deb and rick smith, smith logging, kalispell,...

Deb and Rick Smith, Smith Logging, Kalispell, Montana

2 www.evergreenmagazine.com

“In logging, as in forests and forestry, the only constant is change. Over the lastcentury, we have moved from brute strength to waterpower, from animal powerto steam and, finally, the internal combustion engine. The future cannot andwill not be held back. We either embrace change or we perish.”

John Manz, see “Logging Comes of Age,” Page 30

On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, loggers and the tools of theirtrade, circa 1900

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Cover photo: Stephanie Steck, Northern Lights, Bigfork, Montana

Timberjack’s Walking Harvester is a concept machine not yet commercially available. It was developedto test environmentally sustainable methods of mechanized logging, and has already yielded severalimportant advancements in both automation and hydraulics. Timberjack cut-to-length technology isfeatured on Page 34.

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EVERGREEN 3

In this issue we write about timberharvesting in America’s privatelyowned forests. “The Bountiful Harvest:Securing America’s Forest Future” isone of the most uplifting stories we’vetold in the 16 years we’ve beenpublishing Evergreen Magazine.

Most Americans equate timberharvesting with egregious environmen-tal destruction. Small wonder. It’s beenmore than 20 years since the forestproducts industry mounted a seriousand well-funded campaign designed toexplain the role harvesting plays in themanagement and protection of thenation’s privately owned forests. Thelast such effort involved “GreenAmerica,” a quarterly publication of thenow defunct American Forest Institute.It was both the inspiration forEvergreen and a dependable sourceof perspective for this writer during hisyears as a working journalist.

In the years since AFI closed up shopthe industry’s altogether too smallcommunications budget has been divertedto other seemingly more importantmatters. But what could be more vital toforestry’s future than seeing to it that eachnew generation of Americans grows upwith a bedrock understanding that periodictimber harvesting is good for forests?

Not so many years ago even non-timber companies took on the job ofexplaining forestry to the nation’s school-age youngsters. In war-torn 1943, theCoca Cola Bottling Company distributedfour beautifully illustrated “Lumber”posters. Designed for use in classrooms,each “Our America” poster highlighted adifferent sector in what was then one ofAmerica’s most admired and strategicallyvital industries: the forest productsindustry. No. 1 in the full color series[reproduced nearby] highlighted logging;No 2 transportation; No. 3 wood uses andNo. 4 developing new uses for wood.

It would be wonderful if Coke would

re-issue these historic posters, if only toshow just how far forestry has come overthe last 60 years, but the refreshingcandor they convey can’t even be foundin timber industry literature today. Suchis a measure of just how far our feel goodculture has waded into the politicalcorrectness swamps. In this issue ofEvergreen we hope to light the way outof the swamp.

In the course of our two-year investi-gation we traveled to 17 states, conductedmore than 100 interviews, reviewed morethan 200 scientific studies and took morethan 2,000 photographs. We could haveeasily written a book covering what welearned, but ever-present budget con-straints limit our report to a smatteringof history, science and from-the-scenereports written in a conversational stylethat we hope stimulates your furtherinterest in the role forest management isplaying in providing our nation with

forests that are tangibly and intrinsi-cally abundant.

Begin with this one fact: there arenearly ten million private forestlandowners in the United States. Theirforestry objectives are as diverse as the358 million acre landscape they own.Many own forests for the simplepleasure they bring. Others with nameslike Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascadeare big-time lumber and paper produc-ers and are constantly on the lookoutfor ways to increase forest productivity.But Forest Service surveys reveal mostof the nation’s private landowners ownforests because they enjoy wildlife andhunting. For these landowners, timberharvesting is the tool of choice forcreating, protecting or enhancinggame habitat.

No matter the motive, timberharvesting is a vastly different enter-prise than it was a generation ago.Gone are the days when luck anddetermination were all that was needed

to propel a young man—often a highschool dropout—to success in the loggingindustry. Chainsaws that cost a fewhundred bucks have given way techno-logically advanced light-on-the-landlogging systems that cost more than onemillion dollars. Bankers who thoughtnothing about financing pickups and sawsthink long and hard before financing suchmachines. Business plans and pro forma’sare necessities, and advanced degrees inbusiness, finance, forestry, engineering,even biology, are increasingly commonamong successful loggers.

This issue’s many facets are mademore meaningful if you start with theknowledge that in the late 1800s fear ofa wood famine was so widespread thatCongress created the National Forestsystem to insure that the nation wouldnot run out of wood. Today, thanks to thebillions of public and private sector dollarsinvested in science and technology,

We must always consider the environment and people together,as though they are one, because the human need to use naturalresources is fundamental to our continued presence on Earth

Jim Petersen, Evergreen Magazine, 1989

One of four beautifully illustrated “Lumber” postersdistributed by Coca Cola to the nation’s classroomteachers in 1943 (Gifted to Evergreen, Hermann BrothersLogging Co., Port Angeles, Washington).


America’s forestland base is still 70percent the size it was when the Pilgrimslanded in 1620, and now lumber andpaper are traded as commodities ratherthan the luxuries many feared they wouldbecome. This despite the enormous andstill expanding wood fiber demands of aU.S. population that has grown from anestimated 3.9 million in 1790 to asurveyed 248.7 million in 1990. Sothe irony: it is the abundance ofwood fiber— not its scarcity— thatmakes the public debate about“saving forests” possible. To theextent that some environmentalgroups continue to promote conflictand refuse to acknowledge the capitalinvestments that loggers andlandowners are making in foreststewardship, the nation’s access tothis abundance is at risk, for in theglobal marketplace capital is bothfleeting and easily exported. As onelogger suggested, “The question isnot whether we will log, but whatlanguage we will speak on the job.”The connect-the-dots message forAmericans who are worried abouttheir forest legacy is simply this:landowners who are not permitted tomanage their forests for the assetsthey value most will eventually sellto land developers, further limitingpublic access and perhaps irreparablydamaging large expanses of wildlifehabitat. This possibility is already alooming fear in the Northeast.

As is our custom, we have laidout this issue to be read from front toback. Each story builds on the nextone, adding new perspective to yourunderstanding of what it has taken tocreate this nation’s forest bounty.

We begin with “WhitherSustainability,” a short piece inwhich we point out that while publicinterest in protecting the environment isat an all time high, no country on earthconsumes more wood fiber on a per capitabasis than the United States. Manyscientists believe the nation should beproducing more of the wood fiber itconsumes, but there is scant publicsupport for such self-sufficiency.

Thereafter, in “Photosynthesis:Harnessing the free energy of the sun,”New Zealand scientist Wink Suttonexplains how trees make wood, and whywood should be the structural buildingmaterial of choice for a society concernedabout its impacts on the environment.

Our main story, “The BountifulHarvest: Securing America’s ForestFuture,” is actually 13 stories in one.Nature, history, science, technology,

politics and personal choices help shape areprise filled with hope and resolve.

Though not long, “Logging Comes ofAge” might well be the most surprisingstory in this issue. Few people realize justhow profoundly the logging industry haschanged over the last 20 years. Techno-logical advancements have speeded thetransition, but it is the arrival of a new

generation of business-first loggers that isdriving a culture turned profession intothe new century. The hell-roaring days aregone. Safety, conservation, productivity,efficiency and sustainability are the newwatchwords.

There simply is not sufficient space ina 40-page magazine to use all of theinformation we gathered in the course ofour long investigation. But thanks to agrant from Timberjack we now have a finewebsite, www.evergreenmagazine. com.For additional perspective be sure to logon and read “A Word About Franken-trees,” “Forestry at the Millennium,”“Certification in Oregon” and “Certifica-tion Wars: Why SFI Will Win.”

As is always the case, we have a greatmany people to thank for their help withthis issue. Among them, Richard Lewis

and the members of the Forest ResourcesAssociation. Minus their support— andthat of the Oregon Logging Conference,Timberjack, Caterpillar and the Washing-ton Contract Loggers Association — thisproject would never have been completed.

We thank them — and take pleasure incalling your attention to our Page 37 storyabout Log A Load For Kids, a remarkable

charity that now enjoys wide supportamong loggers and forest landowners.

Thanks also to Bob and BartDepratu of Depratu Ford, Whitefish,Montana and Terry Andreessen,Timberline Auto Center, Libby,Montana for their roles in persuad-ing the Montana Ford DealersAdvertising Association to donate anew 2001 Ford F-250 pickup to TheEvergreen Foundation. See Page 38.

Bill Hagenstein, a friend of 30years, read the entire manuscript atmy request. At age 85 he is beyonddoubt forestry’s greatest livinghistorian. I asked him to makecertain we told a story that was bothaccurate and reflective of historicand political nuances that are sooften missing from today’s report-ing. He says we did. I am again inhis debt.

Finally, we want to thank Rickand Deb Smith for appearing on thecover of this issue. The Smiths arethe first husband and wife loggingteam to ever appear on an Evergreencover. We posed their photograph—another Evergreen first— becausethey rarely work side by side. Mostdays Rick is in the woods beforedaylight while Debbie stays behindto answer phones, take care of thecompany books and chase parts forthe woods operation. Their businesstypifies today’s small family-owned

logging company. We write about them inChapter 13 of our main story.

If you take only one lesson away fromthis issue, take this one: where harvesting,public concern and forest policy convergewe have many more choices than theEden-or-Armageddon scenario so manyAmericans seem to have embraced.Science and technology provide an arrayof management choices that is unprec-edented in forestry’s American experience.These choices, freely exercised by thenation’s private landowners, are thereason why America is blessed with suchan abundance of productive and biologi-cally diverse forests. From where we sit,America’s forest future is in good hands.

Onward we go,Jim Petersen, Editor

Rick and Deb Smith, husband and wife logging team fromKalispell, Montana, beside one of two late mechanicalharvesters they own.

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EVERGREEN 5

No country onearth consumes morewood fiber on a percapita basis thanUnited States: 2.27cubic meters perperson per year— 4.1times the worldaverage.

Indeed, prosperity-driven consumptionof raw materials[wood fiber, minerals,petrochemicals,cement and fossil fuels] is at an all timehigh in the U.S. By these measures atleast, Americans enjoya standard of living unmatched in worldhistory.

Public interest in protecting theenvironment is also at an all time high.New groups interested in saving newthings pop up almost daily. One of themost interesting observations about thistrend was made a few years back byconservationist and author, Alston Chase.[“Playing God in Yellowstone and In ADark Wood”]

“Environmentalism increasinglyreflects urban perspectives,” he wrote.“As people move to cities, they becomeinfatuated with fantasies of land un-touched by humans. This demographicshift is revealed through ongoing debatesover endangered species, grazing, waterrights, private property, mining andlogging. And it is partly a healthy trend.But this urbanization of environmentalvalues also signals the loss of a rural wayof life and the disappearance of hands-onexperience with nature. So the irony: aspopular concern for preservation in-creases, public understanding about howto achieve it declines.”

One of the most broadly based andcertainly most vexing environmentaldiscussions to surface in recent yearsconcerns the quest for sustainabledevelopment. Even the United Nations has

Whither Sustainability?

taken it on, much to the consternation ofcritics who see the discussion as little morethan a scheme for forcefully transferringwealth from rich to poor nations.

Still, it is hard to argue against theidea that development of the earth’s landbase, and its natural resources, ought toproceed in an orderly manner. Butaccording to Dr. James Bowyer, whodirects the University of Minnesota’sForest Products Management Develop-ment Institute, there is an even morefundamental problem that champions of

sustainability seemunwilling to address.“If we are really seriousabout protecting theplanet from unsustain-able development—which is the basis forthe whole sustainabilitydiscussion — shouldn’tAmerica produce muchmore of what it con-sumes than it is?”Dr. Bowyer has beenasking this question for

years because, as he points out, the U.S. isa net importer of every category of basicraw material consumed in its factories.These raw materials often come fromcountries where none of the environmen-tal constraints imposed on domesticproducers exist. Moreover, the U.S. isimporting an increasing amount of thewood fiber it consumes — while system-atically restricting or eliminating loggingin U.S. forests.

The hypocrisy of America’s increas-ingly consumptive lifestyle has not goneunnoticed. Doug MacCleery, AssistantDirector of Forest Management for theU.S. Forest Service, struck a nerve in athought-provoking piece he wrote lastyear for Forest History Today. In it, hesuggested that it is time for the nation’sconservation ethic to be paired with aconsumption ethic.

“Since the first Earth Day in 1970 theaverage family size in the U.S. hasdropped by 16 percent, while the averagesingle family house being built hasincreased by 48 percent. The U.S. conser-vation community and the media havegiven scant attention to the ‘ecologicaltransfer effects’ of the mission shift onU.S. public lands. Any ethical or moralfoundation for ecological sustainability isweak indeed unless there is a correspond-ing focus on the consumption side of thenatural resource equation.”

Between 1987 and 1997, timber

Housing starts remain strong in the U.S., thanks to low interest rates. Year 2000 housing startstotaled 1.57 million units, down from a record 1.64 million in 1999. In line with the decline, U.S.lumber consumption declined from a record 54.3 billion in 1999 to 53.9 billion board feet lastyear. Single-family housing, the largest market for lumber, declined 5.5 percent to 1.23 millionunits. Each new single-family home uses an average 14,175 board feet of softwood lumber.[Source: Western Wood Products Association]

“If we are really seriousabout protecting the planetfrom unsustainable devel-opment —which is thebasis for the wholesustainability discussion —shouldn’t America producemuch more of what itconsumes than it is?”

- Dr. Jim Bowyer

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harvesting on U.S. federal timberlandsdropped 70% from about 13 to 4 billionboard feet annually. The decline, drivenby public disfavor with harvesting inNational Forests, removed one-third ofannual U.S. softwood lumber productionfrom the marketplace, transferringdemand to private timberlands and toforests in other countries, a move that Dr.Bowyer criticizes.

“Look at the amount of ozone-polluting fossil fuel that is being con-sumed to bring logs and lumber to theU.S. from distant lands,” he declares.“And look at what is happening to nativeforests in countries that are making upthe shortfall created by our unwillingnessto harvest timber from our own forests.Rather than impose such a horrificenvironmental burden on other coun-tries, we ought to be increasing produc-tion in our own country where harvestingis regulated, where we know how to growand harvest trees with minimal andtemporary environmental degradation.”

There is no accurate count of thenumber of federal, state, county andmunicipal laws private forest landownersmust now abide by, but it surely runs intothe thousands. In the most restrictivestates — Oregon, Washington andCalifornia — harvesting occurs under thewatchful eye of state regulators whofrequently make surprise visits to activelogging operations. California requireswritten harvest plans which must beapproved by the state before harvestingcan begin, typically a two-year process.Mr. MacCleery believes most Americansare unaware of these regulatory processesand are additionally oblivious to theoverseas environmental impacts of theirconsumptive lifestyles because, unliketimberland owners, loggers, farmers andranchers, they lack a cultural connectionsto land. In fact, less than two percent ofthe nation’s population is now engaged infarming. Fewer still grow trees as a crop.

“Adopting a land ethic is easy andpainless for most of us today because itimposes the primary burden to act onsomeone else,” he wrote in his ForestHistory Today article. “While few of usare resource producers any more, we allremain resource consumers. This is theone area we all can act upon that couldhave a positive effect on resource use,demand and management. Yet few of usconnect our resource consumption towhat must be done to the land to make itpossible. At the same time many of usespouse the land ethic, our operatingmotto in the marketplace seems to be‘shop ‘til you drop’ or ‘whoever dies withthe most toys wins’.”

No less a conservationist than AldoLeopold long ago warned of the environ-mental risks that confront a society inwhich conservation and consumption havebeen de-coupled. “A public which lives inwooden houses should be careful aboutthrowing stones at lumbermen, evenwasteful ones, until it has learned how itsown arbitrary demands as to kinds andqualities of lumber, help cause the wastewhich it decries,” he wrote in 1928. “Thelong and the short of the matter is thatforest conservation depends in part onintelligent consumption, as well asintelligent production of lumber.”

But modern environmentalism seemsto have strayed down a much less produc-tive pathway than the one Mr. Leopoldpointed out. Since the early 1970s many inthe movement, including StanfordUniversity’s Paul Ehrlich and theWorldwatch Institute’s Lester Brown, havebeen forecasting global famine, speciesextinction, exhaustion of natural resourcesand catastrophic pollution of air and water.Their solution: economic austerity, globalpopulation control and U.N. oversight ofresource development and regulation.

Fortunately, none of their dire predic-tions have materialized, nor is there anyagreed upon scientific evidence that theywill. This point is made in countless booksand scientific studies, most recently “TheSkeptical Environmentalist,” by formerGreenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg, astatistician at the University of Aarhus,Denmark.

“The trouble is, the evidence does notback up this [environmentalist] litany,”Dr. Lomborg wrote in the Aug. 4 edition ofThe Economist, a British business journal.“First, energy and other natural resourceshave become more abundant, not less sincethe Club of Rome published ‘The Limits ofGrowth’ in 1972. Second, more food is nowproduced per head of the world’s popula-tion than at any time in history. Fewerpeople are starving. Third, althoughspecies are indeed becoming extinct, onlyabout 0.7% of them are expected todisappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. Andfinally, most forms of environmentalpollution either appear to have beenexaggerated, or are transient— associatedwith the early phases of industrializationand therefore best cured not by restrict-ing economic growth, but by acceleratingit. One form of pollution —the release ofgreenhouse gases that causes globalwarming — does appear to be a long-termphenomenon, but its total impact isunlikely to pose a devastating problem forthe future of humanity. A bigger problemmay turn out to be an inappropriateresponse to it.”

Evergreen Foundation economist,Dr. Con Schallau agrees that economicexpansion holds more promise forreducing global pollution that doesrestricting growth.

“Thanks to impressive advancementsin exploration and utilization technolo-gies — adjusted-for-inflation — rawmaterial costs have been decliningsteadily for more than a century,” heobserves. “Economic expansion — notrestrictions on growth — is indeed thebest strategy for averting future environ-mental calamity. Unlike impoverisheddeveloping nations, affluent societies canafford to make capital investments intechnologies that increase land productiv-ity and manufacturing efficiency whilealso minimizing related environmentalimpacts. Once developed, these technolo-gies can — and are — being shared withemerging nations.”

What does it all mean? Well, just asCaterpillar observed years ago in its thought-ful and long running National Geographicadvertising campaign, “There are no easyanswers, only intelligent choices.”

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Doug MacCleery’s book, “America’s Forests: AHistory of Resiliency and Recovery,” is anexcellent primer for anyone wanting a well-documented snapshot of the nation’s forests.

“Adopting a land ethic iseasy and painless for mostof us today because it im-poses the primary burden toact on someone else.”

- Doug MacCleery

EVERGREEN 7

Editor’s note: Dr. W.R.J. (Wink) Sutton isa botanist of considerable renown. Now aprivate consultant in New Zealand, hiscareer path included 27 years with theNew Zealand Forest Service, 12 years withTasman Forestry (now Fletcher ChallengeForests) including two years with theCanadian Federal Forest Service inVictoria, BC. He holds degrees in botany,chemistry and forest economics, and is anauthority on radiata pine plantations. Heis an officer in the New Zealand Order ofMerit, a fellow of the New ZealandInstitute of Forestry and an honorarymember of the Society of AmericanForesters. He is a frequent contributorand advisor to Evergreen.

Dr. Sutton, what is photosynthesis?Photosynthesis is the process by whichplants, including trees, capture visiblelight energy and, with the aid of chloro-phyll, convert water from the soil and

carbon dioxide from the atmosphere intoglucose (sugar) and oxygen. Subsequently,glucose is converted into other organicchemicals, the most common beingcellulose— a water insoluble polymercontaining about 10,000 glucose mol-ecules laid end to end. In trees, theseorganic chemicals are converted towood — a very complex cellular structurewith a very high strength to weight ratiothat makes it ideal for use as a construc-tion material.

Lumber manufacturers tout the“free non-polluting energy of thesun” when describing the environ-mental advantages of wood overother structural building materials,especially steel. What is the signifi-cance of this phrase?It takes about ten times as much energyto manufacture steel as it does to makethe equivalent amount of wood. Thesmelting process by which iron ore is

converted into steel relies heavily on fossilfuels — especially coal— that releasecarbon dioxide and other gasses into theatmosphere. By contrast, the only energyneeded to initiate photosynthesis comesfrom the sun. We pay nothing for thesun’s energy and it does not pollute theatmosphere. Once the solar-powered woodformation process is completed only amodest amount of additional energy isneeded to convert the wood of a tree intofinished lumber.

Is the sun our most importantrenewable energy source?Yes. The sun’s energy is vital to all lifeforms on earth— and of course tophotosynthesis. Fossil fuels, whichcurrently power much of the industrial-ized world, are finite. Someday they willbe gone. But as long as the sun continuesto rise every morning, it will remain themost important of our known sustainableand renewable sources of energy. Other

PHOTOSYNTHESIS:Harnessing the free energy of the sun

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Like all plants this ponderosa pine bud draws life from the free non-polluting energy of the sun.


renewable energy sources includegeothermal, tidal and nuclearfission, which is of course, verycontroversial. Hydro and wind arealso important renewable energysources but they are in fact formsof solar energy — the result ofwarming by the sun. Sun poweredphotosynthesis offers civilization areal bonus because it provides notjust a way to store solar energy butalso a way to create structuralbuilding materials and other solidwood products while storing orrecycling carbon dioxide, therebyhelping to mitigate the environ-mental impacts of global warming.

What gives wood its highstrength to weight ratio?Cellulose accounts for wood’sgreat strength. If you look at itwith the aid of a powerful micro-scope you see a honeycomb-likestructure which is very strong forits weight. As trees, these complexcellular structures can carrytremendous loads and withstand enor-mous natural forces. It is thus ideallysuited for use in structural applicationsincluding floor joists, rafters, framingwalls, bridge timbers.

How is it that trees help cleanthe air?Once again, we have photosynthesis tothank. As trees grow, they act as carbonsinks, absorbing atmospheric carbondioxide and converting it to wood.Although both fossil fuels and wood areessentially stored solar energy, their usehas a very different effect on the net levelof carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.When the carbon from fossil fuel isreleased into the atmosphere it staysthere for millions of years, but as forestsgrow they re-absorb released carbondioxide creating new wood. As long asforests are sustainably managed—meaning the wood harvest is no greaterthan the tree volume increment — ourcivilization can use as much wood as itwants for as long as it wants, with nopermanent increase in atmosphericcarbon dioxide. This is why any proposedcarbon tax on wood consumption makesabsolutely no sense.

You are on record as saying woodmay someday replace petroleum-based chemicals.Yes I am. We have some distance to go interms of basic research, but the ideaintrigues me. I see no reason why a rawmaterial as complex as wood cannot bebroken into its molecular components,then reformulated as wood-based chemi-cals. Biomass fuels, ethanol and methane,are just the beginning. Wood is alreadyused in perhaps 100,000 applications.There is every reason to believe that thereare many more potential uses for wood,many of them will be complex organicchemicals and compounds. We could usewood to make all of the petrochemicalproducts that are currently made fromfossil fuels.

In the future, will most of theworld’s wood come from planta-tions?An increasing amount certainly will. Ican’t see how else we can meet the needsof a world population that is expected totop ten billion by mid-century. Naturalforests currently supply 80 percent of theannual industrial wood harvest, but there

is growing political pressure toconserve natural forests. Plantedforests have distinct advantagesover natural forests: faster growth,trees grown as crops specificallywith specified wood properties andthe certainty that the fiber will bethere when the market demandsit. Per capita wood consumptionhas declined slightly over the lastdecade in industrialized nations,but it is still increasing in emerg-ing economies. Given risingenergy costs and global warmingconcerns I don’t expect energyintensive wood substitutes,including steel, will take a largermarket share than they now have,so it is likely that the worldwideinvestment in forest plantationswill increase dramatically in thisand future decades.

What would you say to peoplewho believe that timberharvesting destroys forests? For millions of years, forests all

over the world have demonstrated aremarkable ability to recover from allsorts of catastrophes, including horrificwind storms, massive wildfires, devastat-ing volcanic eruptions and insect anddisease infestations. In nature and withharvesting, successful regenerationdepends on some of the forest remainingintact. In harvesting, sustainablemanagement is the key. This insures thatonly a relatively small area of the forestis harvested at any one time, and thatthe forest as a whole remains intact. Iwould also ask people to consider themiracle of photosynthesis. Here is anatural process powered by the sun thatconverts water from the soil and carbondioxide from the atmosphere intoglucose and oxygen. The result is wood,civilization’s most versatile raw mate-rial — a material that is environmentallybenign, renewable, recyclable andbiodegradable. I know of no otherearthly process that uses so little energyto create so many life-giving benefits. Solong as harvesting is done sustainably inan environmentally responsible manner,there are no downsides to the continu-ing use of wood. The world should beusing more wood, not less.

Dr. W.R.J. “Wink” Sutton holds degrees in botany, chemistry andforest economics and has written widely on the environmentaladvantages of wood over other, non-renewable structural materials.

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EVERGREEN 9

The Bountiful Harvest:Securing America’s Forest Future

“The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful and the ennobling in man”

J. Sterling Morton, Arbor Day Founder

An Essay By James D. Petersen Editor, Evergreen Magazine

There are nearly ten million forestlandowners in the United States. Globalpowerhouses like Weyerhaeuser andInternational Paper own millions ofacres of timberland and, by virtueof their very size and reach,seem destined to groweven larger.

Then there are themid-size fleet-of-footniche marketers likeBoise Cascade,Willamette, Meadand Westvaco.Their family-likecultures mask thefact that they arejust as sophisti-cated and techno-logically advancedas their largercompetitors.

But theindustry’s familyroots are becom-ing increasinglydifficult to trace.This fall, Meadand Westvacobecame the latestin a long line ofmuch admiredcompanies toannounce theirintent to merge. Moremergers are anticipatedas mid-sized companiesscramble to fend off acquisi-tion-minded companies ten timestheir size.

The big and mid-size outfits share acommon goal: to increase the per acre

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Potlatch Corporation’s Three Corners Plantation in north-central Idaho. The 12-year-old Douglas fir trees in this 1992 photo-graph are already 18 feet tall, eight feet taller than the 22-year-old-Douglas firs in an unmanaged forest nearby.

productivity of their forests. As in the natural world they seekto control, survival of the fittest is a rule with no exceptions.

But for all their size, individuals and families own moreof America’s forests than do the industrial giants. Their

myriad reasons for owning land make it impossible togeneralize about them. These are the David Hale’s,

George Fenn’s and John Ulrich’s of the world:entrepreneurs who own forests for the joy and

income it brings them or because they longago committed their lives to forestry.Together, the giants, the near-giants

and the entrepreneurs own 73 percent ofthe productive timberland base in the

United States, nearly 358 million acres.From these privately-owned acres come

82 percent of the nation’s annualharvest: roundwood logs for dimensionlumber and engineered wood products

and pulpwood logs for paper andpackaging products. There is no

accurate accounting of the amount ofmoney these companies and individu-

als annually invest in forest produc-tivity, roads, advanced manufacturing

technologies and regulatory compli-ance but it most certainly runs into

the tens of billions of dollars.Remarkably, their workhorse

forests—all privately owned—alsoaccount for nearly 70 percent of allwildlife habitat found in the United

States. Most of the nation’s drinkingwater also rises from these forests and

more Americans hunt and fish here than onpublic lands. Taken together, these forests

comprise an unrivaled bounty, a diverse andbeautiful landscape that is a tribute to the skill,

perseverance and vision of companies and individu-als whose conservation ethic, though varied, has contrib-

uted mightily to this nation’s economic and environmentalwell being.

This is their story.

EVERGREEN 9


1On January 20, 1942 thirteen

forestry legends gathered in the GoldRoom at the old Portland Hotel indowntown Portland, Oregon to certifyAmerica’s first Tree Farms. In thecourse of their four-hour meeting,they certified 16 plantations totaling726,617 acres in Oregon andWashington. The event— and WorldWar II — signaled the dawning offorestry’s golden age. The gold is stillflowing.

Led by W.B. Greeley, the thirdChief of the United States ForestService and arguably its greatestconservationist, the gatheringincluded three Yale forestry schoolgraduates, including Greeley, twofrom the University of Washingtonand one each from Oregon State,Penn State, the University of Minne-sota and the Biltmore ForestrySchool. Only one of the thirteensurvives: University of Washingtongraduate W.D. Hagenstein, then 26years old, took the minutes.

“It was a watershed moment inforestry’s long history,” recalls Mr.Hagenstein, now 85 and still living inPortland. He was then a youngforester with the West CoastLumbermen’s Association [WCLA],which spearheaded formation of theAmerican Tree Farm System. Thoughlong since retired, he remains one offorestry’s most eloquent spokesmenand perhaps its greatest livinghistorian.

“I was a youngster among giants,”he modestly recalls. “But to tell youhonestly I’m not certain any of usunderstood the significance of the day.You have to remember, the nation hadbeen plunged into a world war. It tookprecedence.”

Six months before the Portlandmeeting, on June 12, 1941, theWeyerhaeuser Company dedicated whatwould become the nation’s first Tree Farmnear Montesano, Washington. But becauseof paperwork delays Tree Farm CertificateNo. 1 was not issued until September1942, nine months after the first 16 TreeFarms were certified.

Mr. Hagenstein, who had gone to workfor WCLA a week earlier, attended thededication and recalls events leading to it.“Weyerhaeuser foresters began a compre-

hensive evaluation of the company’sMontesano property in 1940. Their studyshowed the land held great tree growingpotential, but that the risk of wildfire wasquite high. So they recommended thecompany invest about a dollar an acre ina fire prevention program that includedadequately maintained roads, construc-tion of lookout towers and water holesand the purchase of fire fighting equip-ment and a communications system.”

To enlist public support for fire-proofing the area, which included 130,000acres of company land and another 65,000acres of state, county and private land, thecompany invited Washington GovernorArthur Langlie to dedicate the property asthe Clemons Tree Farm: “Clemons” afterCharles Clemons, owner of the ClemonsLogging Company before it became aWeyerhaeuser subsidiary — and “treefarm,” a word-picture name suggested bylocal newspaper editor Chapin Collins.

The ceremony marked the end of afour-year Weyerhaeuser public relationsblitz designed to quell public fears thatthe nation would soon run out of timber.“Timber Is A CROP!” the companydeclared in 1937 print advertisements inwhich it made the case for public policies

that encouraged protection and manage-ment of forests. “As with other crops,forests must be harvested when mature orripe,” the text read. “Upon maturity, treescease to grow rapidly and eventually decayand die. By removing mature timber andreplacing it with a vigorous young forest,national wealth is increased and suppliesof raw material are maintained for thegreatest industry in the Northwest.”

But it was Bill Greeley, who becameWCLA secretary-manager in 1928,and George S. Long, Weyerhaeuser’sfirst general manager, who yearsearlier set the stage for formation ofthe American Tree Farm System. InJanuary 1909, Mr. Long invited Mr.Greeley — then Forest ServiceDistrict Forester for 41 million acreDistrict One [now the ForestService’s Northern Region]— to ameeting in Spokane, Washington todiscuss formation of a series of forestfire-protection cooperatives. The twomen shared a common enemy:wildfire. In Mr. Long’s case, memo-ries of the disastrous 1902 YacoltFire which destroyed 23 squaremiles of company timberland insouthwest Washington. In Mr.Greeley’s case the largest forest firein American history: the Great 1910Fire, a colossus that leveled threemillion acres of District One timber,most of it in two days and nights.

Following the Spokane meeting,the two men played leading roles inthe formation of a series of firefighting cooperatives that werecentral to Mr. Long’s 1909 decisionto begin a quiet search for ways toensure that there would be “anothernew crop of timber ready to cutbefore the old one is gone.”

Mr. Long’s vision, now recog-nized as the cornerstone for sustain-able forestry, was revolutionary in an

era when wildfires made it very difficultfor landowners to justify investments inreforestation. But it eventually gainedacceptance with other landowners, thanksto Mr. Long’s considerable lobbying skillsand Mr. Greeley’s leadership as Chief ofthe Forest Service, and later secretarymanager of the WCLA.

Unlike the Forest Service’s legendaryfirst chief, Gifford Pinchot, who favoredfederal action to stop “cut and run”logging on private land, Mr. Greeleybelieved the West’s lumbermen could bepersuaded to replant cutover lands, ifsomething could first be done to reducethe risk of wildfire. Moreover, he sawclearly the role lumbermen were playingin fulfilling the government’s plan for

Forestry’s greatest living historian, Bill Hagenstein, outside hisoffice in downtown Portland, Oregon.

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developing the West’s economy. So afterhe became Forest Service chief in 1920,he championed not just fire preventionbut also tax law changes that encouragedreforestation of cutover land. Four yearslater, on June 6, 1924 Congress ratifiedthe Clarke-McNary Act, institutionalizingfire fighting and reforestation policies thatremain in force today. Within months,Weyerhaeuser Timber Company directorsformed a new subsidiary, theWeyerhaeuser Logged Off LandCompany “to take over, own, controland manage our logged-off land.”

In a sense, the 1942 Tree Farmcertification meeting at the nowlong-gone Portland Hotel was re-affirmation of everything W.B.Greeley and Charles S. Longpreached during their long years ofservice to forestry. It closed the dooron all that had gone before it— andcracked opened the door leading toforestry’s golden age.

World War II was foughtwith wood: 215 billion

board feet in six years. Ten millionacres of timber: an amount sufficientto construct 20 million homes, 48billion board feet for construction ofmilitary training camps, factoriesand shipyards, 43 billion feet fortruck bodies [one million feet daily,mainly ash and oak], ammo boxes,packing and crating and ten billionfeet for weapons, airplanes, patrolboats and ship parts.

“The war machine was fed withlumber, chiefly by denying it to civilians,”Bill Greeley wrote in 1951, four yearsbefore his death. And it was true. Youcould not buy lumber during the warwithout a War Production Board [WPB]permit. Foresters, loggers and sawmillmen were exempt from the draft so longas they stayed at their posts. Colorful WPBposters were everywhere, extolling themen to “Log Like Hell” for the war effort.Indeed, the government became soconcerned about log shortages that it senta nutritionist to Washington’s OlympicPeninsula to make certain loggers weregetting enough to eat.

Mr. Hagenstein remembers the eventwell. “His name was Dr. Auchter. We spentthree days together on the OlympicPeninsula. He even bought a pair of caulk

boots so he could get around. Afterwatching loggers dragging eight poundmauls, four and a half pound axes, 11-footcrosscut saws, and 40 pounds of steelwedges all day long he went back toWashington, D.C. and ordered doublerations of meat for them! Meanwhile therest of the country got its protein frompeanut butter.”

The war also opened the door on anera of technological advancement that

continues today. Waterproof glue,invented at Aberdeen, Washington in 1933by Dr. Charles Nevin, became one of thewar’s single most important strategicmaterials, bonding the sandwiched-together layers in millions of four-by-eight foot sheets of Douglas fir plywoodused in boats, airplanes and pre-fabricatedbuildings. Astounded by its strength andease of repair, the National DefenseAdvisory Commission declared plywood tobe critical to the war effort. In retrospect,lamination — gluing together thinlypeeled sheets of wood under great heatand pressure — has, along with recentrecycling efforts, done more than any-thing else in history to extend the nation’sfiber supply.

But it was the post-war residential

building boom that set forestry on itspresent day course. Rather than trigger areturn to turn-of-the-century over-cutting, as many predicted, post-wardemand for lumber caused timber pricesto triple, stimulating unprecedentedinvestments in reforestation and researchin forest productivity and wood technol-ogy. We have not looked back since. Infact, forest growth has exceeded harvestevery year since the late 1940s. By 1992,

growth exceeded harvest by 34percent and the volume of forestgrowth was 360 percent greater thanit was in 1920.

Today, the U.S. South is workingon its fourth forest, the Northeast itsthird and the West its second. Thefact that America’s forests survivedthe nation’s Nineteenth Centurytransition from agrarian society toindustrial giant is a tribute to theirresiliency. The fact that theirrecovery continued, indeed gainedgreat momentum, in the TwentiethCentury, despite unprecedenteddemand for lumber and paperproducts, is a tribute to science,engineering, enlightened publicpolicy and an army of tree plantersemployed by the Depression-eraCivilian Conservation Corps.But when progress is measured interms of untapped forest productiv-ity, many scientists believe we havenot yet scratched the surface.

“I have two workingBible’s in my life. The King

James Version ministers to my soul andWestvaco’s CFM program ministers tomy trees.”

Say this for David Hale: he is a masterof the proverbial six-second sound bite.He should be. As one half of Knight &Hale, makers of arguably the best turkeycall ever invented, he is an icon on thesporting goods show circuit. But in recentyears he has also become a Tree Farmer ofconsiderable reputation, which is saying alot for a guy who spent years crusadingagainst clearcutting in his belovedKentucky hill country.

“I stopped making decisions inignorance,” Mr. Hale says of his transfor-mation from clearcutting opponent toadvocate. “I wanted all the wildlife Icould have, but I didn’t understand how

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Weyerhaeuser’s first general manager, George S. Long, on askid road near Camp 1 southwest of Seattle in 1903.

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to get it. Harvesting is essential.”Mr. Hale is certainly not the first

wildlife lover to hate clearcutting, norwill he be the last. And had it not beenfor the quiet persistence of a WestvacoCorporation forester he might well stillbe railing against it, but over time thesuccess of the company’s CooperativeForest Management [CFM] Program wonhim over, just as it did his Knight & Halepartner, Harold Knight, who concedes hewas “just about as opposed to harvestingtrees as you could get.”

“Now I’m constantly onthe lookout for places toclearcut,” Mr. Knight says,echoing Mr. Hale’s turn-around. Though he is stillnot fond of the expansiveclearcuts that are central tosouthern pine forestry, Mr.Knight sees the smallerones the two men employin their 2,500-acre hard-wood forest as reliable toolsfor creating and maintain-ing habitat for deer, wildturkeys and songbirds.

“Before we startedworking with WestvacoI was convinced we weresaving our forests by notharvesting,” he recalls.“I now realize they weredying. The harvestingprogram Westvaco’sforesters and biologistshelped us develop not onlysaved our forests but alsomade them better. Byconcentrating on removalof poor quality trees we’reencouraging growth in awider variety of trees thanI even knew we had. Ourforests are more diverseand a lot healthier too.We’re even planting somepine [long considered amortal sin among theSouth’s hardwood aficiona-dos] to create winter coverfor turkeys, and we’reconverting log skiddingtrails and truck loadingareas into feeding zones.It’s wonderful.”

Mr. Knight heartily agrees, notingthat until the two men signed a coopera-tive management agreement withWestvaco he never considered— andwould have rejected out of hand— anysuggestion that there could be a positivelinkage between timber harvesting, foresthealth and wildlife habitat diversity.

“It is a new twist for me,” he con-cedes. “I am a convert.”

Mr. Hale often accompanies Westvacoforesters into the woods to help themmark trees for harvest. He also has aclose working relationship with hisloggers— a father-son duo he clearlyadmires.

“Our whole program is gearedtoward removing poor quality trees andleaving the best ones as habitat and as afuture seed source,” Mr. Hale explains.“They do a great job for us. Nothing is

wasted. I trust them”For most of the nation’s small forest

landowners timber management is a by-product of other more intensely feltinterests. Millions share Mr. Hale’s loveof wildlife, but for others simply improv-ing the quality and aesthetic beauty oftheir forests is an all-consuming passion.Even so, their need to periodically

harvest some timber in order to meetnon-commodity management objectives[in Mr. Hale’s case a desire to maintainopen spaces where songbirds and gameanimals congregate and feed] producesan enormous bounty. In 1997, the mostrecent year for which public records areavailable, so-called “non-industrial”timberlands yielded 5.234 billion cubicfeet of softwood, 50.4 percent of thenation’s entire softwood harvest, andanother 5.426 billion cubic feet ofhardwood, 74.6 percent of the total

hardwood harvest.The number of small

forestland owners partici-pating in company-sponsored tree improve-ment programs likeWestvaco’s CFM Programis not known, but this oneprogram— the oldest inthe country—includes3,000 landowners. Amongthem: Time Warner-AOLmogul Ted Turner, now thenation’s largest privatelandowner and a manmany revile for themillions of dollars he hascontributed to anti-forestry groups. Hisinvestments in forestlandclearly underscore thegreat diversity of manage-ment objectives foundamong the nation’s non-industrial landowners. OfWestvaco’s program andthe landowners it nowserves in South Carolina,West Virginia, Virginia,Maryland, Kentucky,Tennessee and Pennsylva-nia, company forestresources public relationsmanager K.L. “Casey”Canonge says, “Our goal issimply to share ourexpertise and an ever-expanding body of fieldresearch with otherlandowners who share ourcommitment to ecosystem-based multiple use forestmanagement.”

When it comes to fieldresearch, it may be that

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(Top) David Hale spent years crusading against clearcutting, but confesses he is nowconstantly on the lookout for places to clearcut on his Kentucky Tree Farm. Mr. Haleand partner, Harold Knight, founded Knight & Hale, renowned game call maker.(Bottom) Father-son team, Dale and Robert Dunning log for Mr. Knight and Mr. Hale.

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EVERGREEN 13

George Fenn has no equal in all offorestry. Mr. Fenn, 76, is a brilliantphysicist with such an insatiable appetitefor knowledge that he built his ownforestry library at his Fenn Farms office atElkton, near Roseburg, Oregon.

In the 33 years since he departedsouthern California’s defense industryand an impressive post-war businesscareer, Mr. Fenn has transformed a wornout sheep pasture into one of Oregon’smost productive forest plantations. It isby any measure a stunning accomplish-ment that has made his390-acre Tree Farm afavored field trip forresearch scientists andforestry students fromnearby Oregon StateUniversity. Indeed, this isperhaps the only place inOregon where you canstand beneath toweringDouglas firs that rise fromhillsides where Mr. Fenncombined wheat just 20years ago.

Unlike Mr. Knight andMr. Hale, whose interestslie in maintaining wildlifehabitat, Mr. Fenn is, as hesays, “in the business ofgrowing trees for sustain-able productivity andeconomic return.” The factthat he does it so well—minus any formal trainingin forestry—is a tribute tohis education as a physicist,his no-nonsense back-ground in guided missilesystems and his trademarkirreverence for the statusquo. When, for example, hediscovered that one of hisplantations was notgrowing as fast as othersnearby, he rejected thesuggestion that there wasnothing he could do andinstead took tissue samplesfrom seedlings, conducteda worldwide search ofrelevant scientific litera-ture and concluded the soillacked sufficient boron andiron. He applied both nutrients. It worked.

“I do not suffer timidity gladly,” Mr.Fenn says of his attempts to induce twoforestry schools to join him in hisresearch. Both declined noting othergovernment-funded research commit-ments, so he did it himself—and nowshares the results with other landownersand scientists who have come to admire

not only his diligence but also hisextraordinary success. “My door is alwaysopen,” he says. “I’m happy to share whatI’ve learned with anyone who will use theinformation.”

For years West Coast Douglas firplantations have been the subject ofridicule from environmentalists who seethem as little more than biological desertsdevoid of species diversity they say canonly 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 onslopes where sheep grazed for decades.Indeed, his planted forests contain moretree species than do many of the region’svast naturally regenerated Douglas firforests—products of great wildfires thatlast burned nearly a century ago.

In the course of adding species to hisplantations—and researching probable

productivity gains—Mr. Fenn hasaffirmed an important aspect in an alreadyimpressive body of scientific knowledgethat supports clearcutting of shadeintolerant tree species.

“The physiology of shade intoleranttree species, like Douglas fir, larch andponderosa is fundamentally different fromthat of shade tolerant species like redwoodand grand fir,” he explains. “Shadeintolerants are capable of extraordinaryjuvenile growth rates, but if you fail toprovide optimum growing conditions,

including early thinning,they never fully recover. Bycontrast, shade tolerant treespecies can be suppressedfor years and still exhibitimpressive acceleratedgrowth with thinning.”

Mr. Fenn harvested hisfirst trees in a 1997 com-mercial thinning, just 19years after he planted them.He expects final harvest—meaning the residual croptrees will be removed—inanother 12 to 14 years aftertwo more commercialthinnings. Thereafter, theprocess continues: 500 to600 genetically superiorseedlings will be planted oneach harvested acre. Overthe 32-year cycle, it willgrow at a rate of more than500 cubic feet per acre peryear, four times the annualwood fiber yield of acomparable wild forest, andcomparable to forestplantations growing in theSoutheast, considered bymany to be the best fiberproducing region in NorthAmerica.

In his quest to increasethe productivity of hisforests, Mr. Fenn has left nostone unturned. And he ispassionate about the result,especially when questionedabout the sustainability ofshort-rotation forestry,which relies on tools andtechniques many environ-

mentalists consider unsustainable:genetically superior seedlings, fertilizers,herbicides and clearcutting.

“There is no scientific evidence thatany aspect of short rotation forestrydepletes the soil,” he says of an oft-madeenvironmentalist claim. “In Ohio there isa continuous corn crop dating to 1839. Acomparison of soil records indicates it is

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

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5in better shape now than it once was. Ourland productivity is both sustained andsustainable. We acquire the best geneticresources possible, work with the mostadvanced seedling nurseries, plant,fertilize, control competing vegetation,protect against animal damage, optimizethe drainage, protect the streams, avoiderosion and take great care duringharvest.”

Despite Mr. Fenn’s considerablesuccess — perhaps even because of it—he is at odds with third-party forestcertification, a controversial-in-some-corners process by which thesustainability of various forestpractices is verified by an unbiasedthird party hired by the landowner.Though considered by many to betoo subjective, certification hasbecome increasingly important tomajor lumber and paper retailersanxious to strengthen buyingrelationships with their environ-mentally conscious consumers.

“Certification is a bottomless pit,particularly the Forest StewardshipCouncil program,” he grumbles. “Iwould never submit to such an auditbecause their standards do notrepresent progressive forestry. WereI to apply their standards in myplantations productivity woulddecline by 75 percent and the costof our wood products would increaseby 400 percent.” Indeed, a 1997financial analysis of Fenn Farmsrevealed that Mr. Fenn’s shortrotation regime was returning$2,600 per acre, compared to a lossof $674 per acre for longer rotationmethods he terms “neglectfulforestry, affordable only by tax-supported government entities.”

Productivity is no small matter forMr. Fenn—and generating a respect-able return on his considerableinvestment is for him only half theargument favoring short rotationforestry. The other half involves arocket scientist’s mid-life discovery that hecould leave a small patch of earth in bettershape than he found it.

“What could possibly be better for theearth than growing, managing andharvesting trees,” he retrospectively asks ofhis 30-plus year sojourn in forestry. “Wehave transformed a worn out overgrazedsheep pasture into a vibrant Tree Farm,producing not only renewable wood fiberbut also myriad growth opportunities forplant and animal species that inhabit theopenings harvesting creates. Can anyonedoubt the tangible or intrinsic value of ourcontribution to the environment?”

A thousand miles away innorthwest Montana, John

Ulrich is tending a different kind ofpasture—an overgrown ragtag forest thatis the aftermath of a turn-of-the-centuryhigh-grading by loggers employed by theold Great Northern Railroad. Mr. Ulrich

intends to restore it—and after nearly 30years the result of his backbreaking effortis beginning to show. Sunlight illuminatesthousands of waist-high saplings growingbeneath towering residual trees GreatNorthern loggers passed up because theywere then too small. Punctuated bybrightly colored wildflowers and bits ofnutrient-rich logging debris this rescuedforest is indeed an impressive site.

“Essentially, we are engaged in a long-term thinning program,” Mr. Ulrich saysof his 306-acre work in progress. “Byharvesting only the poorest quality trees,we’re encouraging quality natural

regeneration in larch, ponderosa pine,Douglas fir, spruce, lodgepole and alpineand white fir. Eventually this forest willtake on the visual and biologicalcharacteristics of the one that grew herebefore the first loggers came through.”

What may be most remarkable aboutMr. Ulrich’s work is that it provides ablueprint the Forest Service would likevery much to replicate in its adjacentFlathead National Forest, if onlyCongress would approve the work.Having worked for the Forest Service for

23 years, including a six-year touras Flathead timber manager, Mr.Ulrich has some sympathy for theagency’s plight, though he is notfond of the clearcut that now sitssquarely in the across-the-canyonview from his house.

“Clearcutting can be aneffective forest regeneration tool,but the current lack of experiencein timber sale layout really showsin this one.”

Mr. Ulrich acquired his firstacreage here in the late 1960s whenhe was still with the Forest Service,then added to it as adjacent parcelswent up for sale. He thinned hisstands by hand for nearly 20 yearsbefore contracting with FloydQuiram, one of the area’s mostadmired loggers. Using a cut-to-length mechanical harvestercapable of efficiently removingsingle trees without damaging theresidual stand, Mr. Quiram has thusfar thinned about 120 acres to aspacing that Mr. Ulrich believes issufficient to promote both growthand successful natural regeneration“Considering the condition of thisforest before we started, we’vemade remarkable progress.”

His peers would seem to agree.Three years ago, and just 18 yearsafter his Tree Farm was certified,Mr. Ulrich was named MontanaTree Farmer of the Year. And while

his forest will never be a big timberproducer, it has, like Mr. Fenn’s,become a must stop for scientists andothers studying techniques for improv-ing forest health and productivity.

“The potential here in northwestMontana is huge, not just on federallands, but also on smaller privatetracts,” he says. “Those of us whounderstand this potential—and therisks associated with neglect—need toelevate the forestry discussion in asmany ways as we can. I am doing it bycreating a real-world example otherscan follow.”

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

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6World War II was not the

first war fought with wood.The Civil War was—and there-after WorldWar I. The two wars and the rise of theIndustrial Revolution took a terrible tollin forests east of the Mississippi, thoughtoday it is virtually impossible to findevidence of the devastationthat occurred between 1850and 1920. But hidden awayin a magnificent hardwoodforest near Chillicothe insouthern Ohio are the lastremnants of VintonFurnace, a colossus thatsmelted pig iron from 1854to 1883. Historians believethe iron cladding on theUnion Navy’s warshipMonitor came from Vintonarea furnaces.

Iron making was abackbreaking task requiringiron ore, limestone andcharcoal. Once ax-wieldinglaborers had stripped thetrees from the area’s lowrolling hills, German andPolish immigrants dug outthe iron and limestone byhand. Trees were piledhaystack fashion, coveredwith mud and set afire.Inside oxygen deficientmud-hut ovens, the woodcharred but did not burn.The recipe for one ton ofpig iron was straightfor-ward: to 200 bushels ofcharcoal add 5,000 poundsof ore and 300 pounds oflimestone. The averagefurnace produced eight to12 tons of pig iron daily. Ittook 350 acres of timber tosupport one furnace for ayear. There were 46 blastfurnaces in the region’sforests.

For economic reasons,Vinton Furnace was converted fromcharcoal to coal in 1868. And up the hillbehind the furnace the remains of 24ovens bear silent witness to what hap-pened here. They were imported fromBelgium in 1875 and assembled on site toconvert coal to coke. Now trees tower overthem as if holding them hostage.

Forty-four houses, a store and

schoolhouse once had a clear view of thefurnace from across a nearby stream. Butthey too are gone now, overtaken by treesso thick it is difficult to see anything frommore than 50 yards away. In fact, unlessyou know the trail leading to it, youcannot find Vinton Furnace today. Call itnature’s vindication if you like, but whatstands here today is the Vinton FurnaceExperimental Forest, a 1,200-acreresearch site created for Forest Serviceuse in 1952 by the Baker Wood PreservingCompany. The Mead Corporation bought

the site and 16,000 surrounding acres in1962 and has maintained the ForestService relationship since then as partof its effort to improve the quality andproductivity of southern Ohio forests thatnow grow on land cleared for farmingafter the Civil War.

Here, amid oak, yellow poplar, redmaple, blackgum, sassafras, sourwood,

ash, cherry and walnut, 50 years ofresearch lights the way for any landownerinterested in learning how to be a bettersteward of his forest. Eleven differentplots illustrate the forest’s reaction tothinning and harvesting techniquesaccentuating seemingly conflicting values:maximum growth in commerciallyvaluable species, natural regeneration,species composition, wildlife habitatmanagement and visual quality. But whatis most amazing about the plots, which lieadjacent to one another in this living

laboratory, is that they donot conflict, but rathercomplement one anotherquite nicely. There are sun-filled openings, evidence ofrecent thinning activity,heavily shaded standsuntouched for 20 or moreyears, areas thinned topromote plants favored bydeer, turkeys and squirrelsand clearcuts wherecommercially valuablepoplar, cherry and oakquickly re-sprout fromsubterranean roots.

“It really is prettyremarkable,” says WayneLashbrook, Mead’s foreststewardship manager andthe company’s ForestService liason at VintonFurnace. “A landowner cancome here and study theapplication and aftermath of18 different long runningharvest and regenerationexperiments. You can pickyour management objectiveand see the result already inplace.”

Mead’s Chillicotheoperation is a mirror imageof the rest of the nation’spulp and paper industry. Themill, which makes severalgrades of paper, consumesmore than one million tonsof wood annually—far morethan the company’s150,000-acre regional forestcan provide. To fill thesupply gap, Mead fiber

buyers annually purchase 400,000 tons ofchips from 70-some sawmills in southernOhio, West Virginia and Kentucky, plusanother nearly 600,000 tons of pulpwoodthat are chipped at Chillicothe. To keepthe logs coming, the company courtsthousands of small timberland ownersacross the region. And to improve itslandowner relationships, the company has

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(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 suchfurnaces in the area each consumed 350 acres of timber a year. (Bottom) Selectionharvest unit in the surrounding Vinton Furnace Experimental Forest, a Mead Corporationdemonstration forest maintained in concert with the U.S. Forest Service.

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Although the nation’s population has more than tripled [from 76.2 million to 281.4 million] since 1900 the nation’s forestland base has declined by a mere 4.3% in the same century [from .78 billion acres to .747 billion acres]. Most of the decline is the result of forestland conversion to other uses: agriculture, urbanization and transportation. The fact that the nation’s forestland base is so modest despite significant population growth [soaring demand for wood and paper products] is a tribute to advances in forestry and huge private capital investments in increasing per acre forest yield. [Sources: Dr. Con Schallau, Doug MacCleery, USFS; 2000 Resource Planning Act Assessment; and U.S. Census Bureau]

Private individuals, including members of the American Tree Farm System, own almost 58% of the nation’s 503.7 million-acre timberland base and provide nearly 60% of the annual harvest. Forest industry lands are more intensively managed, so while industrial owners own only 13.27% of the U.S. timberland base they account for nearly 30% of annual harvest. By contrast, federally owned National Forests comprise 19.15% of the timberland base but provide a mere 5.17% of the harvest. Other public ownerships account for 9.83% of the timberland base and provide 5.9% of the harvest. “Timberland” is defined as land capable of growing more than 20 cubic feet of industrial wood per acre per year in natural stands. [Source: U.S. Forest Service, Forest Resources of the United States, 1997, Tables 10, 18, 19, 35, 36, 37]

The American Tree Farm System [ATFS] is the oldest and largest certifier of private non-industrial forestlands in the United States. There are 65,000 certified Tree Farms covering 25 million acres in 48

states. ATFS recently retained Price Waterhouse Coopers to lay the groundwork for third party review of its auditing process. [Source: Forest Operations Review and the American Tree Farm System]

American Tree Farm System Who Owns America’s Forest& Where Does the Harvest

Come From?

Historical Trends in U.S. Population & Forestland

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1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 20000

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0.70

0.71

0.72

0.73

0.74

0.75

0.76

0.77

0.78

0.79

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Total U.S. Timberland:503,664,000 acres


Acres of Timberland Owned

TTotal Harvest in 1997:otal Harvest in 1997:16,024 billion cubic feet16,024 billion cubic feet

Total Harvest in 1997:16,024 billion cubic feet

Non-industrial Private: 290,840,000

Forest Industry: 66,857,000

National Forest: 96,436,000

Other Public: 49,532,000

01-1011-2526-50

51-7576-100101-421

Number of CertifiedTree Farms per County

PopulationForestland

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EVERGREEN 17


Total Harvest in 1997:16,024 billion cubic feet

COMPANY VERIFIER

Willamette Industries, Inc. Price, Waterhouse, CoopersBlandin Paper Company QMIPlum Creek Timber Company, Inc. Price, Waterhouse, CoopersBoise Cascade Corporation Price, Waterhouse, CoopersFraser Papers, Inc. QMIStora Enso Consolidated Paper, Inc. BioForestSeven Islands Land Company Plum LineStimson Lumber Company Price, Waterhouse, CoopersLP BVQIFinch, Pruyn & Company, Inc. Plum LineInternational Paper Company BVQIMead Paper Price, Waterhouse, CoopersTimberWest KPMGWeyerhaeuser Company QMI/Price, Waterhouse, CoopersInterFor KPMGSimpson investment Company Price, Waterhouse, CoopersGeorgia-Pacific Corporation Price, Waterhouse, CoopersTemple-Inland, Inc. BVQIThe Pacific Lumber Company Auther Anderson/InterforestHampton Affiliates Price, Waterhouse, CoopersSierra-Pacific Industries KPMG

TOTAL

More than 33 million acres of industrial forestland in the U.S. [23.3 million] and Canada [10 million] have completed Sustainable Forestry Initiative [SFI] third party certification. Another 64.3 million acres [24.7 million U.S. and 39.6 million in Canada] are pending. Independent verification of the sustainability of forest practices is critically important to a growing number of lumber and paper wholesalers and retailers, as well as consumers of large amounts of office-related paper products. [Source: American Forest & Paper Assn]

Although per capital forest product consumption is projected to increase during the first half of this century, per capita roundwood harvesting will remain roughly constant according to U.S. Forest Service research economists Richard Haynes and Peter J. Ince. Projected gains in production process efficiency and paper recycling are expected to yield sufficient additional fiber to meet increased demand for wood fiber. Harvesting will increase more on non-industrial private forestlands (left) than on other ownerships, with the South (right) providing an increasing share of the nation’s harvest. [Source: U.S. Forest Service, “2000 RPA Timber Assessment,” by Richard Haynes and Peter J. Ince.]

Projections in Timber Harvestin millions of tons, dry weight

by Ownership by Region & Species

Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI) ProgramCompanies That Have Completed Third-Party Certifications

DATE CERTIFIED

Oct. 1, 1998Sept. 1, 1999Oct. 31, 1999June 8, 2001

June 20, 2000July 17, 2000Aug. 1, 2000Aug. 1, 2000Oct. 1, 2000Oct. 1, 2000Nov. 1, 2000Nov. 1, 2000Nov. 1, 2000Dec. 1, 2000

Dec. 31, 2000April 20, 2001April 27, 2001April 27, 2001May 17, 2001July 30, 2001Aug. 1 2001

HECTARES

689,09978,107

1,343,773396,606808,040147,716394,583117,743364,23067,180

2,954,310844,817331,166135,170

2,913,840184,948

0852,13691,05872,848

607,050 13,394,416

ACREAGE

1,702,740193,000

3,320,418980,000

1,996,640365,000975,000290,940900,000166,000

7,300,0002,087,513

818,300334,000

7,200,000457,000

02,105,598

225,000180,000

1,500,000 33,097,149

– 0 –

– 50 –

– 100 –

– 150 –

– 200 –

– 250 –

– 300 –

– 350 –

– 400 –

1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 20501980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050

Other PublicNational ForestNon-Industrial PrivateForest Industry

West Total HarvestSouth Hardwood HarvestSouth Softwood HarvestNorth Total Harvest

Southern softwood harvestincreases rapidly after 2010.

Harvest increases more onnon-industrial private forestlandthan other ownerships.

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initiated a free landownerassistance program similar toWestvaco’s CFM program. Then,to make certain its contractloggers are sensitive to soil andwater quality—environmentalvalues easily damaged byreckless use of equipment—Mead imposes two ironcladrules: loggers deliveringpulpwood to company woodyards must comply with statesafety and environmentalstandards, and loggers who workon Mead land or company-contracted land must completeadditional safety and waterquality training at HockingCollege in Nelsonville, Ohio.

“Loggers are our interfacewith small forestland owners,”Mr. Lashbrook explains. “We aretogether responsible to thelandowner for the quality of thework we do. And we depend onour loggers to alert us tolandowners who need helpmanaging their forests. As amatter of company policy, weencourage landowners toresponsibly manage their forestsand we buy only from MasterLoggers.”

Mead, based at Dayton, Ohio,owns another 2.1 million acresof forestland in Alabama,Georgia, Kentucky, Maine,Michigan, Tennessee and NewHampshire. In addition to itsChillicothe operation, it owns paper millsat Escanaba, Michigan, Phenix City,Alabama and Rumford, Maine. All told, thecompany has offices and operations in 32countries and sells it products—paper,packaging material, paperboard and officepapers—in 98 countries. Annual salesexceed $4.3 billion and its Mead andGilbert paper labels are among the mostrecognizable on office products storeshelves around the world.

Mead and its Wall Street-tradedcompetitors—their holdings labeled“Forest Industry Lands” in Forest Servicerecords updated annually since the early1950s— own just 13 percent of thecountry’s 503.8 million-acre timberlandbase. But because timber production isemphasized, industrial landownersaccount for about 38 percent of thenation’s softwood harvest [3.965 billioncubic feet in 1997] and about 16 percentof its hardwood harvest [1.141 billioncubic feet in 1997] Softwood lumber isused mainly as structural framing andsheeting material in houses, while

hardwood is used in doors, windows, woodtrim, furniture, pallets, newsprint andnumerous grades of writing paper. Add allthe cellulose-based products made byother industries and you have 5,000-plusnecessities of life that were first productsof the forest.

But numbers don’t tell the wholestory. Most of the nation’s big landownersmaintain cooperative research ventureslike Mead-owned Vinton Furnace, andmost also have close ties with wildlifegroups including the Ruffed GrouseSociety, Ducks Unlimited, the NationalWild Turkey Federation, the Izaac WaltonLeague of America, the Boone andCrockett Club and the Rocky MountainElk Foundation. All require their loggersto complete training programs, mostmaintain landowner assistance programs,many are involved in sophisticateduniversity-level research in forestry andwood technology and most participate inthird-party certification programsdesigned to assure lumber and paperretailers their forests are sustainably

managed. But standing beneathtowering oaks that shadowVinton Furnace it is comfortingto see that here in southernOhio’s beautiful hill country,before forestry made its wayfrom Europe to America, naturefaced down the IndustrialRevolution and won.

Forestry gets down tobusiness in a hurry in

Louisiana today. The greatsouthern pine forests that gavethe South its first real shot atthe Industrial Revolution arenearly all gone now. Gone too isthe region’s old lumber millingindustry—gone the way of theCrowell Lumber Company atLongleaf. Its saws, installed in1892, fell silent for the last timeon Valentine’s Day 1969.Shortly thereafter the towndisappeared from state roadmaps. Sad, because there is asplendid outdoor museum therenow to remind passersby that athousand people once lived inLongleaf, and that Crowell sawscut virgin southern pine logsused to build the famed Higginsassault boats that Ike saidhelped win World War II.

But what has replaced Louisiana’s oldforests and its first milling industry isstunning in its own right. In the half ofthis state that is forested, southern pineplantations stretch as far as the eye cansee. Although they are the progeny ofearlier natural forests, these forests ofloblolly, slash, shortleaf and longleaf pineare growing much faster, yielding nearlyfour times as much wood per acre peryear. Such productivity gains do not comeeasily, but thanks to advances in geneticresearch it is now possible to grow asouthern pine forest that is ready forharvest in 35 years or less, depending onthe desired product. No wonder southernpine is now Louisiana’s leading crop.

These new forests bear witness to therise of an industry that bears littleresemblance to its heritage. The old gangsaws that cut big logs into lumber arelong gone, replaced by state of the artmilling technologies that convert smalldiameter logs into lighter and cheaper-to-assemble “engineered” products whosestandards for performance and reliability

The old Crowell Lumber Company mill site at Longleaf, Louisiana is nowa fine museum. During World War II the plant milled virgin southern pineused in the construction of the famed Higgins boats Ike said helpedsecure peace. Built in 1892, the mill fell silent for the last time onValentine’s Day 1969.

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

far exceed those of earlier generation sawnlumber: glued laminated timbers, I-joists,I-beams and structural compositeproducts including oriented strand boardand laminated veneer lumber. And there isthis fact that you would think would haveconservationists dancing in the streets: ittakes only 40 percent as much wood toframe a house when laminated veneerlumber [LVL] is used in place of dimen-sion lumber.

Louisiana is home to the largest LVLmanufacturing facility in the world, BoiseCascade Corporation’sAlexandria plant.Together with itsslightly smaller sisterplant in White City,Oregon, the companynow services burgeon-ing LVL markets onthree continents:Europe, Asia and NorthAmerica. To meet itsfuture fiber needsBoise has also becomea leader in southernpine genetic research.

“We are looking forthe elite amongnaturally occurringpollen crosses,” saysSouthern ForestResources ManagerTom Rhodes of thecompany’s seed treeorchard and its 13progeny test sites. “Ourobjective is to increaseper acre fiber yieldwhile also increasing the genetic diversitywithin our plantations.”

Boise plants about 12 million seedlingsannually on some 15,000 cutover acres.And like other southern forest landown-ers, it is constantly on the lookout forpines that exhibit exceptional insect anddisease resistance, tolerate frost, growfaster and display superior form andstructural properties. Seeds extractedfrom their cones stand a good chance ofbecoming part of a six-state tree improve-ment cooperative that provides seedlingsgrown from millions of naturally occur-ring genetic crosses.

To maximize tree growth and quality,southern pine forests are typically thinnedthree times. Boise reduces stand densityfrom 700 to 300 trees per acre at age 14,from 300 to 175 at age 20 and from 175 to95 at age 26. Thinning No. 1 producesnine cords per acre, No. 2, six cords andNo. 3 yields seven cords. Final harvest,between age 30 and 35 yields another 60cords, but within a few years, genetic

advances will soon push final harvest toage 27 and boost final yield to 75 cords.

By age ten the trees are 20 feet tall andtheir bark is thick enough to withstand alow intensity ground fire. So to controlinsects and diseases, and to promotegrowth in plant species preferred bywildlife, ground fires are thereafter set atthree-year intervals until final harvest.Then the process starts anew. The land iscleared, stumps are pulled, piled andburned, the soil is tilled into high-centered rows that allow for drainage and

a new pine crop is planted.While these new plantations certainly

lack the storied past that inspired so manyof the Old South’s great novelists, theForest Service expects them to providenearly 75 percent of the nation’s softwoodharvest by 2050. Moreover, fast growingpine plantations are expected to blanketnearly 50 million acres of the South bythen, 53 percent more area than theycover today. And though somesoutherners resent the sameness ofplantations, the surprising fact is thatthey also provide abundant wildlifehabitat. Boise’s forests, which are by nomeans unique, hold deer, squirrels andrabbits, plus more than 80 bird speciesincluding the endangered red-cockadedwoodpecker. Southern forest landowners,including Boise, have learned how to workaround the bluebird-sized woodpeckers—the only birds in the region that borecavity-like nests into live pines. Since itcan take a woodpecker more than a yearto bore a nest-size hole in a live pine,

biologists sometimes lend a hand byboring nesting cavities about 25 feet offthe ground. The mature park-like settingsthe birds prefer stay so because forestersburn them periodically to reduce competi-tion from brush, speeding growth innaturally reseeded saplings. Because thewater table in the Southeast is so close tothe surface, any appreciable amount ofrain can quickly turn a logging job into amud bog. To alleviate the problem andsubsequent erosion, which can impairwater quality, heavy logging equipment

traverses the landscapeon layers of logs called“mats” or “corduroyroads” because they areribbed like the fabric.Laid crossway the logssupport the weight ofmachines that wouldotherwise sink to theiraxles.

Wherever machinesrun, there are corduroyroads laid out in street-grid fashion. Once thejob is done, the logs areremoved and milled.Within a matter ofweeks, new vegetationobliterates the roadbed.

Of course, suchroads are standard farefor companies partici-pating in the AmericanForest & PaperAssociation’s Sustain-able Forestry Initiative[SFI]. SFI mandates

practices that protect water quality— asdoes the federal Clean Water Act. Andaccording to Boise’s Mr. Rhodes, SFI hasbecome a way of life for company forestersand loggers. “It has changed ourmindset,” he observes. “We say to our-selves, ‘Protecting water quality meansthat we can keep the mill supplied withlogs year-round.’ And because the supplyflows year-round, the frantic pace of old isgone. We work slower and safer andprotect water quality and still get thewood the mills need.”

Boise logging contractor, Eddie RayHavens, verifies Mr. Rhodes’ observationsin a way only a logger can. “I’m proud toshow people the work we do,” he says.“There’s no soil rutting. You can hardlytell where our machines have been.”

Mr. Havens, who started logging withmules more than 50 years ago, nowoperates the most technologicallyadvanced mechanical harvesters moneycan buy: powerful machines with steel-reinforced cabs that keep loggers out of


8

The future: A tiny southern pine seedling atBoise Cascade’s Evans See Tree Orchard nearDeRidder, Louisiana. In Louisiana the companyannually plants 12-15 million seedlings on about15,000 harvested acres.

This red-cockaded woodpecker nest cavity is ina 43-year-old plantation owned by BoiseCascade. The company burns the site annuallyto maintain the park-like structure biologists saythe endangered robin-sized bird prefers.

This Boise Cascade southern pine plantation isabout 30 years old—and will soon be harvested.In Louisiana the company owns 684,000 acres andoperates two plywood mills, a paper mill and alaminated veneer lumber manufacturing plant.

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harm’s way. Suspended from hydraulicarms, huge disk-shaped saws that spin atthousands of revolutions per minute sever60-foot-tall trees at ground level inseconds then lay them gently on in thesoil. [See “Logging Comes of Age,” Page30]

“It is a much different and far saferbusiness today,” says Mr. Havens of hislifetime in logging. “The machines arevery expensive [$500,000 and up] but we

work year round and our workers’compensation insurance costs are a tenthwhat they were when we had men on theground packing chainsaws.”

Mr. Havens’ crew was felling a 39-year-old slash pine stand the day we caught upwith them south of Alexandria. Withinweeks the brush was piled and burned, thesoil tilled and the 20-acre site replanted.Now, barely a year later, a knee-high forestof seedlings—the elite—is pushing itsway skyward.

It is five o’clock in themorning. Day 3 of a certifica-

tion tour of forestry operations on BoiseCascade Corporation timberlands near LaGrande, an eastern Oregon timber andfarming community, is about to begin. Iam one of 17 guests invited to observe the

process: forestry’s equivalent of an IRSaudit.

My fellow travelers represent highprofile Boise Cascade customers: Lowes,at 600 stores the nation’s second largesthome center chain; Marvin, maker ofhigh-end windows and doors; Lanoga,owner of Lumbermen’s Building Centers,Spenard Builders Supply, Home Lumberand United Building; Pella, another majorwindow and door manufacturer; and

ENAP, operator of 349 east coast lumberyards.

McStain Enterprises, a major Coloradohomebuilder, has also sent a representa-tive, its director of environmentalprograms. Over lunch this day she will tellme that homebuilders from coast tocoast are polishing their environmentalcredentials for the day when manyexpect most homebuyers will ask if thewood used to build their new homescame from sustainably managed forests.So far few have.

The fact that we have all traveled so farto be here this morning attests to asecond fact: forest certification isforestry’s biggest story today. A thirdfact—Boise Cascade’s willingness to allowus to observe the process first hand anduncensored—underscores a fourth fact:the nation’s major industrial timberlandowners see third party certification as thebest way to quell consumer concern forthe sustainability of their forest manage-ment practices. But also on this day aretailer will take me into his confidence

long enough to say that while customer-conscious retailers are indeed pressuringlandowners to get their forests certified,what they fear more than uncertifiedlumber are environmental activistsdressed in Ninja garb rappelling fromstore rooftops for the amusement oftelevision news crews. In high volumestores working on razor-thin marginssuch antics can send customers stamped-ing for the exits, erasing a month’s profit

in a single day.Marquee scientists from three major

universities— Oregon State, MontanaState the University of Idaho —areconducting today’s field audit undercontract to PricewaterhouseCoopers, oneof the world’s largest managementconsulting firms. The company’s auditingroots run deep in both forestry and forestproducts manufacturing.

Last night we sat through an hour-long orientation designed to acquaint uswith the certification process. We learnedthat Day 1 was devoted to a randomsearch of company forestry records.Anything in the filing cabinet is fair game.Day 2 was spent interviewing foresters,logging engineers, silviculturists andreforestation specialists. Three-hourinterviews are commonplace. “It is liketaking off all your clothes at a publicbeach,” a company forester tells me later.Today’s field audit is a reality check. Doeswhat the certification team sees on theground mirror what they learned on Day 1and 2? We will know at the end of the day.

EVERGREEN 21

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

Midway through Day 2 the teamannounced it was rejecting the three sitesthe audit firm had selected for today’s fieldaudit in favor of three new locations. I askwhy and am told that certification teamsview unanticipated scheduling changes asa way of enhancing the credibility of theiraudits. “The company had time to preparefor the first three sites,” explains Price,Waterhouse, Coopers audit managerBruce Eaket. “They had no time toprepare for the alternate sites we selectedat the last moment. We like it that way.”

Third party audits take from four tonine days and can cost wellover $100,000, dependingon the size of the forest.The landowner pays—a factthat raises conflict ofinterest questions in theminds of many including aretailer attending lastnight’s briefing. But whensomeone asks if any retailerin the room would bewilling to pick up the tab nohands go up. Retailers areno more interested inpaying for certified “green”lumber than are theircustomers, so Boise eats thecost— as do other majorlumber producers. It is acost of doing business withlumber retailers who havebecome targets of Ninjaimitators.

Three more eminentscientists will join us thismorning. Jack WardThomas, Chief Emeritus ofthe U.S. Forest Service andnow Boone & Crocketwildlife professor at theUniversity of Montana;hydrologist David Thorud,Professor and DeanEmeritus, University ofWashington College ofForest Resources andwildlife biologist SteveMealey, another ForestService veteran and one ofthe country’s most re-spected grizzly bearexperts. Now retired, Dr.Mealey recently joined thecompany as its manager for watersheds,wildlife and aquatic ecology. DoctorsThorud and Thomas consult with Dr.Mealey and other company scientistsresponsible for implementing whateverrecommendations the certification teammakes in its final report.

Certification is serious business and

failure is not an option, especially in thepresence of customers who account formore than $100 million in annual lumberand engineered wood product sales. Butthis day proves uneventful. Some minorsuggestions are offered [they always are]and it is off to Minnesota, where thecompany’s pine and aspen forests under-went certification in late August.

If anyone had told me ten years agothat the country’s industrial timberlandowners would someday open their foreststo this kind of scrutiny I would have saidthey were crazy. And I would have been

wrong. At this writing, some 33 millionacres of industrial timberland in the U.S.and Canada will have been third partycertified in accordance with SustainableForestry Initiative [SFI] standardsdeveloped by scientists and landownersworking under the aegis of the AmericanForest & Paper Association.

There are more than 80 forest certifi-cation systems in place around the world.Most are small and have no presence inthe United States. Here, three systems areat the forefront: the venerable AmericanTree Farm program established in 1941;SFI, established in 1993 and the ForestStewardship Council’s FSC program,established in 1994. Despite the fact thatboth SFI and the Tree Farm programdwarf FSC, it is FSC that gets most of thepublicity, first because it was establishedby a coalition of environmental organiza-tions, and second because of its close ties

to the Rainforest ActionNetwork [RAN], marketer ofNinja look-alikes. RAN is anFSC member—a fact manysuspect played heavily inrecent decisions by Lowesand Home Depot to reviewearlier commitments tofavor FSC-certified lumberover SFI certified products.

FSC’s high profilemarketing program, whichhas included advertisementsin Playboy and People(featuring those well knownforestry luminaries PierceBrosnan and Olivia NewtonJohn), has turned certifica-tion into something of apolitical sideshow —a factthat has not gone unnoticedamong serious participants.(See “Certification Wars:Why SFI Will Win” at thisweb-site: www. evergreenmagazine.com). In fact, toward off any appearance ofimpropriety AF&PA (whosemembers own industrialtimberland or manufactur-ing facilities) has created aseparate non-profit corpora-tion— with a separate boardof directors that includesrepresentatives from severalconservation groups—toadminister SFI’s standardsand measures. Amongthem: the Isaac WaltonLeague, The NatureConservancy, ConservationInternational and theConservation Fund. And

among those who applaud the move:Boise SFI advisors Jack Ward Thomas andDavid Thorud.

“Distancing SFI from AF&PA memberlandowners is one of two keys to theprogram’s success,” Dr. Thomas said in arecent Evergreen interview. “The other isindependent third-party verification of

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

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the sustainability of forest practices. SFIis a solid program and a very creativesolution to problems associated with apublic perception that industrial land-owners aren’t practicing sustainableforestry.” Dr. Thorud concurs.

“Third party certification puts forestryback in the forest where it belongs,distancing it from legislative and policyprocesses,” he told me during a LaGrandeinterview. “It assigns a much higherpriority to environmental goals, therebycommanding the unprecedented atten-tion of top industry executives. And it hascreated a nice bridgelinking the commoninterests of industriallandowners and conserva-tionists.”

Dr. Thorud, who alsosits on SFI’s SustainableForestry Board, creditsenvironmentalists withturning certification into amarketplace issue. “It istheir contribution to aworthwhile process,” hesays. “In the years beforethird-party certificationcame along landownersnever got credit for protect-ing fish and wildlife habitat,soil productivity and waterquality. Now they do.”

At 8:32 a.m. onSunday, May 18,

1980 a primeval force upfrom the basement of timedecapitated the crown jewelof southwest Washington’sCascade mountain range.In a single killing moment,more than a cubic mile ofMount St. Helens’ splendorrocketed into the heavens.It would fall back to earthas ashen powder in commu-nities as far away asKellogg, Idaho, 400 miles tothe east.

The lateral blast, whichmoved across a heavily timbered land-scape at more than 400 miles an hour,smashed everything in its path. Within 17miles of ground zero, 700 degree windsblew at 100-miles an hour. A 60-ton logloader was tossed 1,100 feet through theair and torn to smithereens. Standing onthe volcano’s bulging north flank,

vulcanologist David Johnston wasincinerated.

The force of the blast blew the bulgeacross sparkling Spirit Lake at 100 milesan hour, transforming its blue watersinto a 300-foot high tsunami. The entirelake crashed into the forest on its northshore, then fell back on itself carryingmillions of tons of debris. The lake’scabins and lodges were swept to thebottom of the lake and now lie beneathhundreds of feet of mud and debris.Twenty-one years later, logs, trees andstumps still bob gently in shoreline

waters. There is not a tree in sight.The accompanying earthquake

triggered a debris torrent that sweptdown the Toutle River with such forcethat it eventually blocked ship traffic onthe Columbia River at its confluence withthe Cowlitz. Everything in its path—homes, roads, bridges, machinery,

railroad tracks and industrial sites—wereswept away.

In all, 57 people lost their lives,together with 5,000 black-tail deer, 1,500Roosevelt elk, 200 black bear, 15 moun-tain goats and countless millions ofsongbirds, small mammals, salmon andsteelhead. Nearly 234 square miles oftimber were flattened by the blast,including almost 106 square miles of theWeyerhaeuser Company’s St. Helens TreeFarm. Huge trees, some over 250 tall andsix feet in diameter, were snapped likewooden matchsticks. Those that were not

toppled by the force of theblast were ripped from theground. Like spentmissiles, they fell back toearth on the backsides ofsurrounding ridges. Thethought of anythingsurviving seemed unthink-able.

To the casual observer,the blast zone does notlook much different todaythan it did 21 summersago. But scientists havebeen surprised by therelative speed of a recoverythey feared might takecenturies. Where inhospi-table ash was washed awayby erosion, hundreds ofplant species, includingwildflowers, punctuate anotherwise grayish moon-scape once covered byheavy timber. The birds,frogs and salamanderscame back too, as did theelk and coho salmon, bothof which proved far moreadaptable to greatly alteredhabitats than biologists hadpredicted. But it will stillbe a century or more beforea conifer forest is seen hereagain.

In 1982 Congressestablished the 110,000-acre Mount St. HelensNational Volcanic Monu-ment, commemoratingboth the blast and nature’searly attempts to put thepieces of a once great forest

back together again. The desolatelandscape radiates its own beauty,providing scientists with a ringside seatfrom which to observe the recovery.Nearly 12 million tourists come hereevery year to gaze at this spectacle and[one supposes] try to figure out wherethey might have taken cover. But there

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The once sparkling blue waters of Spirit Lake were transformed into a 300-foot hightsunami by the force of the St. Helens’ blast. (Top) Twenty-one years later logs,trees and stumps still fill the lake. The Weyerhaeuser Company lost 106 squaremiles of timber and spent two years salvaging 850 million board feet of timber.(Bottom) Salvage loggers retrieved enough blast-killed timber to construct 85,000three-bedroom homes.

was no place to hide, so it is toWeyerhaeuser’s adjacent St. Helens TreeFarm that visitors often retreat in theirimaginary flight to safety. In fact, manyconfuse it with the Monument and, untiltold otherwise, seem to want to creditnature for the stunning forest they see.

But it is Weyerhaeuser that deservesthe credit, for here, on company land,more than 18 million Douglas and noblefir seedlings were planted amid a two-year salvage logging operation thatyielded 850 million board feet of timber,enough to construct 85,000three-bedroom homes.Most of the trees were handplanted, and in nearly everycase, planters had to digthrough nearly a foot ofash to reach nutrient-richmineral soil. Today, thetrees are 60 feet tall. Nowonder the tourists getconfused.

The rapid recovery ofplant and animal species isespecially noteworthy oncompany lands because ithad been widely assumed[and still is in somequarters] that salvagingtimber in the aftermath ofsuch a devastating naturaloccurrence would onlymake things worse. Butthat has not turned out tobe the case. Despite thenear frenetic pace of thesalvage operation, 90wildlife species, includingelk, birds and amphibians,were observed repopulat-ing the area by September1981. Within five years elkpopulation numbers hadreturned to pre-eruptionlevels. Moreover, spawningsteelhead numbers in thedevastated south fork ofthe Toutle River wherehigher than those forstreams unaffected by theeruption. This despitepresumed fatal highstream temperatures,scoured pools and a neartotal loss of riparianhabitat.

Perhaps no scientist was moresurprised by the speed of the recoverythan University of Washington forestecologist Dr. Jerry Franklin, who early onpredicted it would be centuries beforesignificant recovery occurred. “It was astupid perspective,” he conceded in an

MSNBC interview conducted on thetwentieth anniversary of the eruption.Dr. Franklin stepped out of a helicopterinto ankle-deep ash just two weeks afterthe 1980 eruption. “I expected to findnothing alive but was instead greeted bya recovery already underway. How could Ihave been so dumb?”

But Dr. Franklin was far from alone infearing the worst. Many also predictedrecent clearcuts would be the last areas torecover, when in fact they were the first.The reason: plants that quickly colonized

clearcuts provided an unexpectedmeasure of resiliency as well as a readyseed source, and mineral soil exposed byerosion or logging equipment provided anutrient-rich seedbed unavailable innitrogen deficient ash.

Weyerhaeuser lost $66 million intimber, plantations and equipment on

that fateful May morning in 1980. Itspent another $10 million replanting and$1 million monitoring the result. Ofcourse, the cynics will argue that the onlyreason the company did it is because theyare a big outfit and can afford it, and thatis certainly true of the world’s largestsoftwood lumber producer, engineeredwood manufacturer and owner ofstanding softwood inventory. But I willargue that they did it because 25 yearshence the return of shareholder capitalon these immensely productive acres will

be huge. Meanwhile, morethan 130 wildlife speciesthrive here. And to the 18.4million Douglas and noblefir seedlings the companyplanted, nature addedmillions more red alder,cherry, cascara, cotton-wood, big-leaf maple andWestern flowering dog-wood. It is a sight tobehold.

The 1980eruption of Mount St.Helens teaches two greatecological lessons. First,nature is resilient, notfragile as some suggest; andsecond, armed with theright tools, people can helpspeed the recovery process.St. Helens the Tree Farmand St. Helens the Monu-ment teach these lessons asstudies in contrast thatcould not be more sharplydefined: 106 square miles of60-foot-tall trees standingbeside 128 square miles ofnear desolation.

But hidden beneath thesesharp contrasts is anothereven more importantlesson: where nature isconcerned nothing is everas simple as it first appears.There is, for example, thetemptation to see St.

Helens as a ringing endorsement forclear-cutting. And why not: here wehave a 234-mile clearcut, punctuated by106 square miles of pretty good evi-dence that picking up the pieces andreplanting works.

But the lesson taught here is far moresubtle and, for landowners, far more


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Replanting Douglas and noble fir seedlings in the aftermath of St. Helens’ salvagelogging proved more difficult than Weyerhaeuser scientists had anticipated. Formost of the 18 million seedlings planted, planters had to dig through a foot ofash (Top) to reach nutrient-rich mineral soil. (Bottom) Today the trees tower 60feet above the very spot where the shovel-full of ash was photographed.Thinning is next.

valuable. And, like themountain’s disgorgedremains, the sometimescontradictory evidence isscattered across an aca-demic landscape thatstretches back to the 1930swhen clearcutting becamethe focal point of a scien-tific debate of near epicproportion. On one side:Leo Isaac, a brilliantsilviculturist with theForest Service’s PacificNorthwest Forest andRange Experiment Stationand his boss, ThorntonMunger, a Yale man andramrod straight adminis-trator. On the other side:Burt Kirkland and AxelBrandstrom, two Universityof Washington scientistswho, during the Depres-sion, suggested that theForest Service considerpartial cutting in theregion’s old growth forestsas a means of reducinglogging costs. Cash-strapped loggers could[they reasoned] take outthe larger more valuabletrees leaving the smallerones behind. The ideacaught on quickly withthose who saw partialcutting as a visuallyattractive alternative toclearcutting. But Mr. Isaacsaw partial cutting asnothing more than highgrading, a scheme lacking scientificbasis “dreamed up in smoke-filled officesat the University of Washington.” Thefight was on.

In the end, politics trumped science.The Kirkland-Brandstrom paper waspublished in 1936, complete with aglowing forward by Forest Service chief,Ferdinand Silcox. And so for the next 20years the federal government flirted withpartial cutting in Pacific Northwestnational forests, despite Mr. Munger’swell-publicized speech before the PugetSound Section of the Society of AmericanForesters—a speech in which he casti-gated partial cutting as a system “whichtook out the finest trees and left the restas sub-standard forest which wouldpredominate in all future growth.”Reciting an axiom known to generationsof German foresters he declared, “Theselection forest must not become theplunder forest.”

But it would be 1956 before the partialcutting experiment crash-landed in thewake of Mr. Isaac’s analysis of the results.Subsequent mortality exceeded growth in15 of 17 plots he monitored. Residualtrees frequently blew over in strongcoastal windstorms while others weredamaged by equipment that loggers haddifficulty maneuvering between desig-nated leave trees. Growth was furtherimpaired by the absence of middle-agedDouglas fir trees poised to take the placesof the towering giants that were removed.Worse yet, partial cutting altered speciescomposition, favoring growth in lessvaluable shade tolerant tree speciesincluding hemlock, cedar and silver fir.

“The results of this study, on thewhole, provide further proof of theaccepted hypothesis that a [shade]intolerant tree like Douglas fir is un-suited for a selection cutting thatcontinuously harvests the oldest and

ripest trees in an all-agedforest,” he wrote in whatfor must have been amoment of considerablevindication.

But Leo Isaac was a farmore careful observer ofnature than he is nowgiven credit for havingbeen. Despite his ardentdefense of clearcutting, heclearly understood itslimitations, and acknowl-edged them in his 1956paper.

“Individual treeselection or evenshelterwood cutting mayhave a place in some of theabnormal stands or sites inthis region,” he wrote.“Douglas fir occurs in purestands or in mixture withponderosa pine and otherspecies in a somewhat all-aged forest on dry sites. Inthese stands east of theCascade Range and to someextent in southwest Oregonand on severe sites withinthe region proper, moistureis the limiting factor. Thesestands are short, wind-firmand somewhat open; theylet in enough light forsome Douglas fir reproduc-tion to become establishedand grow. Sample plotswere not located in thesestands in this study, butpartial cutting or trueselection cutting in these

stands was practiced with success east ofthe Cascade Range before this projectbegan. There seems to be no logicalreason why it would not be equallysuccessful on the drier sites of southwestOregon, the loose, gravelly soils of thePuget Sound region, or on severe southslopes elsewhere within the Douglas firregion.”

Over the years since his “ResearchPaper No. 16” [Place of Partial Cutting inOld Growth Stands of the Douglas FirRegion] was published, Mr. Isaac’s workhas been both praised and criticized, butin his determination to overcome theemotional forces that often swirl aboutclearcutting he lit the way for legions ofresearchers who have since been obligedto defend the controversial practice in theface of political opportunists and othersfor whom defending the environment hasbecome chic.

In a 1996 paper he wrote for Policy

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(Top) Privately owned forests across the U.S. often containmore genetic diversity than naturally regenerated NationalForests. To improve tree quality and protect their forests fromdisease landowners test different genetic strains in orchardslike this one in Louisiana. (Bottom) Soil productivity isnaturally enriched by nutrient laden logging debris leftbehind to rot and return to the soil.

Options, [“Biodiversity And ItsRelationship To Ecosystem Healthand Integrity”] University of BritishColumbia Professor HamishKimmins used some of their ownterminology to remind environmen-talists that biological diversitycannot be protected by one-size-fits-all regulatory regimes that ignoreobservable or desired forest condi-tions.

“Much has been said in theenvironmental debate about ‘respectfor nature’,” he wrote. “However,there is frequent confusion aboutwhat this term means and how weshould conduct forestry in order torespect nature. This is because thereare two major different meanings inthis word. One is to have ‘due regardfor’ or ‘to take particular notice’ ofthe object of respect. Another is to‘esteem’ or ‘venerate’ the object.Many of the mythologies aboutecosystem diversity, health andintegrity are based on the latterdefinition. Successful sustainableresource management must be basedon the former.”

To drive home his point, Profes-sor Kimmins stressed the impor-tance of selecting a harvestingsystem [clearcutting, shelterwood,seed or single tree] that replaces theeffects of natural processes manage-ment has somehow altered.

“In those forests where naturaldisturbance that is typical for thedesired seral stage [condition] ischaracteristically small scale andfrequent, forest management shouldemulate this,” he wrote. “Wherenatural disturbance is severe, largescale and infrequent, managementshould have the same characteristicsif it is the objective to sustain thehistorical condition of the forest.”

Bottom line: where disturbancepatterns are subtle and hard todetect, avoid clearcutting, leavingsome trees behind as a natural seedsources and to shade the new seedlings,just as Leo Isaac suggested. But wherenature clearcuts, clearcut for bestregeneration results.

The Oregon Forest Resources Insti-tute [OFRI] expanded on ProfessorKimmons’ work in a 1999 report,“Harvesting and Regeneration inOregon’s Commercial Forests,” a report itprepared in the aftermath of Measure 64,a 1998 voter initiative that, had it passed,would have outlawed clearcutting in allOregon forests, including those that areprivately owned. Voters defeated the

measure by an 81-19 margin after itbecame apparent to them that privateforests in Oregon were already wellregulated and in far better condition thanthe measure’s sponsors had alleged. TheOFRI report, which drew its points fromthe work of more than 50 scientists, cameto essentially the same conclusions Mr.Isaac drew in 1956. Clearcutting remains“the system of choice,” OFRI reported,but Douglas-fir can be successfullyregenerated using aesthetically morepleasing selection harvesting methods,particularly on drier sites; while on

wetter sites, landowners face thelikely prospect of economic loss, aresult of increased seedling mortal-ity and slower tree growth.

In recent years, clearcuttingopponents have stepped up theirattacks on the practice, claimingthat it hurts wildlife; but again,there is scant scientific evidence tosupport the claim. Two notablereviews of more than 500 studies—one commissioned by OFRI in 1997and a second completed at ClemsonUniversity in 1999— drew the sameconclusion: done properly, clearcutlogging benefits plant and animalspecies that thrive in sun-filledopenings.

Writing in the OFRI study,[“Likely Consequences of ForestManagement on Terrestrial, Forest-Dwelling Vertebrates in Oregon”]University of British Columbiaforest ecologist Dr. Fred Bunnellsaid he could find “no evidence thatcurrent forest practices immediatelythreaten any terrestrial vertebratespecies in Oregon.” Nor did he findnotable evidence that harvestingwas leading to forest fragmentation,a frequent problem neotropicalbirds in areas where forests joinagricultural or urban areas.

Dr. Bunnell considered nearly300 native vertebrate species thatdwell on private lands in Oregonand concluded that becausevertebrates have diverse styles “theworst possible approach to main-taining vertebrate diversity wouldbe to manage every acre in the sameway, or to have a large forest ofa single age class.”

The only noticeable deficiencyDr. Bunnell could find in Oregon’smost intensively managed forestswas a lack of large wood debris— anot surprising discovery given thefact that, for years, landowners wererequired to dispose of loggingdebris, even naturally occurring

debris that found its way into streams.But in recent years, fish and wildlifebiologists have reversed themselves, andin compliance with new regulations,landowners are now leaving more debrisand snags as habitat for small mammals,amphibians and cavity-nesting birds.

The Clemson study [Responses ofWildlife to Clearcutting and AssociatedTreatments in the Eastern United States]reviewed 230 studies by five federalagencies and 27 universities and came tomany of the same conclusions Dr.Bunnell reached. Snags are an important


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(Top) A Weyerhaeuser log truck moves slowly out of a freshclearcut on the company’s St. Helens Tree Farm in southwestWashington. (Bottom) Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore,a Ph.D. forest ecologist and author, is a passionate supporterof variable retention harvesting, a widely used clearcuttingrefinement that retains habitat features biologists believe areimportant to most vertebrate species.

habitat component, as is woodydebris, but clearcutting seems toenhance the quality, quantity andavailability of food and cover for asurprising number of speciesincluding deer, moose, black bear,rabbits, most game birds, manysongbirds and numerous rodentspecies. The study got an unexpectedboost in late 1999 from the presti-gious Wildlife Management Institute.In a copyrighted Associated Pressstory, WMI senior scientist JamesWoehr challenged the oft-madeclaim that logging in NationalForests hurts wildlife. “The publichas this misconception that theproper way to manage for wildlife isto leave the forest alone, but that’sjust not true,” he said. “Where wehave excluded natural forces like firethat would create young forests, wehave to do something else, and that’scut trees. Currently, several birdspecies are in decline in the Eastbecause there has been insufficientharvesting activity to create theyoung forest habitat they need tosurvive.”

In what novelist IvanDoig (“This House of Sky

and English Creek”) once called“the murky annals of clearcutting”no one has mounted a moreunexpected or spirited defense ofclearcutting than high profileGreenpeace co-founder PatrickMoore.

Dr. Moore [yes, he holds a PhDin forest ecology] burst ontoforestry’s stage about ten years agoand has since become the darlingof nearly every forestry industryvenue in the U.S., Canada and Europe.The fact that he is a gifted writer in afield not known for its writers hashelped, but it is his Greenpeace legacythat has brought him so much newattention, especially from journalistswho have simply assumed that an anti-war activist of such renown wouldautomatically oppose logging. Not so,for Patrick Moore is the son andgrandson of British Columbia log-gers. He grew up exploring fields ofstumps. They were his playgrounds,just as certainly as neighborhood ballfields fill the same longing in kids

who grow up in cities.“We didn’t call them ‘clearcuts’

because the word wasn’t known,” heremembers. “It was simply an ‘open-ing’ or the ‘slash.’ The slash was abetter place to play than the deep darkof the old growth surrounding us. Itwas brighter, and when the sun shoneit was warmer and drier. You could siton a stump in the sun and all summerlong the berries grew; first salmonberries, then thimbleberries, thenhuckleberries and finally the salalberries. They were all deliciouslydifferent and we shared them with

birds, deer and bears. As timewent on new trees came up andadded year-round green to thelogged area. Hemlocks, cedarsand firs competing for thesunlight eventually crowded outthe berry bushes. It was time tomove on to a more recentclearcut.”

With such powerful memoriesto draw on, it’s no surprise thatin two well publicized books,Green Spirit and Trees Are TheAnswer, perhaps hundreds ofspeeches, and now on his website,www.greenspirit.com, Dr. Mooregoes to great pains to compareand contrast meadows andclearcuts — the “temporarymeadows” of his boyhood.

“What clearcuts lack in easeof passage compared to naturalmeadows they more than makeup for in ecological terms,” heexplains. “The woody debris itselfadds a dimension not present inthe flat, two-dimensional world ofthe meadow. Wood left behind inclearcuts offers habitat for amyriad of species, from insects tofungi, to liverworts and mosses.Small mammals can hide frombirds of prey beneath decayingbranches and find protectionfrom the rain there. Rotting woodis like a slow-release fertilizer,the larger the piece the longerit will provide nutrients to agrowing forest. Wood soaks upwater like a sponge, holds it overdry periods, and protects the soilfrom wind and sun.”

In his books and speeches,Dr. Moore often references walksthrough forests clearcut by hisgrandfather more than 60 yearsago.

“If it weren’t for the presenceof rotting, moss-covered stumpsyou would never know it had

once been cleared,” he recalledin 1997 testimony before a U.S. Houseof Representatives subcommittee. “Thenew forest is so lush and full of shrubsand trees that all evidence of distur-bance has been removed. Bears,wolves, cougars, ravens and all theother forest-dwellers roam there. Thetrees are straight and tall and althoughthey have not yet reached the greatsize of some of their predecessors theyform a dense and growing cover onland once cleared bare.”

Imbedded in Dr. Moore’s personalstory is an impossible-to-ignore

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(Top) South Carolina logger Jimmy Smith is a strong supporterof sustainable forestry. Of Westvaco’s commitment to SFIstandards he says, “The benefits totally outweigh the costs.I would not go back to the old days.” (Bottom) Westvacohonors its SFI commitment in myriad ways. On its 3,400-acreWildlife Management Unit near Wickliffe, Kentucky rye grassgrows beneath 17-year-old, 110-foot tall cottonwoods.

message for which there is a hugeand growing body of scientificevidence: biological diversity neednot be lost in managed forests.Forests, he says, can be purpose-fully managed to resemble theirpredecessors in species composi-tion and structure.

“Extreme environmentalists liketo promote the idea that once aforest is cut the ecosystem isdestroyed forever,” he said in aFebruary 2000 Evergreen interview.“But with very few exceptionssecond growth forests in BritishColumbia and the Pacific Northwestare composed entirely of the nativetree and plant species. They are assimilar to their predecessors as anyforest in any region of the world.”

In his work with forest land-owners Dr. Moore frequentlychampions variable retentionharvesting, a clearcutting refine-ment that he helped develop thatemphasizes retention of habitatfeatures biologists believe areimportant to vertebrate species.The presence of such species is anindicator of the overall diversity ofa forest, which in turn is consid-ered to be a measure of its abilityto quickly recover from the effectsof human or natural disturbance.“Where sufficient habitat isretained in the landscape it shouldbe possible to maintain viablepopulations of each species,” heexplains.

But it is Patrick Moore’sengaging manner, and his morehopeful view of the world, not hisPhD in forest ecology, that isscoring big points with urbanaudiences that love wood but hatestumps. His two books havebecome enormously popular studyguides for people who are trying tounderstand their place in a naturalworld about which they know verylittle.

“Extremists claim that we humansare a cancer on the earth,” he observes.“By contrast, forest ecology teachesthat we are all part of nature and alllife forms change through time. Itstrikes a balance between human andnon-human interests, between reasonand emotion. We cannot deny that wemust consume to survive any morethan we can deny that over-consump-tion would lead to our demise. Absolut-ist approaches based on simplisticdogma compromise our ability to steera sustainable course.”

Patrick Moore is not theonly Greenpeace member to

jump ship. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, apolitical scientist and professor ofstatistics at Denmark’s University ofAarhus, challenges dire predictions bythe World Wildlife Fund, Worldwatch

Institute and Greenpeace con-cerning global warming, forestdepletion, species’ extinction andpopulation-driven resourcedepletion in his new book, “TheSkeptical Environmentalist”[Cambridge University Press] Dr.Lomborg began researching hisbook in 1998 in the hope ofrebutting “as right-wing propa-ganda” the work of the late Dr.Julian Simon, a University ofMaryland economist who made acareer of debunking the predic-tions of Dr. Paul Ehrlich, presi-dent of Stanford University’sCenter for Conservation Biology.

“Three months into theproject we were convinced thatwe were being debunked in-stead,” Dr. Lomborg said of Dr.Simon’s work in a recent NewYork Times interview. “Noteverything he said was right. Hehas a definite right-wing slant.But most of the important thingswere actually correct.”

Among the mythologies Dr.Lomborg corrects in his, book:the Worldwatch Institute 1998claim that, “The world’s forestestate had declined significantlyin both area and quality in recentyears.” But according to thelongest running set of records,those kept by the United NationsFood and Agricultural Organiza-tion, global forest cover in-creased since 1950 from 30.4 to30.89 percent. Moreover, Canadais gaining about 175,000 hectaresof forest annually, not losing200,000 hectares as Worldwatchreported.

According to Dr. Lomborg,world forest loss—only 20percent since the dawn ofagriculture—is far less seriousthan the 67 percent loss claimedby the World Wildlife Fund. Thepresent loss rate— about 0.46

percent due mainly to urban andagricultural expansion—is much lessthan the two percent loss manyenvironmentalists cite.

Though no longer a member ofGreenpeace, Dr. Lomborg insists he isstill an environmentalist. “I’m a left-wing guy,” he told Times writerNicholas Wade, “and a vegetarianbecause I don’t want to kill animals.So you can’t play the ‘he’s right-wingso he’s wrong’ argument.” But heparts company with former colleagueson exaggerated “leftist” claims he says


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(Top) Rudy Ritter, right, and his son, Allen, left, are also strongSFI supporters. The pair logs in South Carolina for Westvaco.“Attention to water quality standards has helped equipmentoperating and repair costs,” the senior Mr. Allen reports.(Bottom) 3,800-acre Island Three, a Westvaco plantation ona Kentucky island in the Mississippi River, is enormouslyproductive. These cottonwoods are 11 years old. The vinesare poison ivy.

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are distorting society’s priorities.“The worse they can portray theenvironment, the easier it is forthem to convince us that we needto spend more money on theenvironment rather than onhospitals, child day care and otherthings.”

In the weeks after Ifinished writing this

story, I exchanged e-mail noteswith several people I had asked toread portions of the manuscript.Of the notes I received, this onefrom a young lady I met whileparticipating in Boise Cascade’sSFI audit near LaGrande, Oregonstopped me dead in my tracks.“Thanks for helping me to betterunderstand forestry,” she wrote.“It is so important for you asEvergreen and Boise as a companyto put a human face on forestry.Consumers have no idea of thetremendous effort that goes intomanaging forests and makingwood products.”

The note took me back nearly16 years to the night ofEvergreen’s unveiling at aSouthern Oregon Timber Indus-tries Association meeting inMedford, Oregon. In the courseof my presentation to theassociation’s members I promisedthat I would use the pages ofEvergreen to “put a face on thetimber industry.” One sawmillowner in the audience thatevening took issue with medeclaring loudly, “We know whowe are!”

“Yes,” I replied, “I know whoyou are and you know who youare. The problem is that no one out-side of this room knows who you are.”

People—human faces — haveappeared on Evergreen covers 46times since we started publishing.But this issue’s cover features ourfirst husband and wife logging team:Rick and Deb Smith from Kalispell,Montana. Despite enormous andcostly changes in the logging indus-try [See “Logging Comes of Age,”Page 30] most logging companies arestill family-owned. Rick’s father,

Clyde, started the business in the1960s. And now Rick’s son, Ben, istesting the waters —logging foranother Montana company.

Rick and I spent several hoursscouting the location for our coverphotograph, which gave me a chanceto ask if Ben was going to become thethird generation of Smith loggers. “Itwould please me if he did,” Rick says,“but the decision is his, so I guessyou could say we’re running thebusiness as though he won’t, but

we’re hoping he will.”The elder Smith must have

asked himself the same questionwhen Rick went off to WestPoint in 1971. But he would nothave to wait long for the answer.After one semester Rick camehome and enrolled at MontanaState University where in 1976he received his degree inIndustrial and ManagementEngineering. He bought thecompany from his father in1985. Rick runs the woodsoperation and Deb runs theoffice, keeps the books, pays thebills and chases parts when theyare needed at distant loggingsites. “I would be hard-pressedto get through the day withouther,” Rick says of his wife.

Smith Logging’s big cus-tomer is Plum Creek TimberCompany, Montana’s largestindustrial timberland ownerand, at 7.8 million acres, thesecond largest forest landownerin the U.S. “Mainly, we docommercial thinning work forthem,” Rick explains. “Weremove only the poorest qualitytrees or those that are diseased,leaving the best trees behind asa natural seed source for thenext forest. Secondarily, wework to improve diversity byleaving behind a mix of treespecies of differing ages. It’sgood insurance against theonset of diseases which tend tofocus on a single tree species.”

There are also three Smithdaughters. Jessie, Heather andMegan are college studentsseemingly headed in othercareer directions. But if I were abetting man I’d put money onJessi, the oldest daughter and ageo-physics major at theUniversity of Montana, becom-ing a logger. The Sunday we

took pictures she drove the mechani-cal harvester back to its parking spotin the woods. As the giant machinerumbled past me I could not help butnotice the mile-wide grin on her face.

You cannot look into Smith familyeyes and see greed or any of the othercharacter flaws big city newspapercartoonists stereotype in sketchesdesigned to turn public opinionagainst those who harvest thenation’s wood. What you do see are ahusband and wife most folks would

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(Top) Tom Wynne stands atop a log deck on his Tree Farmwest of Olympia, Washington. Small private timberlandowners like Mr. Wynne own 59 percent of the nation’s forestsand provide about 49 percent of the annual harvest. Mostsmall landowners harvest timber to create or maintain wildlifehabitat. (Bottom) This beautiful sunlit stand of Douglas fir isone of many on Mr. Wynne’s property.

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(Top) Though they are both the same diameter [six inches]these cross sections illustrate the value of thinning. On the left,a section from a 60-year-old unmanaged forest. On the right, asection from a 20-year-old managed forest. (Bottom) A SmithLogging Company mechanical harvester begins its uphilljourney after thinning two lodgepole pine trees from a PlumCreek plantation west of Kalispell, Montana.

love to have as next-door neighbors.They embody an essence that iscentral to all human endeavor includ-ing logging and forestry: honesty, astrong work ethic, a giving heart, andlove of family and Country — valuesthat were ridiculed in the years afterVietnam but suddenly became impor-tant again in the terror and heartbreakof the World Trade Center tragedy.

Not every logger or landowner is asenvironmentally aware as those wehave featured in this very long essay.Yet despite human failing, America’s

nearly ten million forest landowners,working in concert with the nation’sone million loggers and mill workers,have managed to create a naturalbounty unrivaled in world history.That our nation’s forest future hasbeen secured is indeed a tribute to theresiliency of nature, but it also atribute to the dogged determination ofextraordinarily gifted men and womenwho, for nearly a century, have puttheir money and their reputations onthe line in service to a vision that istoday as sparkling as it was when

George S. Long first pictured it in1909. As the West’s big forestfirefighting cooperatives took shapehe confided to a colleague that it wastime for Weyerhaeuser to beginsearching for ways to ensure thatthere would be “another new crop oftimber ready to cut before the old oneis gone.”

Ninety-two years later, the searchcontinues. Four generations ofAmericans have been housed and theforest that will house the next is inthe ground and growing.


Logging Comes of Age

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A log truck winds its way through a pre-dawnforest on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula

When Bill Hagenstein signedon with the old Polson LoggingCompany at Grays Harbor, Washing-ton in 1931 he carried a four andone-half pound axe, an eight-poundmaul, a 13-pound 11-foot two-mancrosscut saw, a six-pound spring-board, a five-pound water bag, fortypounds of steel wedges and hislunch: 78 pounds in all.

“We were human pack animals,”he recalled in a recent Evergreeninterview. [See “The BountifulHarvest: Securing America’s ForestFuture,” Chapter 1] “But I was abig kid at 16: 6-foot 5 and 185pounds. That’s when I startedfalling timber.”

My, how times have changed.Today’s timber faller is more apt togo to work carrying a cellular phoneand a laptop computer. He sitscomfortably in an air-ride seat thesize of a living room lounge chair inan air-conditioned cab atop a$600,000 mechanical harvester.Using joy sticks and buttonsmounted on each arm of his seat heeffortlessly manipulates the ma-chine through stands of trees. Anon-board computer helps him selectwhich trees to cut and which toleave behind, and where and wherenot to harvest. At the end of the dayhe pushes a button and a satellite

uplink sends his daily productionreport to an office computer at thespeed of light.

“The era of the logger as PaulBunyan is long gone,” observesJohn Manz, recently retiredWeyerhaeuser Director of AppliedTechnology for Forest and WoodsOperations, a Registered Profes-sional Forester, Accredited LoggingProfessional and, for 30 years, oneof the most influential global voicesin logging technology.

“To the extent that his at-the-tree decisions are driven by scien-tific, economic, social and customerconsiderations, today’s logger mightmore appropriately be described asa working silviculturist,” explainsMr. Manz. “And to the extent thattoday’s advanced logging technolo-gies allow for very concise andefficient tree removal, yesteryear’saxe has been replaced by a“surgeon’s scalpel.” The result isthat regulators and consumers nowhave unprecedented assurances thattheir objectives and concerns arebeing addressed in meaningful andmeasurable ways.”

Indeed, it would seem thattechnology has the sun rising againon a U.S. industry that only adecade ago was thought to beentering its sunset years.

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Software-based pro-grams that simulate forestgrowth and harvestingresponses, hand held andmachine mounted globalpositioning systems andsatellite imagery are amongthe technology-based toolsthat are helping landownersand their loggers make betterdecisions on the ground.[See “Forestry At TheMillennium” by Valerie Jaffe,www.evergreenmagazine.com]So too is forest certifica-tion—independent, thirdparty verification of thesustainability of forestmanagement practices. Itsaim is to assure lumberretailers, building contrac-tors and consumers thatharvesting and managementoperations are not harmingthe environment. [SeeChapters 7–8, “The Bounti-ful Harvest: SecuringAmerica’s Forest Future”]

Inside the loggingindustry itself brute force isyielding to graceful ma-chines that work with thesurgeon-like dexterity Mr.Manz describes. Yes, someloggers are still packingchainsaws, particularly inthe West’s more mountain-ous regions or where treesmarked for harvest are toolarge to be felled by machine. But whereterrain and tree diameter are not limitingfactors the heavy lifting—including theactual cutting —is done by machines,making logging safer, more productiveand more environmentally sensitive thanearlier technologies that emphasizedpower only.

You might think mechanized harvest-ing machines that weigh 30 tons or more—and are capable of lifting half theirweight— would make a terrible mess inthe woods, but they don’t. Because theirweight is distributed over wide tracks, orsupported by oversized flotation tires, theground pressure they exert [measured insquare inches] is half that of a walkingman— and many times less than that of ahorse. Were you to follow one of thesegiants through the forest you would likelybe surprised by the lack of soil distur-bance. But the incongruity does not endhere. With circular saw blades that spin atthousands of revolutions per minute theyare capable of severing a 30-inch diametertree at ground level in seconds. In a single

fluid motion, the machine’s powerfulhydraulic arms lift the tree skyward thengently lay it on the ground, assuring thatits valuable wood it is not damaged.

“In logging— as in forests andforestry—the only constant is change,”says Mr. Manz, who recently joined theEvergreen Foundation Board of Directors.“Over the last century, we have movedfrom brute strength to waterpower, fromanimal power to steam and, finally, theinternal combustion engine. The futurecannot and will not be held back. Weeither embrace change or we perish.”

But of all the often conflicting changesthat have swept over the nation’s forestproducts industry in recent years—therise of global environmental concern,fierce global competition, increasingconsumer demand for wood-basedproducts, competing recreational de-mands, forest regulation on private landand monumental demographic shifts—Mr. Manz says only two lie within thedirect purview of loggers and landowners.

“We can decide to manage forests,

both public and private, in amanner that is economic,addresses landownerrequirements and isecologically sensitive.Thereafter, we canstrengthen the professionalrequirements for employ-ment in forest-basedindustries. Loggers andthose who design and buildtheir equipment haveanswered the call in theonly way they can—bydesigning and buildingmachines that are bothmore productive and moreenvironmentally sensitiveand by imposing trainingand continuing educationrequirements on them-selves.”

Over the last 50 years,logger-day productivity hasincreased by a factor ofseven. Brains and informa-tion-based technologieshave so completely replacedbrawn that in somecountries the public’sperception of loggers hasundergone a remarkabletransformation. Scandina-vians, for example, nowadmire loggers for theirprofessionalism in muchthe same way that theyadmire medical doctors.

The double-bitted axesand “misery whips” [two-man crosscutsaws] of Mr. Hagenstein’s day have givenway to three well choreographed loggingmethods: “full tree,” which yields 50percent of global harvest; “whole tree,” 20percent; and “cut-to-length,” 30 percent.In full tree logging operations the treesare felled and skidded to roadside fordelimbing and/or processing and loading.Tree length systems de-limb trees beforethey are skidded to roadside. Cut-to-length [meaning “cut-to-your-log length”]logging systems employ two machines: aharvester which fells, delimbs, crosscuts,scales and sorts the logs into piles and asecond machine that carries or “forwards”them to roadside.

Many logging engineers believe that thefuture lies in further advancements in cut-to-length [CTL] logging systems. And if a1993 U.S. Forest Service report is anyindication, it’s easy to see why. The report,summarizing the results of CTL tests inIdaho and Montana national forests, citesreduced soil compaction, minimal erosion,increased tree utilization, reduced road

(Top) A cut-to-length forwarder moves slowly through a thinning project onwestern Washington’s Olympic National Forest. The machine belongs to thecontractor, Hermann Brothers Logging Company, Port Angeles. CTL technology hasdone much to transform logging from a brute force business to one requiring bothskill and finesse. But some jobs (Bottom) still require strong backs and determina-tion. Here a mud-covered Hermann Brothers’ “landing chaser” removes a “choker”cable from a log brought uphill by a conventional cable logging system.

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building costs, less incursion onwildlife habitat and an aestheticallymore pleasing outcome as reasons whyCTL logging holds great promise as atool for efficiently thinning overlydense forests.

“CTL logging is a terrific tool,especially in forest thinning,” says TimWhite, Timberjack’s Manager of SalesDevelopment and another recentaddition to the Evergreen FoundationBoard of Directors. “Think about thisfor a moment. When we properly thina forest we stimulate growth in treesthat are left behind. It’s like planting a30 to 40 year old forest. We can alsoreduce the risk of wildfire, create orprotect wildlife habitat or improve theaesthetic quality of the forest.”

Mr. White concedes that CTLsystems are very expensive but hequickly adds, “Their operationalefficiency compensates when they areused in the kinds of forests for whichthey were designed.” Such forests arefound wherever economic and climaticconditions favor fast growing planta-tions: from Sweden and Finland toIndonesia, South Africa, New Zealand,Australia and Brazil. And in the UnitedStates, from Maine to the PacificNorthwest’s Douglas fir forests to theSoutheast’s southern pine forests.Indeed, the success of the more than80 sustainable forestry initiatives nowin play around the world appears tohinge— at least in part— on increasedacceptance and use of cut-to-lengthtechnology or other advanced “light-on-the-land” logging systems.

Still, Mr. Manz cautions againstunqualified endorsement of anyparticular system. “All harvested treesare eventually segmented into theirvarious products— small logs, largerlogs, chips and pulpwood,” he explains.“The question is where can this bedone most efficiently—in the woods, atroadside or at the mill. Answers vary asa function of fuel costs, transportationroutes and proximity to mills. Onceyou filter all the data you can deter-mine which system is best. Sometimesthe answer is a chainsaw and a 30-year-old log skidder.”

Though Timberjack holds a command-ing presence in the world of advancedlogging systems, it is by no means the onlycompany pioneering new technologiesdesigned to reduce the impact and increasethe productivity and safety of giant woodsmachines. Caterpillar, perhaps best knownfor its brutish yellow bulldozers andearthmovers, has developed a rubberizedtrack system that bridges the gap between

bulldozer-like steel tracks and flotationtires. The tracks, which look a bit likeconveyor belts with cleats on them, allowthe company’s Mobile Track Forwarder tocarry heavy loads of logs across sensitiveterrain where rutting and subsequenterosion would otherwise be a problem.Specifically designed for use in southernforests, which can be wet for months onend, the tracks leave almost no footprint intheir path. Because its four rear axles can

tilt from side to side the machine issurprisingly agile, allowing theoperator to maneuver the machinebetween closely spaces trees withoutdamaging them.

Other companies—Timberline andTigercat among them—are adaptingtheir machines to gain operatingefficiencies, agility and adaptability—all essential in a logging industrywhere, despite soaring fuel, labor andequipment costs, loggers aren’tgetting paid much more for their workthan they were 20 years ago. Fortu-nately the cost squeeze loggers arefacing has not gone completelyunnoticed. Several landowners—BoiseCascade, Mead, Westvaco and SevenIslands Land Company amongthem— are doing everything possibleto keep their machine-laden loggersworking year-round.

“Banks want to know that yourwork situation is secure before theylend large sums of money,” a NorthCarolina logger told me. “If you can’tshow that you’re working steady youprobably won’t get the equipmentloan you need.”

But for all the technologicaladvancements that have been made inrecent years, the greatest changes inlogging are not in machines, but inthose who own and operate them. Thehell-roaring days are indeed gone. Sotoo is the era when a young man witha strong back and a desire to workhard could buy a chainsaw on theinstallment plan and “go logging.” Itcosts a million dollars minimum—incapital alone—to get into thebusiness today. Banks that routinelyloaned money for chainsaws thinklong and hard before loaning millionsto someone with no business trackrecord. Those entering the professiontoday— the newcomers as well as thesons, daughters and grandchildren ofearlier generations of loggers— oftenhold masters’ degrees in businessadministration or engineering. Manyalso hold advanced degrees in thenatural sciences: biology, botany orforestry.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that aculture is being replaced by a profession,”says Keith Olson, executive director of theMontana Logging Association.

According to Mr. Olson, the driving forcebehind the self-styled uprooting of logging’swell-worn culture has been a desire byloggers to be seen as professionals capableof responding not just to landowner needbut also to widespread public concern forthe visual appearance and seeming destruc-

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(Top) Keith Olson is the executive director of the MontanaLogging Association (MLA), creators of ALP—the AccreditedLogging Professional training program— one of the most widelyadmired programs of its kind in the United States. (Bottom) PatWoolard runs a mechanical harvester for MLA member, SmithLogging Co. Mr. Woolard’s experience and skill level are suchthat, at his discretion, he can harvest or not harvest trees inthinnings Smith Logging does for Plum Creek Timber Company.He makes his decisions based on a landowner silviculturalprescription that favors leaving multiple tree species and thebest quality trees within each species.

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EVERGREEN 33

tiveness of logging. “We have always beendefined in terms of our worst performers,”Mr. Olson says of the training program MLAdeveloped in the early 1990’s in the hope ofaltering the industry’s poor image.

“We want people to see us in terms ofour best performers and, at the same time,we need to continuously elevate ourperformance standards.”

Mr. Olson and his directors sought theassistance of Montana’s Extension ForestryDepartment, which, by 1991, had developeda Forest Stewardship Workshop designed tohelp small landowners better understandtheir forest management options. Two MLAmember loggers — landowners them-selves— enrolled in the course in 1993 andwere so impressed by it that they suggestedthat Mr. Olson begin a dialogue withextension forestry foresters. The result was aseries of three five-day, 40-hour stewardshipworkshops conducted in early 1994 anddesigned to help loggers help landownersmeet their forest stewardship objectives.

“Different landowners might well placedifferent values on the same tract of land,”Mr. Olson explains. “It is the ‘loggers’ job tohelp landowners develop management plansthat protect what they value most, be ittimber, a home site, wildlife habitat or ahealthy forest. But no matter the valuechosen, the Stewardship Workshops treattimber as a byproduct of the whole forest,not the only product. As you might imagineembracing such a viewpoint is a real leap offaith for loggers who have historicallyviewed production as the primary key tosuccess. But once that leap is made,everything seems to change for the better,particularly our relationships with smallforest landowners who are naturally leery ofproduction loggers.”

The stewardship workshops programproved so popular with participating loggersthat MLA’s directors decided to make themthe foundation for their long contemplatedAccredited Logging Professional [ALP]program. The program, unveiled in thespring of 1995, requires loggers to completethe Stewardship workshop and an eight-hour CPR and first-aid workshop. Theymust also demonstrate a clear understand-ing of Montana’s Best ManagementPractices and the state’s StreamsideManagement law. Since 1995, more than250 MLA members have completed theprogram.

Stewardship workshops are conductedat the University of Montana’s Yellow BayBiological Station on Flathead Lake.Among the course offerings: ForestStewardship Objectives, Important PlantsThat Every Forest Steward Should Know,Tree Growth and Measurement, TheWildlife Resource, Forest Structures,

(Top) Mechanical harvesters like this one are capable of harvesting trees as large as 40 inches indiameter on surprisingly steep slopes. Still, there are places (Bottom) where the harvesting is stilldone the old fashioned way: with chainsaws in the hands of skilled timber fallers. The work is toughand dangerous.

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Cut-To-LengthLogging SystemsCut-To-Length harvesting technology is asuperb tool for thinning in plantations andother forests in which the presence of toomany trees thwarts forest growth and health.In plantations, thinning stimulates growth inresidual trees. Elsewhere, it is used to increasestructural and biological diversity, or toreduce the risk of wildfire and the onset ofinsect and disease infestations.

CTL logging rests on the choreographeduse of two machines: a harvester (one andseven on facing page) and a forwarder (six).The harvester does just what its name implies:it harvests trees. The forwarder forwards—orcarries—processed logs to a pre-determinedpoint where they are loaded on log trucks fortransport to a their destination— a sawmill orpulp mill, or both.

The business end of the harvester —sometimes called a “processor” is its “head”(five). Processing heads are capable ofperforming several tasks in a single uninter-rupted motion. They can de-limb a harvesttree, cut it into pre-determined lengths (two),color-code logs blue or red (three) destinedfor use as lumber or pulp, or spray fungicide(four) on stumps to prevent the spread ofdisease.

CTL systems put loggers in steel reinforcedcabs, so they are much safer than hand-heldchainsaws, which offer no protection fromfalling trees or limbs. And because they moveabout on wide-track tires or steel tracks theirweight is well distributed, leaving a “foot-print” much lighter than that of a walking man.They are also far more efficient because somuch of the work is done quickly bycomputer-controlled functions.

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EVERGREEN 35

Caterpillar six-wheel-drive timber harvester, equipped with a processing head mounted on a pendulum arm designed to keep the operator level in hiscab. Pendulum arm suspension also helps distribute the weight of the machine and the log, minimizing soil compaction. A gearless, hydrostatictransmission keeps the tires from spinning, further protecting soil.

Safe, Efficient, “Light-on-the-land” Technology

7


Sensitive Plant Species in Montana,Riparian Wetland Stewardship, Forest Insectand Disease Identification, Principles ofSelection Harvesting, and Geology, Soils andRoad Construction.

Though ALP is unique in terms of itslogger-landowner link, it is but one of adozen or more logger certification programsthat have emerged across the country inrecent years. All of the programs sharecommon elements: on the job safety, fireand first-aid training and adherence to stateand federal regulations designed to helpminimize soil erosion and damage towatersheds and fish-bearing streams.

Across the country loggers are nearlyunanimous in their support of big changesthat are clearly costing them an enormousamount of money, particularly in terms ofthe enormous capital outlays required tobuy equipment that can operate efficientlyand profitably in today’s regulatory climate.

“The benefits totally outweigh the costs,”says South Carolina logger Jimmy Smith. “Iwould not go back to the old days. We’redoing a better job on the land, I’m notrunning my equipment as hard as I once did,there is less waste and the job looks better.”

Westvaco contract logger DonnieLambert agrees. “Today’s light-on-the-landlogging systems definitely cost more but theydo more, so it’s probably a wash. Besides, thecompany keeps me busy year-round, whichmeans I can keep a well-trained crew on thejob. And we’re not tearing up the forest likewe used to. Everybody wins.”

Mr. Manz concurs.“As professional managers in various

segments of the forest industry, we are, inthe final analysis, the masters of our ownfate. Our major challenge is not theproduction of new products from a ‘better’forest. It is the clear articulation of issues,opportunities and solutions to an increas-ingly sophisticated, educated and polarizedpopulace. To be a professional today it is nolonger sufficient to understand only forestsand machinery, numbers and charts, laborand supervision. We must fully understandand be a part of the real world thatsurrounds us. We must be effectivecommunicators, negotiators, managers,leaders and students. We must learn toengage all of our constituencies from thecustomer to the regulator to the averagecitizen. As the world’s population expandsand management of the biospherebecomes critically important, it is up toeach of us as professionals to lead the way.We must be proactive, because once theissues have become emotional merereaction to them will not suffice — and wecannot afford to expend our politicalgoodwill or financial strength in thewinning of pyhrric victories.”

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Horses and oxen were widely used on logging operations a century ago, before steam and the internalcombustion engine took over. But horses exert more ground pressure per square inch than do modernflotation tires (Center) or (Bottom) rubberized systems like Caterpillar’s Mobile Track, which reducessoil compaction by 75 percent.

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EVERGREEN 37

LOG A LOAD FOR KIDSSustaining “Our Most Precious Resource”

What does atruck-load of logsmean, besides usefulproducts and asustainably managedresource? To manyloggers and timber-based businesses, itmeans a pledge to achildren’s hospital.

In 1988, with theencouragement ofthe Children’sMiracle Network(CMN), the SouthCarolina Forestry Association organized a campaign to raisefunds for a local children’s hospital by encouraging loggers todonate the value of a truckload of logs to the hospital. The“Log A Load For KidsTM”campaign quickly spread throughoutthe state, and today “Log A Load” campaigns have taken off in30 states and in Canada—in each case, culminating indonations to local CMN-affiliated children’s hospitals.

CMN, a non-profit organization which mounts a nationalcampaign on behalf of children’s hospitals every year, says“Log A Load” is one of its largest sponsors. One-hundredpercent of Log A Load For Kids funds donated goes directly tohelp about 70 local children’s hospitals— no overhead oradministrative fees are deducted. Accumulated donationssince the program started now exceed $15 million, and 2001’snational fundraising goal is $3 million.

Early on in the program, it became clear that simplydonating funds was not the whole extent of loggers’ involve-ment. Loggers and foresters often work with hospital staffs toidentify critical funding needs and organize efforts to fill

specific gaps in budgetedprograms. In 1995, forinstance, Alabama dona-tions supported thedevelopment of a specialclinic at Children’sHospital in Birminghamfor prevention andtreatment of child abuse,and Arkansas Log A Loadbegan designatingdonations in 1999 tocreate an endowed “Log ALoad for Kids Chair ofCardiovascular Surgery” at

the Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Loggers, and other forestproducts people, have shown great dedication and creativity inorganizing events such as log auctions, golf tournaments,raffles, “charity harvests”— even dunk tanks at communitycarnivals—to benefit kids with special needs and to affirmtheir own commitment to their communities’ future.

Betsy Luoto, co-owner of Oregon’s Cross & Crown loggingfirm, currently chairs the Log A Load For Kids AdvisoryCouncil, which sets national fundraising goals and helps statecampaigns co-ordinate and share information with each other.“I am proud to be a part of the wonderful group of people fromall over our nation who work hard to produce, manage, andharvest the timber needed and used daily by each American inall facets of life,” she says. “These people go selflessly beyondthemselves when their workday is done to raise funds to helpchildren in need of a second chance at life. We are not afraidto try.”

For more information about this remarkable program,and how to participate in it, please visit www.logaload.org.

FRA

Alabama logger Jimmy Hudspeth and oncologist Dr. Robert Castleberry back upChildren’s Miracle Network hospital patient Eli Weaver in his successful fight againstlymphocitic leukemia. Log A Load fundraising now supports kids with special needsin 30 forested states.


Montana Ford Dealers Contribute Truck

To The Evergreen Foundation

The Montana Ford Dealers’Advertising Association has donateda 2001 Ford pickup to the non-profitEvergreen Foundation, publishers ofEvergreen Magazine.

Bart Depratu, President, DepratuFord, Whitefish, said the associationmade the decision to provide a pre-paid three-year lease to the Founda-tion because “we admire their workand their even-handed approach tooften contentious forestry issues.”

Jim Petersen, the Foundation’sexecutive director and editor ofEvergreen Magazine said the arrangementis the first such the organization hasreceived in its 15-year history. “Suffice itto say, we’re thrilled that Montana’s Forddealers would want to help us in this way.”

Recent Ford Motor Company contribu-tions to environmental organizations,totaling more than $15 million, haveangered loggers, farmers, ranchers andgrass roots organizations across thenation, though both Mr. Depratu and Mr.Petersen downplayed the role thesecontributions played in the Montanadealers’ donation.

“There’s no question about the factthat many Montana Ford dealers havegotten an earful from angry customers,”Mr. Petersen said. “I think Montana’s Forddealers simply wanted to align itself withan organization that is respected in thescientific community and at the grassroots level. That’s Evergreen.”

Mr. Depratu concurred. “We seeEvergreen as an organization capable ofhelping us strengthen our partnerships inrural timber communities. In the months

to come we hope to develop sometools that will enable us to becomemore proactively involved inforestry-related issues that impactour businesses and our communi-ties.”

Participating Members of theMontana Ford Dealers Associationinclude Archie Cochrane Motors,Inc., Billings; Bell McCall, Hamilton;Big Sky Motors, Inc., Dillon; BisonMotor Co., Great Falls; BitterrootMotors, Inc., Missoula; BozemanFord-Lincoln-Mercury, Bozeman;

Brooks Hanna Ford, Butte; CapitalMotors, Helena; Country Ford-Mercury,Plains; Courtesy Ford Sales, Conrad;Davey Motor Company, Columbus; DeltaFord, Inc., Malta; Depratu Ford-VW-Audi,Whitefish; Don Aadsen Ford-Mercury,Ronan; Doughten Ford Sales, Chinook;Hardin Auto Co., Hardin; Havre Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, Havre; Heberle Ford-Mercury, Forsyth; Hi-Line Ford, Inc.,Glasgow; Hilltop Motors, Lewistown;Larson Motor Co., Inc., Sidney; LaurelFord, Laurel; Livingston Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, Livingston; Mac’s Frontierland,Inc., Miles City; McKinney Motors,Culbertson; Mills Motor Co., Inc.,Fairfield; Northern Ford, Cut Bank;Plentywood Motor Sales, Inc., Plentywood;Power Motors, Fort Benton; Rathert-FoxFord-Mercury, Inc., Wolf Point; Ray JuddFord, Inc., Red Lodge; Rice Ford Sales,Whitehall; Rygg Ford Sales, Kalispell;Shelby Motors LLC, Shelby; Stetson Ford,Inc., Big Timber; Timberline Auto Center,Libby; Urbanec Motors, Inc., Glendive andValley Sales, Townsend.

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The Evergreen Foundation’s new 2001 Ford pickup, a gift fromthe Montana Ford Dealer’s Advertising Association.

Just weeks after the Montana FordDealer’s Advertising Association contrib-uted a new 2001 Ford F250 to the Ever-green Foundation, International Truck andEngine Corporation, makers of the PowerStroke Diesel used in Ford trucks, reim-bursed the Foundation for the added costof the motor.

Foundation executive director JimPetersen said International’s gift will beused to help fund a special report describ-ing the role diesel power played in theopening and subsequent managementof the West’s forests.

“Diesel power played a historic and verypositive role,” Mr. Petersen explained. “Butlike so many other good news forestrystories it has received too little attention.”

International communicationsmanager, Robert Carso, said the companyis pleased to have the opportunity toaffiliate itself with the Foundation’s effortsto promote science-based forestry.

International Joins In

EVERGREEN 39

To order reprints of this issue log on to ourweb site: www.evergreenmagazine.com

HeirloomAdirondackChair -Handcrafted fromsolid cedar. Builtto last a lifetime.Seat and backare curved foroptimal comfort.Stained and oiledfor easy use.Easy to as-semble—allhardware included. Allow four weeks fordelivery. Price includes shipping. $355.00

Minute Wood Blocks - These hand-finishedwood wedges represent the amount ofwood consumed every15, 30 and 60 minutesby each of Earth’ssix billioninhabitants. Thewedges are cutfrom sanded aspenand sold in sets ofthree. Custom orders featuring companylogos, are available. Bulk order quotation onrequest. Price includes shipping. $15.00

Our Daily Wood - Our popularpie-shaped wood block, beauti-fully hand-finished. Its sizeapproximates the amountof wood, by volume,consumed every 24hours by everyperson on Earth.Silk-screenedmessageexplains theenvironmentaladvantages ofwood. $35.00

The Evergreen Storewww.evergreenmagazine.com

FOUNDAT I ON

The Evergreen Foundation is a non-profit forestryresearch and educational organization dedicated to theadvancement of science-based forestry and forest policy.

To this end, we publish Evergreen, a quarterlyjournal designed to keep Foundation members andothers abreast of issues and events impacting forestry,forest communities and the forest products industry.

We also operate a web site— www. evergreenmagazine.com — designed to inform members andothers of issues and events that develop too quickly topermit timely coverage in Evergreen. The site alsoprovides global hot links to sites maintained by scien-tists, forest landowners, forestry associations, universi-ties, grass roots and other non-profit organizations thatshare our commitment to science-based forestry.

Evergreen was founded in 1986. Initial funding camefrom a small group of Southern Oregon lumber compa-nies interested in promoting wider citizen involvementin the federal government’s congressionally mandatedforest planning process. In the years since its founding,the magazine has assumed a much wider role, providingforums for scientists, policy makers, landowners andcommunity leaders across North America.

Support for our educational work comes frommembers and other public and private sector non-profitorganizations that share our commitment to science-based forestry. We operate under Internal RevenueService 501(c)(3) regulations that govern the conduct oftax-exempt organizations created for charitable, educa-tional, religious or scientific purposes. Our Federal TaxIdentification Number is 94-3112976. Contributions aretax deductible to the full extent allowed in the case of501(c)(3) corporations.

P.O. Box 1290 Bigfork, MT 59911Tel: (406) 837-0966 Fax: (406) 837-1385e-mail: [email protected]

Metric EquivalentsThis English To Metric Conversion Table is provided as a courtesy toEvergreen readers that use the metric system:Inch x 25.4 = 1 millimeter1 foot x 0.305 = 1 meter1 mile x 1.61 = 1 kilometerSquare Foot x 0.093 = 1 sq. meterCu ft x 0.028 = 1 cubic meter1 lb x 0.454 = 1 kilogramShort ton x 0.907 = 1 ton

1 acre x 0.405= 1 hectareMBF x 2.36 * = 1 cubic meter1000 sq ft x 0.885 = 1 cubic meter **Trees/acre x 2.47 + trees/ha

**Nominal basis 3/8 plywood

A&B Logging, Inc.Alabama Forestry AssociationAlaska Forestry AssociationAmerican Forest & Paper AssociationAmerican Forest FoundationAmerican Forest Resource CouncilAmerisafe, Inc.Arkansas Timber Producers AssociationAssociated Logging Contractors, IdahoAssociated Oregon Loggers

Batzer FoundationB&M Consulting, Inc.Blood, CharlesBoise Cascade CorporationBowater IncorporatedBurns Timber Co., Inc.

California Forestry AssociationCanadian Pulp & Paper AssociationCanal Industries, Inc.Caterpillar FoundationCaterpillar, Inc.Chadbourne Tree FarmsChapman, Carl & CarolynClarke, James L. Logging, Inc.Clary, Aubrey L. Logging and PulpwoodColumbia Forest ProductsConnor Jr., RichardCroman CorporationCurrie, Bob and MargieCutshall, D.L. & Sons Logging Co., Inc.

Deeds Bros., Inc.Depratu FordDonald, Charles Timber Co.Donohue Industries, Inc.Doolittle, Charles K. Inc.

Egolf Forest Harvesting Inc.Etienne’s, Phil Timber Harvest Inc.Evergreen Foundation

Florida Forestry AssociationFly Timber Co., Inc.Forest Landowners AssociationForest Resources AssociationFort James FoundationFort Mountain Land & Timber Co., Inc.Fulghum Fibers, Inc.

Gardner, WT & Sons, Inc.Georgia Forestry AssociationGeorgia-PacificGreen Bay Packaging

Hailicka Equipment Inc.Hardwood, Plywood & Veneer AssociationH.M., Inc.Hoffman Wood Fiber, LLC

Evergreen Magazine Contributor List

Holli Forest ProductsHuffman Logging Inc.

International PaperInternational Truck & Engine Corp.

James, S & B Construction Co.Johnson, C.O. Logging, Inc.

Kel-Log Inc.Knight Forest Products, Inc.Kretz Lumber Co., Inc.

Lewis, Richard and JakieLoggers & Contractors SupplyLouisiana Forestry AssociationLouisiana Logging CouncilLouisiana-Pacific CorporationLouisville Timber Co.Low Country Forest Products, Inc.

Madden, A.W. Inc.Madden, Steven F.Madison Paper IndustriesMagnolia Pulpwood Co., Inc.Maibec Logging Inc.MAR-CAL INC.Martin, F.V. Trucking Co.Maryland Forests AssociationMead Coated Board-WoodlandsMead Paper—OhioMichigan Association of TimbermenMississippi Forestry AssociationMississippi Loggers AssociationMissouri Forestry AssociationMontana Wood Products Association

National Council of Forestry Assoc. ExecutivesNew England Forestry ConsultantsNorth Carolina Forestry AssociationNortheastern Loggers Association

Ohio Forestry AssociationOliver StoresOregon Logging Conference

Pace International Union—Local 5-0680Page & Hill Forest Products, Inc.Pape Brothers, Inc.Penn Harvest Systems, Inc.Petersen, Jim & KathleenPierson, DarrellPine Timber Co.Pittack Logging, Inc.Plum Creek Timber CompanyPrentiss & Carlisle Company Inc.Price Land Co.Professional Logging Contractors of Maine

Quality Forest Products, Inc.

Redoutey, August Logging & Farm

Richards, JohnRobbins, Eugene S.Robbins LumberRoberts Timber Co., Inc.

Scotch Lumber Co.Seaman Timber Co.Shields, BruceSimpson Timber Co.Singletree Inc.Smith Logging Inc.Smurfit-Stone Container CorporationSociety of American ForestersSouth Carolina Forestry AssociationSouth Carolina Timber Producers AssociationSoutheastern Lumber Manufacturers AssociationSouthgate Timber Co.Spencer & Son Inc.Squires Timber CompanyStihl IncorporatedStreamline TimberSuperior Lumber

Temple-Inland Forest Products CorporationTennessee Forestry AssociationTexas Logging CouncilTigercat IndustriesTimbco Hydraulics Inc.Timber Producers Assoc. of Michigan & WisconsinTimberjack—AtlantaTimberlineTrusJoist McMillan

U.S. Timberlands

Vaiden Timber CompanyVirginia Forest Products AssociationVirginia Forestry Association

Wales, R.H. & Son, Inc.Walsh Timber Co., LLCWashington Contract Loggers AssociationWeeks LoggingWest Virginia Forestry AssociationWestern Maryland Lumber, Inc.Westvaco CorporationWetzel, MikeWeyerhaeuser FoundationWhitfield Timber Company, Inc.Wood, Andy Logging

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Backround photo: Columbia Helicopters,Aurora, Oregon, is North America’s largesthelicopter logger. Here, one of the company’sBoeing 234 machines hovers over a recentlythinned forest near McCall, Idaho

Design & production by E.T. HinchcliffeCharts & graphs by Shawn Shaffer

Volume 11 • Number 23

P.O. Box 1290Bigfork, MT 59911

deb and rick smith, smith logging, kalispell,...

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