Some 1.5 billion trees are planted in the U.S. every year, about 5 trees for every American.

Annually, U.S. forestland owners plant about 6 trees for every tree harvested.

About one-third of America's original forest - some 300 million acres - have been converted to other uses, principally agriculture.

There are 26 million more acres of forestland in the Northeast than there were in 1900.

Today, forests blanket about one-third of the U.S. land base and about half the U.S. East.

U.S. annual growth rates have exceeded harvest rates since the 1940's.

Timber harvesting is forbidden on 50% of all National Forest lands in the U.S.

National Forests account for 20% of the nation's forestlands and 19% of its timberlands.

National Forests hold 46% of the nation's softwood timber inventory but only provide 6% of the annual harvest.

Since 1986, the harvest of timber from America's national forests has declined 70%.

In the West, 34% of all forestland and 54% of all timberlands are in national forests.

National forests in the Pacific Coast and Intermountain West regions hold 68% of the nation's softwood timber inventory, but provide less than 28% of annual harvest.

Forest density has increased 40% in the U.S. over the last 50 years.

When it comes to field research, it may be that George Fenn has no equal in all of forestry. Mr. Fenn, 76, is a brilliant physicist with such an insatiable appetite for knowledge that he built his own forestry library at his Fenn Farms office at Elkton, near Roseburg, Oregon.

(Top) Physicist George Fenn, left, is one of Oregon’s most successful and most admired tree farmers. Standing with him in a recently replanted clearcut at his Elkton Tree Farm is reforestation contractor Art Skach, Yoncalla. (Bottom) John Ulrich has turned a ragtag overgrown forest into one of Montana’s finest Tree Farms. He was named Montana Tree Farmer of the Year in 1998.

In the 33 years since he departed southern California’s defense industry and an impressive post-war business career, Mr. Fenn has transformed a worn out sheep pasture into one of Oregon’s most productive forest plantations. It is by any measure a stunning accomplishment that has made his 390-acre Tree Farm a favored field trip for research scientists and forestry students from nearby Oregon State University. Indeed, this is perhaps the only place in Oregon where you can stand beneath towering Douglas firs that rise from hillsides where Mr. Fenn combined wheat just 20 years ago.

Unlike Mr. Knight and Mr. Hale, whose interests lie in maintaining wildlife habitat, Mr. Fenn is, as he says, “in the business of growing trees for sustainable productivity and economic return.” The fact that he does it so well—minus any formal training in forestry—is a tribute to his education as a physicist, his no-nonsense background in guided missile systems and his trademark irreverence for the status quo. When, for example, he discovered that one of his plantations was not growing as fast as others nearby, he rejected the suggestion that there was nothing he could do and instead took tissue samples from seedlings, conducted a worldwide search of relevant scientific literature and concluded the soil lacked sufficient boron and iron. He applied both nutrients. It worked.

“I do not suffer timidity gladly,” Mr. Fenn says of his attempts to induce two forestry schools to join him in his research. Both declined noting other government-funded research commitments, so he did it himself—and now shares the results with other landowners and scientists who have come to admire not only his diligence but also his extraordinary success. “My door is always open,” he says. “I’m happy to share what I’ve learned with anyone who will use the information.”

For years West Coast Douglas fir plantations have been the subject of ridicule from environmentalists who see them as little more than biological deserts devoid of species diversity they say can only be found in wild forests. But Mr. Fenn seems to have broken this mold too, planting not just Douglas fir but also larch, pine, grand fir and redwood on slopes where sheep grazed for decades. Indeed, his planted forests contain more tree species than do many of the region’s vast naturally regenerated Douglas fir forests—products of great wildfires that last burned nearly a century ago.

In the course of adding species to his plantations—and researching probable productivity gains—Mr. Fenn has affirmed an important aspect in an already impressive body of scientific knowledge that supports clearcutting of shade intolerant tree species.

“The physiology of shade intolerant tree species, like Douglas fir, larch and ponderosa is fundamentally different from that of shade tolerant species like redwood and grand fir,” he explains. “Shade intolerants are capable of extraordinary juvenile growth rates, but if you fail to provide optimum growing conditions, including early thinning, they never fully recover. By contrast, shade tolerant tree species can be suppressed for years and still exhibit impressive accelerated growth with thinning.”

Mr. Fenn harvested his first trees in a 1997 commercial thinning, just 19 years after he planted them. He expects final harvest—meaning the residual crop trees will be removed—in another 12 to 14 years after two more commercial thinnings. Thereafter, the process continues: 500 to 600 genetically superior seedlings will be planted on each harvested acre. Over the 32-year cycle, it will grow at a rate of more than 500 cubic feet per acre per year, four times the annual wood fiber yield of a comparable wild forest, and comparable to forest plantations growing in the Southeast, considered by many to be the best fiber producing region in North America.

In his quest to increase the productivity of his forests, Mr. Fenn has left no stone unturned. And he is passionate about the result, especially when questioned about the sustainability of short-rotation forestry, which relies on tools and techniques many environmentalists consider unsustainable: genetically superior seedlings, fertilizers, herbicides and clearcutting.

“There is no scientific evidence that any aspect of short rotation forestry depletes the soil,” he says of an oft-made environmentalist claim. “In Ohio there is a continuous corn crop dating to 1839. A comparison of soil records indicates it is in better shape now than it once was. Our land productivity is both sustained and sustainable. We acquire the best genetic resources possible, work with the most advanced seedling nurseries, plant, fertilize, control competing vegetation, protect against animal damage, optimize the drainage, protect the streams, avoid erosion and take great care during harvest.”

Despite Mr. Fenn’s considerable success—perhaps even because of it—he is at odds with third-party forest certification, a controversial-insome-corners process by which the sustainability of various forest practices is verified by an unbiased third party hired by the landowner. Though considered by many to be too subjective, certification has become increasingly important to major lumber and paper retailers anxious to strengthen buying relationships with their environmentally conscious consumers.

“Certification is a bottomless pit, particularly the Forest Stewardship Council program,” he grumbles. “I would never submit to such an audit because their standards do not represent progressive forestry. Were I to apply their standards in my plantations productivity would decline by 75 percent and the cost of our wood products would increase by 400 percent.” Indeed, a 1997 financial analysis of Fenn Farms revealed that Mr. Fenn’s short rotation regime was returning $2,600 per acre, compared to a loss of $674 per acre for longer rotation methods he terms “neglectful forestry, affordable only by taxsupported government entities.”

Productivity is no small matter for Mr. Fenn—and generating a respectable return on his considerable investment is for him only half the argument favoring short rotation forestry. The other half involves a rocket scientist’s mid-life discovery that he could leave a small patch of earth in better shape than he found it.

“What could possibly be better for the earth than growing, managing and harvesting trees,” he retrospectively asks of his 30-plus year sojourn in forestry. “We have transformed a worn out overgrazed sheep pasture into a vibrant Tree Farm, producing not only renewable wood fiber but also myriad growth opportunities for plant and animal species that inhabit the openings harvesting creates. Can anyone doubt the tangible or intrinsic value of our contribution to the environment?”

5. The Bountiful Harvest

Loading pulpwood on a Jim Carey Logging Company job on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, not far from Mead Corporation’s Escanaba paper mill. Highly mechanized logging systems are commonplace in the Great Lakes region.

A thousand miles away in northwest Montana, John Ulrich is tending a different kind of pasture—an overgrown ragtag forest that is the aftermath of a turn-of-the-century high-grading by loggers employed by the old Great Northern Railroad. Mr. Ulrich intends to restore it—and after nearly 30 years the result of his backbreaking effort is beginning to show. Sunlight illuminates thousands of waist-high saplings growing beneath towering residual trees Great Northern loggers passed up because they were then too small. Punctuated by brightly colored wildflowers and bits of nutrient-rich logging debris this rescued forest is indeed an impressive site.

“Essentially, we are engaged in a longterm thinning program,” Mr. Ulrich says of his 306-acre work in progress. “By harvesting only the poorest quality trees, we’re encouraging quality natural regeneration in larch, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, spruce, lodgepole and alpine and white fir. Eventually this forest will take on the visual and biological characteristics of the one that grew here before the first loggers came through.”

What may be most remarkable about Mr. Ulrich’s work is that it provides a blueprint the Forest Service would like very much to replicate in its adjacent Flathead National Forest, if only Congress would approve the work. Having worked for the Forest Service for 23 years, including a six-year tour as Flathead timber manager, Mr. Ulrich has some sympathy for the agency’s plight, though he is not fond of the clearcut that now sits squarely in the across-the-canyon view from his house.

“Clearcutting can be an effective forest regeneration tool, but the current lack of experience in timber sale layout really shows in this one.”

Mr. Ulrich acquired his first acreage here in the late 1960s when he was still with the Forest Service, then added to it as adjacent parcels went up for sale. He thinned his stands by hand for nearly 20 years before contracting with Floyd Quiram, one of the area’s most admired loggers. Using a cut-to-length mechanical harvester capable of efficiently removing single trees without damaging the residual stand, Mr. Quiram has thus far thinned about 120 acres to a spacing that Mr. Ulrich believes is sufficient to promote both growth and successful natural regeneration “Considering the condition of this forest before we started, we’ve made remarkable progress.”

His peers would seem to agree. Three years ago, and just 18 years after his Tree Farm was certified, Mr. Ulrich was named Montana Tree Farmer of the Year. And while his forest will never be a big timber producer, it has, like Mr. Fenn’s, become a must stop for scientists and others studying techniques for improving forest health and productivity.

“The potential here in northwest Montana is huge, not just on federal lands, but also on smaller private tracts,” he says. “Those of us who understand this potential— and the risks associated with neglect—need to elevate the forestry discussion in as many ways as we can. I am doing it by creating a real-world example others can follow.”

6. The Bountiful Harvest

(Top) All that remains of the coke ovens that once fired Vinton Furnace near Chilicothe, Ohio. Originally fired by charcoal, they smelted pig iron from 1854 to 1883. 46 such furnaces in the area each consumed 350 acres of timber a year. (Bottom) Selection harvest unit in the surrounding Vinton Furnace Experimental Forest, a Mead Corporation demonstration forest maintained in concert with the U.S. Forest Service.

World War II was not the first war fought with wood. The Civil War was—and there-after World War I. The two wars and the rise of the Industrial Revolution took a terrible toll in forests east of the Mississippi, though today it is virtually impossible to find evidence of the devastation that occurred between 1850 and 1920. But hidden away in a magnificent hardwood forest near Chillicothe in southern Ohio are the last remnants of Vinton Furnace, a colossus that smelted pig iron from 1854 to 1883. Historians believe the iron cladding on the Union Navy’s warship Monitor came from Vinton area furnaces.

Iron making was a backbreaking task requiring iron ore, limestone and charcoal. Once ax-wielding laborers had stripped the trees from the area’s low rolling hills, German and Polish immigrants dug out the iron and limestone by hand. Trees were piled haystack fashion, covered with mud and set afire. Inside oxygen deficient mud-hut ovens, the wood charred but did not burn. The recipe for one ton of pig iron was straightforward: to 200 bushels of charcoal add 5,000 pounds of ore and 300 pounds of limestone. The average furnace produced eight to 12 tons of pig iron daily. It took 350 acres of timber to support one furnace for a year. There were 46 blast furnaces in the region’s forests.

For economic reasons, Vinton Furnace was converted from charcoal to coal in 1868. And up the hill behind the furnace the remains of 24 ovens bear silent witness to what happened here. They were imported from Belgium in 1875 and assembled on site to convert coal to coke. Now trees tower over them as if holding them hostage.

Forty-four houses, a store and schoolhouse once had a clear view of the furnace from across a nearby stream. But they too are gone now, overtaken by trees so thick it is difficult to see anything from more than 50 yards away. In fact, unless you know the trail leading to it, you cannot find Vinton Furnace today. Call it nature’s vindication if you like, but what stands here today is the Vinton Furnace Experimental Forest, a 1,200-acre research site created for Forest Service use in 1952 by the Baker Wood Preserving Company. The Mead Corporation bought the site and 16,000 surrounding acres in 1962 and has maintained the Forest Service relationship since then as part of its effort to improve the quality and productivity of southern Ohio forests that now grow on land cleared for farming after the Civil War.

Here, amid oak, yellow poplar, red maple, blackgum, sassafras, sourwood, ash, cherry and walnut, 50 years of research lights the way for any landowner interested in learning how to be a better steward of his forest. Eleven different plots illustrate the forest’s reaction to thinning and harvesting techniques accentuating seemingly conflicting values: maximum growth in commercially valuable species, natural regeneration, species composition, wildlife habitat management and visual quality. But what is most amazing about the plots, which lie adjacent to one another in this living laboratory, is that they do not conflict, but rather complement one another quite nicely. There are sunfilled openings, evidence of recent thinning activity, heavily shaded stands untouched for 20 or more years, areas thinned to promote plants favored by deer, turkeys and squirrels and clearcuts where commercially valuable poplar, cherry and oak quickly re-sprout from subterranean roots.

“It really is pretty remarkable,” says Wayne Lashbrook, Mead’s forest stewardship manager and the company’s Forest Service liason at Vinton Furnace. “A landowner can come here and study the application and aftermath of 18 different long running harvest and regeneration experiments. You can pick your management objective and see the result already in place.”

Mead’s Chillicothe operation is a mirror image of the rest of the nation’s pulp and paper industry. The mill, which makes several grades of paper, consumes more than one million tons of wood annually—far more than the company’s 150,000-acre regional forest can provide. To fill the supply gap, Mead fiber buyers annually purchase 400,000 tons of chips from 70-some sawmills in southern Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, plus another nearly 600,000 tons of pulpwood that are chipped at Chillicothe. To keep the logs coming, the company courts thousands of small timberland owners across the region. And to improve its landowner relationships, the company has  initiated a free landowner assistance program similar to Westvaco’s CFM program. Then, to make certain its contract loggers are sensitive to soil and water quality—environmental values easily damaged by reckless use of equipment—Mead imposes two ironclad rules: loggers delivering pulpwood to company wood yards must comply with state safety and environmental standards, and loggers who work on Mead land or company contracted land must complete additional safety and water quality training at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio.

The old Crowell Lumber Company mill site at Longleaf, Louisiana is now a fine museum. During World War II the plant milled virgin southern pine used in the construction of the famed Higgins boats Ike said helped secure peace. Built in 1892, the mill fell silent for the last time on Valentine’s Day 1969.

“Loggers are our interface with small forestland owners,” Mr. Lashbrook explains. “We are together responsible to the landowner for the quality of the work we do. And we depend on our loggers to alert us to landowners who need help managing their forests. As a matter of company policy, we encourage landowners to responsibly manage their forests and we buy only from Master Loggers.”

Mead, based at Dayton, Ohio, owns another 2.1 million acres of forestland in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Tennessee and New Hampshire. In addition to its Chillicothe operation, it owns paper mills at Escanaba, Michigan, Phenix City, Alabama and Rumford, Maine. All told, the company has offices and operations in 32 countries and sells it products—paper, packaging material, paperboard and office papers—in 98 countries. Annual sales exceed $4.3 billion and its Mead and Gilbert paper labels are among the most recognizable on office products store shelves around the world.

Mead and its Wall Street-traded competitors—their holdings labeled “Forest Industry Lands” in Forest Service records updated annually since the early 1950s—own just 13 percent of the country’s 503.8 million-acre timberland base. But because timber production is emphasized, industrial landowners account for about 38 percent of the nation’s softwood harvest [3.965 billion cubic feet in 1997] and about 16 percent of its hardwood harvest [1.141 billion cubic feet in 1997] Softwood lumber is used mainly as structural framing and sheeting material in houses, while hardwood is used in doors, windows, wood trim, furniture, pallets, newsprint and numerous grades of writing paper. Add all the cellulose-based products made by other industries and you have 5,000-plus necessities of life that were first products of the forest.

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Most of the nation’s big landowners maintain cooperative research ventures like Mead-owned Vinton Furnace, and most also have close ties with wildlife groups including the Ruffed Grouse Society, Ducks Unlimited, the National Wild Turkey Federation, the Izaac Walton League of America, the Boone and Crockett Club and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. All require their loggers to complete training programs, most maintain landowner assistance programs, many are involved in sophisticated university-level research in forestry and wood technology and most participate in third-party certification programs designed to assure lumber and paper retailers their forests are sustainably managed. But standing beneath towering oaks that shadow Vinton Furnace it is comforting to see that here in southern Ohio’s beautiful hill country, before forestry made its way from Europe to America, nature faced down the Industrial Revolution and won.

 

7. The Bountiful Harvest

Before this Boise Cascade clearcut in Louisiana is replanted, bulldozers remove stumps and till the soil, creating rows of mounds in which seedlings will be planted. Ditches between the mounts collect rainwater.

Forestry gets down to business in a hurry in Louisiana today. The great southern pine forests that gave the South its first real shot at the Industrial Revolution are nearly all gone now. Gone too is the region’s old lumber milling industry—gone the way of the Crowell Lumber Company at Longleaf. Its saws, installed in 1892, fell silent for the last time on Valentine’s Day 1969. Shortly thereafter the town disappeared from state road maps. Sad, because there is a splendid outdoor museum there now to remind passersby that a thousand people once lived in Longleaf, and that Crowell saws cut virgin southern pine logs used to build the famed Higgins assault boats that Ike said helped win World War II.

But what has replaced Louisiana’s old forests and its first milling industry is stunning in its own right. In the half of this state that is forested, southern pine plantations stretch as far as the eye can see. Although they are the progeny of earlier natural forests, these forests of loblolly, slash, shortleaf and longleaf pine are growing much faster, yielding nearly four times as much wood per acre per year. Such productivity gains do not come easily, but thanks to advances in genetic research it is now possible to grow a southern pine forest that is ready for harvest in 35 years or less, depending on the desired product. No wonder southern pine is now Louisiana’s leading crop.

These new forests bear witness to the rise of an industry that bears little resemblance to its heritage. The old gang saws that cut big logs into lumber are long gone, replaced by state of the art milling technologies that convert small diameter logs into lighter and cheaper-toassemble “engineered” products whose standards for performance and reliability far exceed those of earlier generation sawn lumber: glued laminated timbers, I-joists, I-beams and structural composite products including oriented strand board and laminated veneer lumber. And there is this fact that you would think would have conservationists dancing in the streets: it takes only 40 percent as much wood to frame a house when laminated veneer lumber [LVL] is used in place of dimension lumber.

Louisiana is home to the largest LVL manufacturing facility in the world, Boise Cascade Corporation’s Alexandria plant. Together with its slightly smaller sister plant in White City, Oregon, the company now services burgeoning LVL markets on three continents: Europe, Asia and North America. To meet its future fiber needs Boise has also become a leader in southern pine genetic research.

“We are looking for the elite among naturally occurring pollen crosses,” says Southern Forest Resources Manager Tom Rhodes of the company’s seed tree orchard and its 13 progeny test sites. “Our objective is to increase per acre fiber yield while also increasing the genetic diversity within our plantations.”

Boise plants about 12 million seedlings annually on some 15,000 cutover acres. And like other southern forest landowners, it is constantly on the lookout for pines that exhibit exceptional insect and disease resistance, tolerate frost, grow faster and display superior form and structural properties. Seeds extracted from their cones stand a good chance of becoming part of a six-state tree improvement cooperative that provides seedlings grown from millions of naturally occurring genetic crosses.

To maximize tree growth and quality, southern pine forests are typically thinned three times. Boise reduces stand density from 700 to 300 trees per acre at age 14, from 300 to 175 at age 20 and from 175 to 95 at age 26. Thinning No. 1 produces nine cords per acre, No. 2, six cords and No. 3 yields seven cords. Final harvest, between age 30 and 35 yields another 60 cords, but within a few years, genetic advances will soon push final harvest to age 27 and boost final yield to 75 cords.

By age ten the trees are 20 feet tall and their bark is thick enough to withstand a low intensity ground fire. So to control insects and diseases, and to promote growth in plant species preferred by wildlife, ground fires are thereafter set at three-year intervals until final harvest. Then the process starts anew. The land is cleared, stumps are pulled, piled and burned, the soil is tilled into highcentered rows that allow for drainage and a new pine crop is planted.

While these new plantations certainly lack the storied past that inspired so many of the Old South’s great novelists, the Forest Service expects them to provide nearly 75 percent of the nation’s softwood harvest by 2050. Moreover, fast growing pine plantations are expected to blanket nearly 50 million acres of the South by then, 53 percent more area than they cover today. And though some southerners resent the sameness of plantations, the surprising fact is that they also provide abundant wildlife habitat. Boise’s forests, which are by no means unique, hold deer, squirrels and rabbits, plus more than 80 bird species including the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. Southern forest landowners, including Boise, have learned how to work around the bluebird-sized woodpeckers—the only birds in the region that bore cavity-like nests into live pines. Since it can take a woodpecker more than a year to bore a nest-size hole in a live pine, biologists sometimes lend a hand by boring nesting cavities about 25 feet off the ground. The mature park-like settings the birds prefer stay so because foresters burn them periodically to reduce competition from brush, speeding growth in naturally reseeded saplings. Because the water table in the Southeast is so close to the surface, any appreciable amount of rain can quickly turn a logging job into a mud bog. To alleviate the problem and subsequent erosion, which can impair water quality, heavy logging equipment traverses the landscape on layers of logs called “mats” or “corduroy roads” because they are ribbed like the fabric. Laid crossway the logs support the weight of machines that would otherwise sink to their axles.

Wherever machines run, there are corduroy roads laid out in streetgrid fashion. Once the job is done, the logs are removed and milled. Within a matter of weeks, new vegetation obliterates the roadbed.

Of course, such roads are standard fare for companies participating in the American Forest & Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative [SFI]. SFI mandates practices that protect water quality—as does the federal Clean Water Act. And according to Boise’s Mr. Rhodes, SFI has become a way of life for company foresters and loggers. “It has changed our mindset,” he observes. “We say to ourselves, ‘Protecting water quality means that we can keep the mill supplied with logs year-round.’ And because the supply flows year-round, the frantic pace of old is gone. We work slower and safer and protect water quality and still get the wood the mills need.”

Boise logging contractor, Eddie Ray Havens, verifies Mr. Rhodes’ observations in a way only a logger can. “I’m proud to show people the work we do,” he says. “There’s no soil rutting. You can hardly tell where our machines have been.”

Mr. Havens, who started logging with mules more than 50 years ago, now operates the most technologically advanced mechanical harvesters money can buy: powerful machines with steelreinforced cabs that keep loggers out of harm’s way. Suspended from hydraulic arms, huge disk-shaped saws that spin at thousands of revolutions per minute sever 60-foot-tall trees at ground level in seconds then lay them gently on in the soil. [See “Logging Comes of Age,” Page 30]

The future: A tiny southern pine seedling at Boise Cascade’s Evans See Tree Orchard near DeRidder, Louisiana. In Louisiana the company annually plants 12-15 million seedlings on about 15,000 harvested acres.	This Boise Cascade southern pine plantation is about 30 years old—and will soon be harvested. In Louisiana the company owns 684,000 acres and operates two plywood mills, a paper mill and a laminated veneer lumber manufacturing plant.	This red-cockaded woodpecker nest cavity is in a 43-year-old plantation owned by Boise Cascade. The company burns the site annually to maintain the park- like structure biologists say the endangered robin-sized bird prefers.

“It is a much different and far safer business today,” says Mr. Havens of his lifetime in logging. “The machines are very expensive [$500,000 and up] but we work year round and our workers’ compensation insurance costs are a tenth what they were when we had men on the ground packing chainsaws.”

Mr. Havens’ crew was felling a 39-yearold slash pine stand the day we caught up with them south of Alexandria. Within weeks the brush was piled and burned, the soil tilled and the 20-acre site replanted. Now, barely a year later, a knee-high forest of seedlings—the elite—is pushing its way skyward.

8. The Bountiful Harvest

Protecting soil and water quality from equipment- related impacts is a requirement of both the federal Clean Water Act, several state forest practices acts and the American Forest and Paper Association Sustainable Forestry Initiative [SFI]. “Corduroy roads” (Top) and all weather, all season bridges (Bottom) are common on industrial forestland across the U.S. These photos were taken on Westvaco land in South Carolina and West Virginia.

It is five o’clock in the morning. Day 3 of a certification tour of forestry operations on Boise Cascade Corporation timberlands near La Grande, an eastern Oregon timber and farming community, is about to begin. I am one of 17 guests invited to observe the process: forestry’s equivalent of an IRS audit.

My fellow travelers represent high profile Boise Cascade customers: Lowes, at 600 stores the nation’s second largest home center chain; Marvin, maker of high-end windows and doors; Lanoga, owner of Lumbermen’s Building Centers, Spenard Builders Supply, Home Lumber and United Building; Pella, another major window and door manufacturer; and ENAP, operator of 349 east coast lumber yards.

McStain Enterprises, a major Colorado homebuilder, has also sent a representative, its director of environmental programs. Over lunch this day she will tell me that homebuilders from coast to coast are polishing their environmental credentials for the day when many expect most homebuyers will ask if the wood used to build their new homes came from sustainably managed forests. So far few have.

The fact that we have all traveled so far to be here this morning attests to a second fact: forest certification is forestry’s biggest story today. A third fact—Boise Cascade’s willingness to allow us to observe the process first hand and uncensored—underscores a fourth fact: the nation’s major industrial timberland owners see third party certification as the best way to quell consumer concern for the sustainability of their forest management practices. But also on this day a retailer will take me into his confidence long enough to say that while customer conscious retailers are indeed pressuring landowners to get their forests certified, what they fear more than uncertified lumber are environmental activists dressed in Ninja garb rappelling from store rooftops for the amusement of television news crews. In high volume stores working on razor-thin margins such antics can send customers stampeding for the exits, erasing a month’s profit in a single day.

Marquee scientists from three major universities—Oregon State, Montana State the University of Idaho—are conducting today’s field audit under contract to PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s largest management consulting firms. The company’s auditing roots run deep in both forestry and forest products manufacturing.

Last night we sat through an hourlong orientation designed to acquaint us with the certification process. We learned that Day 1 was devoted to a random search of company forestry records. Anything in the filing cabinet is fair game. Day 2 was spent interviewing foresters, logging engineers, silviculturists and reforestation specialists. Three-hour interviews are commonplace. “It is like taking off all your clothes at a public beach,” a company forester tells me later. Today’s field audit is a reality check. Does what the certification team sees on the ground mirror what they learned on Day 1 and 2? We will know at the end of the day.

Midway through Day 2 the team announced it was rejecting the three sites the audit firm had selected for today’s field audit in favor of three new locations. I ask why and am told that certification teams view unanticipated scheduling changes as a way of enhancing the credibility of their audits. “The company had time to prepare for the first three sites,” explains Price, Waterhouse, Coopers audit manager Bruce Eaket. “They had no time to prepare for the alternate sites we selected at the last moment. We like it that way.”

Third party audits take from four to nine days and can cost well over $100,000, depending on the size of the forest. The landowner pays—a fact that raises conflict of interest questions in the minds of many including a retailer attending last night’s briefing. But when someone asks if any retailer in the room would be willing to pick up the tab no hands go up. Retailers are no more interested in paying for certified “green” lumber than are their customers, so Boise eats the cost—as do other major lumber producers. It is a cost of doing business with lumber retailers who have become targets of Ninja imitators.

Three more eminent scientists will join us this morning. Jack Ward Thomas, Chief Emeritus of the U.S. Forest Service and now Boone & Crocket wildlife professor at the University of Montana; hydrologist David Thorud, Professor and Dean Emeritus, University of Washington College of Forest Resources and wildlife biologist Steve Mealey, another Forest Service veteran and one of the country’s most respected grizzly bear experts. Now retired, Dr. Mealey recently joined the company as its manager for watersheds, wildlife and aquatic ecology. Doctors Thorud and Thomas consult with Dr. Mealey and other company scientists responsible for implementing whatever recommendations the certification team makes in its final report.

Certification is serious business and failure is not an option, especially in the presence of customers who account for more than $100 million in annual lumber and engineered wood product sales. But this day proves uneventful. Some minor suggestions are offered [they always are] and it is off to Minnesota, where the company’s pine and aspen forests underwent certification in late August.

If anyone had told me ten years ago that the country’s industrial timberland owners would someday open their forests to this kind of scrutiny I would have said they were crazy. And I would have been wrong. At this writing, some 33 million acres of industrial timberland in the U.S. and Canada will have been third party certified in accordance with Sustainable Forestry Initiative [SFI] standards developed by scientists and landowners working under the aegis of the American Forest & Paper Association.

There are more than 80 forest certification systems in place around the world. Most are small and have no presence in the United States. Here, three systems are at the forefront: the venerable American Tree Farm program established in 1941; SFI, established in 1993 and the Forest Stewardship Council’s FSC program, established in 1994. Despite the fact that both SFI and the Tree Farm program dwarf FSC, it is FSC that gets most of the publicity, first because it was established by a coalition of environmental organizations, and second because of its close ties to the Rainforest Action Network [RAN], marketer of Ninja look-alikes. RAN is an FSC member—a fact many suspect played heavily in recent decisions by Lowes and Home Depot to review earlier commitments to favor FSC-certified lumber over SFI certified products.

FSC’s high profile marketing program, which has included advertisements in Playboy and People (featuring those well known forestry luminaries Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Newton John), has turned certification into something of a political sideshow—a fact that has not gone unnoticed among serious participants. (See “Certification Wars: Why SFI Will Win” at this web-site: www. evergreen magazine.com). In fact, to ward off any appearance of impropriety AF&PA (whose members own industrial timberland or manufacturing facilities) has created a separate non-profit corporation—with a separate board of directors that includes representatives from several conservation groups—to administer SFI’s standards and measures. Among them: the Isaac Walton League, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and the Conservation Fund. And among those who applaud the move: Boise SFI advisors Jack Ward Thomas and David Thorud.

“Distancing SFI from AF&PA member landowners is one of two keys to the program’s success,” Dr. Thomas said in a recent Evergreen interview. “The other is independent third-party verification of the sustainability of forest practices. SFI is a solid program and a very creative solution to problems associated with a public perception that industrial landowners aren’t practicing sustainable forestry.” Dr. Thorud concurs.

“Third party certification puts forestry back in the forest where it belongs, distancing it from legislative and policy processes,” he told me during a LaGrande interview. “It assigns a much higher priority to environmental goals, thereby commanding the unprecedented attention of top industry executives. And it has created a nice bridge linking the common interests of industrial landowners and conservationists.”

Dr. Thorud, who also sits on SFI’s Sustainable Forestry Board, credits environmentalists with turning certification into a marketplace issue. “It is their contribution to a worthwhile process,” he says. “In the years before third-party certification came along landowners never got credit for protecting fish and wildlife habitat, soil productivity and water quality. Now they do.”

9. The Bountiful Harvest

Clearcutting is the forest regeneration tool of c hoice in shade intolerant Douglas fir forests in western Oregon and Washington. But state- mandated riparian buffers, where harvesting is forbidden, protect fish-bearing rivers and streams throughout the region. The recent clearcut (Top) is on Willamette Industries’ timberland west of Salem, Oregon and the riparian zone (Bottom) is on Boise Cascade timberland, also west of Salem.

At 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18,1980 a primeval force up from the basement of time decapitated the crown jewel of southwest Washington’s Cascade mountain range. In a single killing moment,more than a cubic mile of Mount St. Helens’ splendor rocketed into the heavens. It would fall back to earth as ashen powder in communities as far away as Kellogg, Idaho, 400 miles to the east.