought recently we should have a call center, but call centers tend to be in areas with a tremendous potential employment base because they have high turnover.” Wallowa County, by contrast, has 7,150 residents, and no stoplights.

Tourism? Northeast Oregon lacks major lakes and has only two tiny (but fun) ski areas. The inherent seasonality and low wage structure of tourism has, in the view of Mr. Hayward and others, “impacts in terms of social implications that stem from having a long-term sense of being able to stay in a community. The number of four-and five-generation families in an area matters. Most are tied to the land through ownership, but some aren’t. But their dad worked at the local sawmill, their grandfather homesteaded 160 acres but couldn’t make it on 160 acres, so they went to work at the mill. That was kinda the way it was.”

JACK BOYD & BILL CHRISTENSEN Jack Boyd with mill manager Bill Christensen. Why are these guys smiling? With a week to breakup, the yard is almost full.

Jack Boyd “lived in a timber community, Seaside, Oregon, where tourism was touted. The police blotter used to be a little corner in the paper when I lived there. Now it takes up half the page. Without sounding like a snob, when you bring in tourism you bring in minimum wage people, who bring a whole lot of things: High turnover in schools, drugs, so on. It’s not an answer to the economic woes of losing your basic industry.”

“Let’s take Mitchell [Oregon] years ago,” suggests Andy Munsey. “When I first moved there, the mill had just shut down and moved to Prineville. That was market attrition, but that little community was a good community. The loggers lived there, the school was the heart and soul of the town, and people lived above the poverty level. But as years passed, it was down to where most people were below the poverty level, and they weren’t the most desirable people. It was just an evolution of a community into a ghost town.”

The evolution is starting. Roy Garten has been a forester in Wallowa County for 34 years and raised a family here. Besides the decline in the national forests he has witnessed, “the other thing that really bothers me about all this is decline of a great way of life in all these small towns. The schools are declining, and this is becoming a place of the haves and the have-nots.”

Evergreen stopped off at the mothballed North Powder sawmill on impulse and wound up visiting its caretaker, Mr. Bauck, recently retired from 42 years logging, mostly in the Triangle. The discussion came to the “common wisdom” that loggers are dumb, and Bauck huffed “Dumb loggers don’t last long...they either get hurt or go broke.” That led into the value of, and respect for education: “I had two young guys that would work for me for six months until they got enough money and they’d go back to college ‘til they ran out of money. It was a standard deal, ‘when you run out of money, get back here, I need you.’ One of them, it took him about four or five years. One day out by Heppner, I looked up and he was standing with some paper in his hand, whooping and hollering. He’d justgraduated from college, he’d come to  show all of us. Then he told me, ‘well, I don’t need ya’ no more, Mel.’ [laughs] He did very well for himself over the years; I think his time in the woods gave him a work ethic, which is very important.”

The vast majority of the people we interviewed for this issue came from multigenerational backgrounds such as Mr. Hayward married into. Will there be another generation? Randy Burgess’ father and grandfather were mill managers. After Mr. Burgess graduated from high school and tried college, tried Portland: “I couldn’t get used to the crowds, the traffic and the crime. I get up every morning and I appreciate where I am, to live in the beautiful place where I am.” So he ended up in the Elgin mill. Will any of his five kids be in the fourth generation? “Nooooo. No. I tell all my kids that. I made a point of that. Don’t. My dad told me that.”

LARRY CUBBS “It seems so strange to make all these advances in everything else and turn your back on the forestry we’ve known forever, and just let the world fall apart around us, and say it’s a good thing.”

Ken Evans’ granddaughter considered pursuing a forestry degree in college: “I was very careful to not push her either way, and I support her, but nothing today would encourage me.” She has since chosen another path.

“If you step back and look at the community ecology,” observes Ted Ferrioli, “you have to have all the components that make it function. As any environmentalist will tell you, the loss of any ecosystem component causes the system to fail. If you really believe in the concept of ecology, you can’t throw any of the pieces away. None of these components are expendable.” Commissioner MacLeod feels the human side is being ignored. “If the American public doesn’t care about people, they do care about their assets. If you can’t consider the people of the West, at least consider the assets you are destroying.”

Last call

Is this really the end game in the Blue Mountains? Certainly, the industry and the surrounding communities depend on the Forest Service, as they always have. But this dependence is mutual. The collapse of timber management programs in other parts of the country, accompanied by catastrophic wildfire, always leads to the same inescapable conclusion: without loggers, without mills, the Forest Service cannot fulfill its stated mission of “Caring for the land and serving people." Under the false premise that eliminating timber harvest would “protect” the environment, our Forest Service is facing outrageous fuel loads, accumulations so vast they threaten entire landscapes. Remember that thousand-mile-long train left stranded in the Blue Mountains the past ten years? Divide those 71,739 carloads by ten years of 365 days and you get about 19.35 carloads per day.

An American Forest Resources Council report written by consulting forester Chuck Burley estimates that the remaining 15 Iron Triangle manufacturing facilities have the ability to process 849 million board feet annually, running at two-shift level, broken down into 499 MMBF of National Forest harvest as well as 350 million feet from other sources.

In carload terms, 46 cars a day, all carrying lumber converted into products  that people want and will buy, rather than added to a wildfire nobody wants. Burley’s report goes on to show that if these mills ran full blast, they could process 965 million board feet of national forest wood a year, plus the wood from other sources. Two reasons for doing so might be to treat 10% a year of Wildland Urban Interface forests that now threaten homes and private property; and to manage another 5% a year of forests that Americans might prefer not burn. Such an accelerated harvest rate would also enable managers to whittle away at the huge pile of firewood that has built up since 1995; the net fuel removal given current growth and full production comes to around 289 MMBF, or around 15 flat-cars a day.

That might not sound like much. Even at full bore, it would take over 35 years to get rid of all the wood that built up in the last ten years. And some will surely burn before it can be harvested. After all, the Blue Mountains got their name from the numerous fires set by Indians and by lightning—these lands were a fire-adapted system. But then again, every 13 years or so, one fewer Biscuit Fire would be out in the woods ready to explode—rather than a new Biscuit piling up unharvested every six years as now.

Perhaps after 35 years of a full-bore program, managers can consider reintroducing fire into the Blue Mountains forests as a normal part of good forestry; but not before. The Forest Service, and Congress, and all Americans, should think this over, then decide. “The shareholders are the public, us,” observes Bruce Dunn. “I don’t know that it’s nuts to make a profit on public lands. We got these lands for a couple cents an acre from the French. So every tree, every fish, every drop of water should be pure profit, after covering overhead. We shouldn’t be losing millions and billions. We should look at the forest as our principal, and the trees growing as our interest. Not every acre has to be treated, not every tree needs to be cut, but to me, burning down the capital and not harvesting the interest is a lousy way to ‘save’ forests.” Declares Mr. Fullerton: “The opportunity right now is marching down the path of taking Class III land and putting it back in Class I,” taking forest lands primed for uncontrolled wild fire and restoring them to a safer, more historic condition.

KEVIN TRACY “I’m not much of a writer, I’m not real articulate, but after a few beers I can sure speak my mind. But I do have a passion, I just wish I could say the magic words to help people understand.”

“We’re able to do that because the infrastructure and expertise are still here,” Mr. Fullerton explains. “We can create a better environment, jobs, have fewer natural disasters if you will, and positively impact all the other strengths we have here, the hunting, fishing and tourism that go along with the beautiful country that we have. If you’re managing in a scientific manner, doing the things we can do, you have it all, literally. We have strong communities, strong schools, low crime, healthy forests; everyone has a job…what more can you ask for? Keeping all this is the opportunity, but you can piss it away in a heartbeat, too.”

Time’s up, folks. Choose now and choose wisely, or your grandkids will regret it for a long time to come.

"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."