Flying Finns
What happened to the Southwest's Timber Industry?
The Southwest’s timber industry is long gone, a victim of its near total dependence on national forest timber sale programs that were phased out in the 1990s.
Only three sawmilling businesses of any size still operate in the two states: Fort Apache Timber Company at Fort Apache, Arizona; Mescalero Forest Products at Mescalero and Alamogordo, New Mexico and Rio Grande Forest Products at Espanola, New Mexico. Of these, only Rio Grande attempts to purchase thinning sales offered periodically by the Forest Service.
The Southwest’s only pulp mill is still operating but it no longer buys pulp logs in the region. Rather than endure the vagaries of the federal government’s on again off again thinning program, new owner Abitibi imports cooked pulp from Canada.
 Harvesting big ponderosa on the Coconino National Forest in the 1950s. Chainsaws no longer threaten these big trees, but insects, diseases and drought do. Unless the dense thickets in which these big trees live are thinned, wildfires will soon kill them. |
Little remains of the Forest Service timber sale program in the Southwest. Limited salvage logging is occurring in dead and dying forests, but green tree harvest volume has been declining steadily since 1989 when 428 million board feet were harvested in Arizona and New Mexico national forests. (See charts on facing page)
The decline in the region’s lumber industry is chronicled in profiles prepared by the University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research—a 1997 New Mexico report and a companion 1998 Arizona report. New Mexico forest products sales in 1997 were less than half what they were in 1986, $77.7 million versus $170 million. Lumber production in 1995, 1996 and 1997 fell to a 50-year low. Also significant: just 12 percent of the 1997 harvest came from national forests, compared with 84 percent in 1986. Private lands accounted for 63 percent of the harvest and tribal forests 25 percent.
Arizona fared no better. In 1998, lumber production fell to 81 million board feet, its lowest point since World War II and a 70 percent decline in six years. Sales for the year were $29.2 million, about ten percent of what they were 20 years earlier. And the federal share of timber harvested fell from twothirds in 1984 to 37 percent in 1998. Tribal forests accounted for 60 percent of the harvest. Private lands, which comprise only 1.5 percent of the state’s timberland base, accounted for the remaining three percent.
Although the Fort Apache, Mescalero and Espanola sawmills cut most of the region’s lumber, there are many portable mills operating in both states. In fact, New Mexico had more of them in 1997 than it had a decade earlier. These “Mom and Pop” mills often operate seasonally, cutting house logs and vigas or latillas—aesthetic staples in the Southwest’s signature adobe-style architecture. Meanwhile, most of the construction lumber used by the region’s burgeoning homebuilding industry comes from Canada, Texas or California, an irony not lost on Mr. Ribelin.
“How ridiculous is it that we have to import lumber because our own national forests, which hold millions of acres of dead and dying timber, are no longer managed for the timber they could produce?” he asks. “Our family would probably build a new sawmill here in the Flagstaff area capable of handling the small diameter trees that most everyone agrees must be removed from our forests to reduce the risk of wildfire, but we’re unwilling to make the investment without federal assurances of a stable and adequate longterm supply of logs.”
While some see the decade-long collapse of the region’s timber industry and the Forest Service’s stated unwillingness to enter into long-term supply agreements as nearly insurmountable obstacles, others seem to see new opportunities everywhere they look.
“There are advantages to starting from nothing,” says Dr. Martin Moore, executive director of the St. Johns, Arizona Environmental Economic Communities Organization (EECO). “We can focus on the future without worrying about the past.”
Through its various federally funded community-based collaborations EECO is incubating a half-dozen small enterprises capable of consuming modest amounts of wood fiber harvested from forests adjacent to at risk communities.
Community-based collaboration has also gained a significant foothold in New Mexico. Most attribute success to the dedication of state forester Toby Martinez, who is also credited with formation of the Four Corners Initiative, a four-state dialogue involving community and tribal leaders, environmentalists and entrepreneurs from Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.
“Clearly we would all like to be working at an infrastructure scale that matches the scale of our forest health problem,” says Dr. Moore. [EECO is also involved in Four Corners] “But I think even our most impatient members recognize that we have to start small in order to rebuild lost trust.”
It will not be easy. Doers like Mr. Ribelin won’t risk their capital until the Forest Service comes up with a bulletproof longterm supply contract. Through their lawyers, environmentalists shout back across a philosophical chasm—announcing their fear that the old timber industry will somehow regain a foothold in the Southwest if they don’t appeal and litigate the Forest Service’s every move. The standoff continues.
Brian Cottam, coordinator for the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership (until recently the Grand Canyon Forests Foundation) shares Dr. Moore’s concerns for the absence of trust and the inadequacy of scale. To the chagrin of some of its partners, the Flagstaff-based conservation alliance has pioneered several innovative thinning projects in northern Arizona discovering, perhaps to its own surprise, that thinning forests in ways that are acceptable to nervous environmentalists is only half the battle. Finding reliable buyers for small diameter logs of often poor quality isn’t easy either.
“It all goes together,” Mr. Cottam observes. “We can’t market logs without mills and we won’t have mills until some level of mutual trust is restored. The fact that most of the people we work with now concede that our wood utilization and forest density problems must be addressed together, and on a much larger scale, is a good sign. Creating firebreaks around communities and calling it forest restoration isn’t going to get the job done. We need to start building new milling capacity at a scale that will allow us to meaningfully address both our forest problem and our forest future.”
human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on earth."