Despite popular opinion, environmental groups are not responsible for the demise of the timber industry in western Montana, even though they have made for a convenient “whipping boy.” A strong dollar and international trade agreements are to blame, making imports, including wood products, extremely cheap. For nearly three decades, much of America’s insatiable demand for wood has been met by many third world nations, where logging practices are extremely destructive. Areas of Madagascar have been decimated, with millions of years of soil profile simply washed away into the Pacific Ocean. In Southeast Asia, very valuable forests of exotic hardwoods, shipped to America and Europe, have been cut down and the sites turned into palm oil plantations. Even Canada has a history of poor forest management practices. They logged the crap out of old growth Sitka Spruce in British Columbia over many decades. Nature responded by replacing them with the ultimate “pioneer species” – lodgepole pine. That species is now being attacked, en masse, by the mountain pine beetle, just as it is here in Montana. The ensuing fires will be beyond belief.
When I was a junior forester in Oregon in the late 1970’s, a thousand board feet of average ponderosa pine and Douglas fir went for around $350. In today’s dollars, at 3 % interest, that would now be worth around $1,300. But, the current price is only around $450. In other words, Montana timber is only worth about 35% of what it was 35 years ago. That loss of timber value is what has injured the timber industry in western Montana and beyond. NAFTA not only hurt the American middle-class, it seriously depreciated the economics of forest management in America. Americans have been able to avoid the ugliness associated with logging for the same reasons.
It is simply hypocritical for Americans to continue to consume wood products at a record pace, while refusing to accept forest management in their own back yards, as is often the case here in the Northern Rockies. In order to meet forest health objectives, we are likely going to have to subsidize logging operations in order to get the millions of small diameter, low value trees out of the forest; trees that have occupied these sites as a direct result of putting out fires for more than a century. The back-side cost of doing nothing is beyond comprehension: in dollars, in property, in lost soil, and very likely, in lives lost.
A short growing season, drought, low site productivity and a warming climate are combining to present a “nightmare scenario” for forests of the Northern Rockies. We have to accelerate current forest health actions to the landscape level. Mother Nature has only so much patience for the errors of human beings. She has a “bag of tricks” that won’t seem very funny when she unleashes them on us. The western spruce budworm, a voracious defoliator, is one of them and is on the horizon. Despite its name, Douglas fir is the budworm’s favorite food, and there are millions of them, from the southern Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains, extending continuously into Canada.
This is not about filling the coffers of logging companies. At current prices, they want nothing to do with all of this low value material; they will simply lose money.
Every citizen living in the Northern Rockies needs to read about the Great Fire of 1910. It is easily found on the internet. It burned three million acres in just two days. At least 85 people died horrible deaths. The smoke encircled the planet and was smelled in New York City. It is why the Forest Service has had a zero tolerance fire policy for 105 years. It is also the primary reason that we have national forests, to protect these special areas from logging companies that had been moving across the country like a deadly virus, consuming anything of value, while leaving millions of tons of slash that produced wildfires of unbelievable effect. Imagine boiling to death after jumping into a river to escape the heat from slash fires. Stories like this came out of Michigan and Wisconsin in 1871.
If you have no tolerance for smoke or logging trucks, then you should just move away, because both of those are going to increase, no matter what we do, or do not do, in the near future.
Chris A. Linkenhoker
Corvallis