Editor's Column

Guest Columns

Woods Wisdom

Notes From All Over

By: Dave Skinner

Continued from part one

Too Many Here, Too Few There

In late 2005, E. D. Hovee & Company prepared a report for the Oregon Forest Resources Institute entitled Baseline Forest Growth and Mortality Assessment. Using data from three different data bases in the rough time frame of 1990 to 2004, the report shows Oregon’s forests growing over ten billion board feet a year. About four billion is harvested, two billion dies, and four billion keeps on growing, adding to the total volume. So, in general, more trees are being grown than cut in Oregon. But the devil is always in the details—and the details here are troubling. In eastern Oregon’s seven national forests, which are growing at a rate of 1.8 billion board feet annually, 775 million board feet die annually, while only 184 million board feet are harvested, which means these forests are adding 800 million board feet of new biomass annually, or, as a cynic would say, “we are adding 800 million board feet of firewood and bug food.”

Indeed, as the Hovee study points out, “mortality is substantially higher on public lands than private lands in western and eastern Oregon. On federal lands, mortality far exceeds harvest removals on both sides of the Cascades [with] adverse implications for forest health and risk of uncharacteristically intense forest fire.”

This, dear readers, is a quite generous understatement. Trees dying on the stump don’t just disappear. They will, of course, eventually rot and fall down, but in dry Eastside forests, they’ll likely burn first, and burn big. How big? Well, Hovee’s statistics suggest there is 24 billion board feet more wood standing in Eastside forests today than there was in 1990. That’s six Biscuit Fires’worth, in just 15 years.

If we put all that wood through a mill then loaded it on 74-foot spine-flat cars, which carry roughly 90,000 to 99,000 “board measure” feet (which in turn run between 1.5 and 2.1 times tree board feet, depending on mill efficiency), our train would be over 454,736 cars, or 6,373 miles long, not counting 12,746 locomotives to pull it. At 62 miles per hour, we’d have to wait four and a half days for it to go by. If we simply took all those logs and piled them up in one spot, using the generalization that a thousand board feet of saw timber logs is 183 cubic feet, the mountain of logs (4.392 billion cubic feet) would bury the tallest building in America (Chicago’s 1,450-foot Sears Tower and a good amount of the Loop) by over 150 feet. Got a match?

Furthermore, according to Forest Service data collected from 1996-2005, the Iron Triangle national forests grew 765 MMBF of new wood. Harvest averaged 98.7 MMBF, while 384 MMBF died, with net growth of 282 MMBF. The net firewood buildup in those ten years: 6.66 billion board feet; or 1.5 Biscuit fires worth (the Biscuit burned four billion feet on 500,000 acres in southern Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest in 2002); or a train “only” 71,739 cars and 1005 miles long, with 2010 engines. Let’s add something else to the mix. The Hovee data shows that on private lands in eastern Oregon, 462 million board feet grew annually, 528 million were harvested, 87 million died, for an average net decrease of 152 million board feet a year. Comparing Hovee’s regional numbers with the Forest Service figures for the Blue Mountains also shows a higher mortality rate in the Blue Mountains versus the region, 51% compared to 44%, both rates being a lot higher than the Eastside private mortality rate of 19%. In forestry terms, federal forests are sick compared to private forests, and the Iron Triangle forests are the sickest.

But the private land data is troubling even if the mortality numbers say health and vigor are acceptable. The Hovee study points out that “Private lands east of the Cascades represent the only category for which net growth is negative for the time frame indicated.”

The situation is easy to grasp: On one side are comparatively sick federal forests with insufficient harvest to address problems of high mortality and a frightening fuel buildup. On the other side are comparatively healthy, low lowmortality private forests that are nonetheless being over-harvested. And caught in the middle are the communities of northeast Oregon, caught in a perfect political, scientific and economic storm that may soon turn the Iron Triangle into a ring of fire.

“The forest is not going to get healthy without us. It’s not possible. You don’t thin forests without loggers, you don’t remove fuels without mills.”

The Crunch

Fifteen years ago, the Iron Triangle wood-basket supported 29 manufacturing facilities, including sawmills, plywood plants, chip yards and a paper mill. When the Forest Service sale program crashed, so did half the mills. The survivors have been harvesting from eastern Oregon’s 1.139 million acres of non-federal commercial timber, the other 32% of commercial forest in the region, betting that common sense to eventually prevail on federal land. But as the Hovee data shows, it’s nearing time to cash in the chips.

The nearly empty log yards at northeast Oregon’s remaining mills unmask the looming timber supply crisis. Boise Building’s (formerly Boise Cascade) Region Wood Procurement Manager Buck Fullerton explains: “We’re probably getting an average of 20-25% of our wood from public sources, and half of that is coming from state lands in Idaho. The other half is coming from Forest Service ground in Idaho, Oregon and Washington. We’re getting less than 5% from the three forests around here.” The rest is private and the trees are running out.

R-Y Timber “dirt” forester Bruce Dunn, who has spent most of his 37-year career in Idaho, sees irony in Oregon sawmills “hauling logs from the north end of the Payette valley near New Meadows to Pilot Rock, John Day, and Prairie City. You have roughly 195,000 acres of Boise ground, six National Forests, a fair amount of private land, and at least four parcels of state ground big enough to be managed as forests, and only one mill which uses roughly 30 million feet a year, near New Meadows? What’s wrong here?”

Kevin Tracy, a log scaler for Boise in La Grande, builds on Mr. Dunn’s point: “It’s like a cancer that started in the sagebrush and is spreading into the big-timber country. Boise used to be a mill town.”

Kinzua’s Mr. Munsey talks about the effects of this cancer: “A good example is in Arizona. The Forest Service there wanted to thin 50,000 acres, but there was no infrastructure to harvest and process it. So we hauled the logs from there, up HERE!”

Mr. Munsey rolls his eyes and shakes his head: “Economically, it would not work for them, but they had no way to process it down there. I had a group of ten ranchers from Espanola, New Mexico come and talk to me, they said ‘We’ll help finance it, you build a mill, we’ll guarantee you 40 million feet a year; we need to do this to manage our lands. We need someplace to take this wood.’”

Evergreen has written about this cancer for more than 15 years: the loss of milling capacity and the downstream impact on forest management in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, South Dakota and Wyoming We’ve also reported on the swarm of devastating wildfires in those states. Is eastern Oregon next or eastern Washington, or Idaho or Montana?

Dan Bishop, timber manager for Prairie Wood Products in Prairie City and Grant Western of John Day, muses “you know, ten years ago, we had a hundred million feet under contract here. Today we are hand to mouth, with sales under contract, state, private, BLM, Forest Service, of sixteen million feet. Between here in Prairie City and John Day, we go through about eight million feet a month. It’s pretty tight. You can’t plan.”

The Prairie City stud mill also runs a cogeneration boiler. Electricity sales don’t make much profit. It’s the free steam for the kilns that makes cogeneration worthwhile for Mr. Bishop, but, “See our log supply?” he asks. “That’s about thirty days of fuel out there, while we like to keep it at ninety days. It is so low because our mills have been running one shift since last year—because we can’t get the log supply.”

Wallowa Forest Products timber manager Jack Boyd says flatly: “We’re in trouble. I’ve got six months worth of wood in front of me. Most of my wood, probably 80%, is gate-wood [unplanned truckloads bought at the front gate]. With what I’m used to (laughs), six months of wood is a long way out. It’s hand to mouth. We’re not a non-profit organization. We can’t run a deficit for any length of time. We were down for almost a year.”

Long hauls and expensive fuel pinch, too. “Our reach is about 250 miles,” Mr. Boyd says. “I’ve had to go into the state of Washington, some from the Yakama reservation, but they’ve quit selling, their two new mills are taking almost all their allowable cut. We’re getting some Washington DNR [logs], some private. We also are reaching into Idaho, Forest Service and private. With fuel prices the way they are right now, we can’t go any farther, and the recent increase has limited us quite a bit in the last year.”

The North Powder Lumber Company mill in North Powder lies dormant, waiting for a change in Forest Service policy. But nobody can say when owner D.R. Johnson will decide to scrap it.

Fuel prices have a whammy at the other end, as Kevin Tracy points out: “When the mill at Cascade [Idaho] was going, private landowners around there would get $1,000 a load for stumpage, and now $500 of that is burned up in diesel getting the wood over here.” And the coming crunch in Oregon combined with a lack of demand in southern Idaho is “a big concern for Idaho Department of Lands. If I was a private landowner over there, I’d get my ground mowed off,” Mr. Tracy warns.

There’s always the option of “mowing off” private holdings, cutting and running, but the idea is anathema to everyone Evergreen interviewed, at least while there is still hope the Forest Service will see the light. As Dan Bishop puts it, “we have a lot of fee lands, but we’re a pretty new company having been here about 30 years when Don Johnson [owner of D.R. Johnson Lumber Company] decided to enter the area. We had to buy the land, and then pay for it, and the way you pay for it is to log it. We’ve done so, and done a good job, but doggone it, we’re not going to just go out there and clearcut it. We’re just not going to do that.” Not yet, anyway.

The Fish and the Screens

Two significant wrenches in the Forest Service gears deserve mention here: the Fish and the Screens. The Fish, of course, are the Interim Strategies for Managing Pacific Anadromous Fish-producing Watersheds in eastern Oregon and Washington, Idaho, and portions of California, (PACFISH) and Inland Native Strategies for Managing Fish-producing Watersheds in eastern Oregon and Washington, Idaho, western  Montana, and portions of Nevada, (INFISH).

These “interim” acronyms were implemented in 1996 and have remained in place, “protecting” streams by imposition of a “no additional humancaused disturbance” requirement on “riparian reserve” vegetation strips next to wetlands, streams and rivers. These buffers are off-limits “to the outer edges of the riparian vegetation, or to the extent of seasonally saturated soil, or the extent of unstable and potentially unstable areas, or to a distance equal to the height of one site-potential tree, or 150 feet slope distance from the edge of the wetland” and so on.

Confused? So are foresters. “Why would you leave the most fuel in an area that has the most potential to have the worst impact in a fire,” wonders Mr. Fullerton. “The most sensitive area in the forest is a riparian zone, and if you’re not thinning and have a fire, the worst consequences will be there. Why do you do that? It’s the absolute wrong thing to do, and the Forest Service walks away from the Riparian Management Areas due to PACFISH and INFISH on every single sale.”

Next are the so-called Eastside Screens, first implemented in August 1994 as an “interim” pre-planning measure by the regional leadership in response to litigation by the Natural Resources Defense Council aimed at ending old-growth harvesting. Fourteen “interim” years later, the Screens have prohibited harvest of any live trees over 21inches, no matter the species, no matter the health of the tree. How well does Mr. Fullerton think the Screens work? “You have a fuels reduction thinning, right? You’ve got a 60-year-old white fir with limbs to the ground, 60 foot tall and 24 inches, standing next to a 250-year-old ponderosa pine. Well, you can’t cut that fir because it’s over 21 inches. So what happens when the next fire comes through? It ladders up through the white fir and burns the pine you’re trying to save. Tell me how that makes sense.”

In Mr. Evans’ experience, “diameter limits don’t fit into any kind of good timber management. You have species differences and competition, moisture factors...the dominant influence on ponderosa pine is moisture, which determines appropriate stocking levels. The Screens should be scrapped completely and started over in a sound planning process, not using contrived criteria that say we’re doing this ‘to preserve planning options in the future’.”

...continued on Part Three