There are no silver bullets in the timbering wars

Counting only my Evergreen years, this is my 28th year at war. If I count my family’s heritage in sawmilling, it can then be said that I was born into this war more than 69 years ago.

All wars are hell, but this one has been awful. And still there is no end in sight.

We face superior armies with far more firepower than we’ve ever had. They are well trained, well organized and exceptionally well equipped. Our rag-tag band fights bravely, but we inevitably take heavy casualties, then retreat into the darkness where we bury our dead and contemplate our next counter attack.

We are fighting for the future of a simple but very powerful idea — that this nation’s publicly owned forests ought to be managed by trained professionals for the economic and environmental benefits they are very capable of yielding. Although I find great appeal in this idea, many oppose it in the belief that only nature can correctly manage forests. I disagree. More on this later.

Figuratively speaking, I have occupied the same front line foxhole since the fall of 1985. Most I knew then are dead now. Some died of old age. Others perished along with entire companies. All of our command centers — brigade-sized forest industry associations that practically invented forestry in America — have been obliterated. There are no survivors.

A fairly good case can be made for the fact that I am the last man standing — the last man who knew most of the independent lumbermen who started their companies in the western United States after World War II ended. Many of them were World War II veterans. To a man they credited their war training with the exceptional work ethic and discipline they brought to their tiny enterprises.

That these young men were even able to enter the brutally competitive sawmilling world in the late 1940s is a lasting tribute to the Truman Administration and a cadre of brilliant young political operatives, all of them Democrats, who saw the West’s national forests for what they were: enormous economic engines that could propel the nation’s blossoming peacetime economy.

Wars consume ungodly amounts of wood. Some 60 billion board feet were harvested from private timberlands during World War II, mostly here in the Pacific Northwest. Why private lands? Because the public’s vast timber reserves were still largely un-roaded. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, there wasn’t the time or money needed to construct thousands of miles of logging roads. We went with what we had.

The Truman Administration’s post-war idea was beautiful in its simplicity: build roads into the West’s national forests, which held the lion’s share of the country’s softwood timber, then sell the timber at auction to the highest bidder. The Administration’s brain trust — many of them holdovers from the Roosevelt Administration — thus solved two problems that only the government could solve.

They provided a source of high-quality timber for the burgeoning post-war homebuilding boom, thereby encouraging private sector job-forming investments in logging, trucking, sawmilling, secondary wood processing, papermaking, industrial parts manufacturing and construction.

They unleashed a dazzling array of technological advancements in logging and wood and paper processing — conservation writ large — by forcing lumbermen to compete for federal timber. The goal was to reduce wood waste by unleashing entrepreneurial forces that drove investments in cost-saving efficiencies in logging and log processing. The strategy worked magnificently.

Most of the sawmilling towns that I knew were products of Truman Administration pragmatism. Had the Administration sided with wealthy lumbermen who bought their timberlands from land-grant railroads for pennies on the dollar, the public’s federal forest reserves would have become the exclusive domains of timber barons after World War II. Fortunately, the Administration thought private sector competition was a better idea than government-sponsored monopoly.

The economic boom that spread across the rural West following the war was unprecedented. Unlike the early gold rush camps that came and went in a flash, timber towns had real staying power, thanks to an abundance of federal timber and a new breed of lumbermen who were willing to make investments in wood processing technologies that made them formidable competitors. By the late 1950’s the nation’s homebuilding industry was in high gear. Homebuyers never had it so good.

The good life — most of my growing up years — would last for about 25 years. Then came Vietnam and everything changed. The story here is long and tortured, but when I visualize what I witnessed in the 1970s and 1980s, I see privileged consumers who had grown so wealthy that they lost their connections to their rural heritage, and to those who get their hands dirty every day putting food on our tables, clothes on our backs and roofs over our heads.

Some of these card sharks call themselves “environmentalists.” I think they give environmentalism a bad name. Under the guise of “conservation,” they are killing our country’s resource-based economies — its lumber, mining, ranching, farming and energy development sectors. These largely rural economies are more important to America’s place on the world stage than at any time in history. If you doubt me on this point, consider this: there is not a job or a product on the face of the earth that is not the result of the harvest or extraction of a raw material and its conversion to a finished product. Not one.

Why, then, are Americans allowing Congress and its byzantine bureaucracies to trash these vitally important businesses? I think it is because this generation (what is it: X, Y or Z?) is the least informed generation in my lifetime. Mainly, they are clueless and consumptive bores. A Saturday trip to the mall reaffirms America’s abundance for them. “Hey, dude, like the economy is back! LOL.”

In some parts of the country, the economy is indeed gathering momentum. The energy boom underway in North Dakota is like nothing that state has ever seen. An abundance of natural gas and a technology called “fracking” are the reasons why. The same thing happened in western Oregon after the Second World War, but the resource in abundance was federal timber and the technology was the high-strain band mill, a Canadian-inspired system that soon doubled and later tripled the amount of lumber that could be sawn from each log. Again, conservation writ large: expanding the nation’s timber supply by encouraging investments in technologies that increased log yield, thereby creating new jobs and an abundance of new and structurally superior building products. Enduring proof that the Truman Administration got it right in 1948: true conservation was itself an entrepreneurial endeavor.

But most of the rural west is not recovering in North Dakota style - and never will. The stark reality of this came home to roost in Cave Junction, Oregon last month with Rough and Ready Lumber Company’s unexpected announcement that it would button up its sawmill this spring. Rough and Ready Lumber was one of those beautiful home grown flowers that blossomed after the Second World War, and the Krauss family’s reluctant decision to close down after 91 years in business has me wanting to sort through 28 years of battlefield wreckage to see if I can make any sense of so much seemingly senseless loss. The obvious question is, “Where does the West go from here?” A related question is, “Are we going to manage the public’s forests or leave them to nature’s vagaries?”

If I have learned nothing else in 28 years in a front line trench, I have learned that there are no silver bullets - no political, economic or legal hat tricks that will cause forestry’s enemies to lay down their arms. The post-war lumber industry’s misplaced belief in silver bullets has caused it more grief than any of its numerous battlefield mistakes. The dead cannot be brought back to life, but if new life is not soon breathed into federal forestry, new carcasses will soon start piling up on battlefields that extend far beyond the West’s once vibrant and prosperous timber economy.

(Jim Petersen is founder and executive director, the non-profit Evergreen Foundation.)