We recently refined our subscriber list to focus on readers who genuinely engage with Evergreen’s work. If you’re
Enjoying this interview? less than 2% of our readers subscribe. If this is you - please understand that someone else
I recently asked a retired U.S. Forest Service employee what he thought about the current effort to restructure the
We recently refined our subscriber list to focus on readers who genuinely engage with Evergreen’s work. If you’re reading this, thank you — you’re part of the community that keeps this mission alive.
Evergreen now reaches nearly 3,000 active readers, yet only about 2% help fund it. That handful carries the weight for everyone else. If you value the clarity and perspective Evergreen brings, please consider subscribing or donating. Your support keeps this work strong, independent, and growing.
Machines and computer technologies have been doing the heavy lifting in the logging and sawmilling industries for decades. They’ve eliminated some jobs and created others—especially in equipment manufacturing and advanced wood products.
Among the latest innovations: Mass Panel Plywood from Freres Engineered Wood in Lyons, Oregon—a dazzling, fully automated process that assembles massive structural panels capable of holding up the new Portland International Airport concourse roof.
So here’s a question:
Will future technological advancements in logging and sawmilling be influenced by the light-speed rise of artificial intelligence?
It’s certainly possible. But we don’t believe AI will be ready for prime time until it can think for itself.
The technical term for that self-directed capability is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a level of machine reasoning said to surpass human intellect. None exist yet, but the company that cracks the code will have an enormous competitive advantage.
When that day comes, millions of jobs could be replaced by AGI systems. The prevailing logic among technology investors is that savings in salaries, wages, and productivity gains will more than offset the cost of AI software and hardware—think robots on warehouse floors or assembly lines.
Today’s newsmakers are the companies designing and building the microchips that power AI itself:
For all the hype, there’s a major obstacle few discuss: the nation’s outdated power grid.
Solar and wind currently provide only a fraction of what’s needed to run the massive data centers envisioned by Nvidia and friends.
The Kiplinger Letter reports that grid demand could triple by 2030. The Wall Street Journal even added a weekly section to cover energy and data-center growth.
In a recent Journal essay, technology futurist George Gilder predicted that microchips will soon give way to wafer-scale engines, compressing a data center into a “small box with 64 trillion transistors.” It’s easy to see why energy-demand projections are all over the map.
And then there’s the water footprint: AI’s global water usage could reach 6.6 billion m³ by 2027. Ironically, AI can also help optimize irrigation, detect leaks, monitor quality, and build smarter grids—perhaps even solving its own sustainability problem.
To give this technological chaos some local relevance, we asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a grizzly in a forested riparian zone. The result looked strikingly like the Lake Creek area south of Troy, Montana—where our team began grizzly habitat research and restoration more than three years ago.
Next, we requested a digital rendering of a 15-year-old forest thinning in Northwest Montana. Again, the composition mirrored what we’re doing at the south end of Bull Lake, about 25 miles south of Troy.
These AI-aided glimpses of the future are an uncanny resemblance to our grizzly thinning and habitat management project in the Bull River Valley.
Knowing that our project creates jobs—and has potential to create many more—we started building a list of work AI will never replace. Robotic systems are already embedded in modern logging and sawmilling equipment, but human experience still rules.
Jobs safe from AI:
Loggers, sawmill workers, miners, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, steamfitters, mechanics, oil-field roustabouts, ranch hands, heavy-equipment operators, HVAC techs, irrigation installers, vineyard workers, truck drivers, and many skilled assembly-line workers.
Yes, AI is eliminating repetitive roles. But new jobs are emerging in programming, supervision, maintenance, and—most importantly—problem-solving.
We first saw this blend of human and machine thinking 25 years ago at a junior-high school in a rough D.C. neighborhood.
We brought along a Timberjack harvesting simulator—about the size of an upright piano—used to train loggers on joystick-controlled cut-to-length harvesters (now John Deere, Tigercat, Ponssee, and Komatsu brands).
We challenged students, many raised on video games, to compete against professional loggers. One 14-year-old beat them all. When he finished in record time, he looked up and asked, “Can I get a job doing this?”
“Yes, you can, son,” said a veteran logger watching over his shoulder.
That day, we witnessed human intelligence meeting machine precision. Kids today master computers before first grade. For them, AI isn’t intimidating—just another tool.
Piece ’a cake.
This attitude explains why many high-school students are choosing career-technical programs over traditional four-year degrees. These programs teach hands-on skills—no student-loan debt required—and many jobs start at $70 per hour.
In Idaho, we’re seeing strong partnerships between high-school trade programs and University of Idaho’s College of Natural Resources, where custom two-year associate degrees prepare students for forestry, logging, and restoration careers that keep them rooted in rural communities.
For people like the men and women from Libby and Troy now working at Hecla Mining’s Greens Creek Mine in Southeast Alaska, the dream is to come home to good-paying local jobs. That dream may soon materialize: the U.S. Forest Service recently approved a Hecla exploration project that could expand mining in the Bull River Valley—a region believed to hold vast deposits of silver, copper, and gold, the very materials used in microchip manufacturing.
Every forest-products manufacturer in Oregon depends on Douglas-fir, supporting more than 30,000 family-wage jobs.
Freres Engineered Wood sources most of its logs from private lands, producing mass-panel plywood through a fully automated process that even includes a soundproof CNC cutting system.
Montana, by contrast, faces a tougher reality: most of its forests are federally owned and lightly harvested.
Roughly 1.25 million acres of the 2.2 million-acre Kootenai National Forest need thinning and prescribed burning. As canopies close, biomass builds; insects and disease devastate thousands of acres. Fire risk in much of western Montana remains in Condition Class 2 or 3.
Table extracted from FIRE REGIME CONDITION CLASS DEFINITION
We believe our grizzly habitat project in the Bull River Valley will open the door to Adaptive Forest Management—a blend of high technology and higher-order human intelligence (HI).
Will AI play a part? Absolutely.
Can it replace the nuts and bolts of on-the-ground human experience? Absolutely not.
AI can, however, enhance our ability to apply the science, examine results, and educate the public about adaptive stewardship.
Consider the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Experiment (AMEX) led by the University of Nevada Reno in collaboration with a number of partners including CalFire (video link). Faced with uncertainty about how future forests will function, AMEX uses diverse silvicultural tools to reduce carbon loss and help drought- and beetle-impacted forests shift from carbon sources back to carbon sinks.
Sounds a lot like what we’re doing in Montana.
With Adaptive Forest Management, we gain:
Piece ’a cake. Let’s get busy.
Our mission is public education as it relates to all things forestry - so your contributions matter. Your support means
If you’re not a subscriber, please consider subscribing! We’re committed to public education and use our paywall sparingly
In this article you will find Doug's essay on Reinventing the Forest Service. It is an extensive article
The QR code in our upcoming publication, New Jersey's Pine Barrens, Legacy, and People - will bring you
You 100% tax-deductible subscription allows us to continue providing science-based forestry information with the goal of ensuring healthy forests forever.
