I have no problem with timber companies managing their tree farms, so long as they protect water ways (offsets), slopes (no clear cuts causing mud slides), etc. I also think we need new management practices (eg permit more smallers fires to reduce likelihood of huge fires).
My problem is when timber companies must extract every board foot from every acre, threatening critical habitat, from public forests. To add insult to injury, we (the public) build the roads, and sell the timber at a loss.
I wouldn't mind so much if the mythical "free market" was working, so that timber, mining, fishing, and ranching companies actually paid fair market price for the resources they're stealing.
My problem is when timber companies must extract every board foot from every acre, threatening critical habitat, from public forests. To add insult to injury, we (the public) build the roads, and sell the timber at a loss.
Lies, lies, and more lies. Have you even been to a cut down forest within the last 20 years? Streams have required easements, there are requirements for leaving a number of trees per acre and any logging roads are paid for by the landowner. The roads are a cost of the harvesting.
...actually paid fair market price for the resources they're stealing.
You act like it's a quick turn around. We are talking decades after replanting, there are very few industries that have to follow this. And then, after waiting all that time, you need to hope that the market isn't in the state that it's currently in. Domestic timber is in the dumpster right now due to foreign logs and a lack of new housing.
I care little what timber companies do with the land we gave them last century. But if they're cutting down OUR trees on OUR land, then they have to replant that acreage. If they can't do that profitably, then too bad. There is no right to profit.
You have shown you know very little of the timber industry. Private landowners are under the same laws with respect to replanting as the public lands are. Public lands are logged, sold, and the profits returned to the public in the same free market system. No matter, it ALL has to be replanted.
On what planet do you think someone is just letting perfectly good land that can support a forest just sit barren? Unless it's re-zoned into something else, that's not profitable nor sustainable. Our forests are very sustainable.
Timber, pulp, paper are all cyclic. Always have been, always will be.
If you think the pulp and paper industry will ever be what it once you are fooling yourself. In the electronic age paper is far down it's not even funny. I grew up in a pulp and paper town that is a shell of what it once was.
Exactly what 'management' do you mean? I ask because this is a frequent astroturf point timber companies use to claim that they need to have larger, cheaper timber leases.
The forests were fine for a very, very, very long time before timber companies were around to help 'manage' them. Many species require forest fire as part of a larger biological cycle. Forest fires are OK. Let them burn. The problem is that we're trying to insert our human stuff into the forests, at which point all of a sudden they are something that requires 'managing'.
I take the point. Removing land from the potential to be developed is different from removing land from production.
Not that anyone is saying this directly, but I disagree with the argument that good, productive land left fallow is better than good productive land that is producing.
My brother makes a living and feeds his family based on his wood lot. Traces of original settlers from nearly two hundred years ago are found throughout the forest. Which is to say, it is pretty obvious now that it was not suited for farming.
But as forest, it is wonderful. There are at least six species of viable commercial trees at scale. Maple, oak, cedar, black cherry, pine. Most original species, or those introduced by the original indigenous people or the first settlers. The crab apple trees pop up in strange places.
My brother has a government approved forestry management plan that takes from the forest each year far, far less than what the forest produces. The forest will remain diverse and support a family well, indefinitely.
The trees are coming out in a managed way that is creating trails, with clear evidence that wildlife is making good use of the trails. Across the forest, he has installed a wide assortment of habitat for species at risk, birds, bats and others, several of which had not been seen in the area for generations - and they are being used! Under the managed forest, wildlife is returning in which there is no evidence had been there for at least two generations. This wildlife is moving into the adjacent conservation authority land, not the other way around.
If this was not an owned and managed forest, this would be happening at a much slower rate.
If I had to compare that against a plan that left the land alone, I'd tilt my hand to the one that actually supported people, in harmony with nature.
I'd like to see some data regarding this, actually.
I've got a good friend that owns a tree farm in Oregon, and if you listen to the environmentalists, they make it sound like Richard is some sort of maniac clear-cutting idiot who is destroying a precious natural resource.
The opposite becomes apparent if you actually talk to him about the farm, and look at the money they put into both planning and tree-farming technology. Him, and his family, view their forest as a long-term asset, not to mention an effectively infinite stream of future revenue, and a great place to go hiking.
They go to incredible lengths to make sure that their forest is going to be around, and viably growing, a few hundred years from now.
It seems odd that any large company wouldn't look at their company-owned farms in the same fashion.
Of course, corporate owners can be greedy and stupid as well. So I'd like to know more about how large-scale farming causes soil damage.
I'm not an expert on the timber industry. I'm sure that there are sustainable lumber practices, but I have no idea what the dominant sources are today. Still, tree farms are not a replacement for the old growth forests that were destroyed throughout the US. It takes hundreds of years for an old growth forest to regenerate, if ever.
Domestic timber is in the dumpster right now due to foreign logs and a lack of new housing.
Um, no. Timber, pulp, paper are all cyclic. Always have been, always will be.
We are talking decades after replanting, there are very few industries that have to follow this. And then, after waiting all that time, you need to hope that the market isn't in the state that it's currently in.
We're talking about public lands. What are you talking about?
I care little what timber companies do with the land we gave them last century. But if they're cutting down OUR trees on OUR land, then they have to replant that acreage. If they can't do that profitably, then too bad. There is no right to profit.
Don't be so blind as to just blanket all logging in the world as 'logging bad'.
It's none of my business if Ikea wants to buy productive forest land and take it out of production.
However, I don't understand how it is any kind of signal of virtue.
Would it be virtuous to buy productive farm land and take it out of circulation?
How is forest land any different?
In a previous life, it would be broadly correct to say that I worked in the forest industry. My body still hurts when I think about it.
I worked for wood lot owners, felling trees, trimming off the branches, sectioning the logs, splitting the wood and then stacking it to be sold by the cord. These woodlots had been in operation for over 150 years. Same land, different trees. They still operate now.
I also worked as a tree planter, hired by small contractors working for 'big forest'. Us tree planters went in after the heavy equipment had ripped out the trees, tearing the land to shreds in the process. It felt like what ground would have been like after a B-52 strike, an eerie hell scape, but with an explosion of small plants and flowers with new access to the sun, deer and other wildlife roaming free, wondering at the strange human interloper. Sometimes wolves and bears, at which point it felt rather lonely, me with a Swiss Army knife (mostly for the fork) and my nearest crew mate being well outside shouting distance.
The churned up land we were planting had been pulp forest itself for over a hundred years. As I planted, others were taking soil and water samples. To the forest company, the forest was a long term asset and that it thrived was in their interest.
I didn't think about it much then, but others long dead had planted that ground before me. Those foot long trees I planted have long been harvested and new trees planted in their place.
Trees are like wheat, or corn, or quinoa. Except instead of being a once a year crop, trees are once every twenty five years or so.
Everything has externalities though. Don't get me wrong I'm all for a forest going unlogged, but we will replace those resources with something else.
We still use lumber, if it isn't locally harvested we buy it from another part of the world, outsourcing those externalities and throwing in all the extra costs of shipping, labor overhead for the various middlemen, customs, etc.
My point isn't that we're screwed and should just chop down forests because we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. But saving one forest won't fix anything by itself and could very well make things worse if we don't do it by simply reducing the number of resources we consume. Paying someone else to own the externalities will never help.
tl;dr:
US Forestry Service: We have too many trees ! How can we sell more of them in a declining building market?
The US Forestry service (certainly by Bill Bryson) is regarded as in thrall with loggers (builds roads for access to heavy equipment, sells trees at a loss acting as a subsidy provider etc.)
So the idea that the great new industry, that involves chopping down trees, should be owned by US forestry service, does not inspire confidence.
The $1.7 million factory, which is owned by the US
Forest Service,
Who remembers the Friends episode where Courtney-Cox was asked to come up with some tasty way to make cakes with fish-chocolate?
I own a small acreage in north GA, which is part of a former timber plantation. About 10 acres are nothing but densely packed southern pine monoculture. My neighbor has another 15 or so acres of pure pine adjacent to it, also rows and rows of the darned things.
Next to it I have another 20 or so of mixed hardwoods and pines. Hickory, oak etc. Native plants.
Nature is slowly but steadily reclaiming _almost_ everything - I see tons of whitetail, plenty of birds of prey, a family of black bears, the occasional flock of turkey, a very healthy population of various bugs, including ecologically sensitive dragonflies, butterflies, etc, and blissfully few wild hogs. There hasn’t been a week where I don’t see anything on the trail cam.
However… those 10 acres grow nothing, and I mean nothing, but southern pines. Unless I have it professionally managed (and hence, harvested), it will probably grow nothing but. I see the financial incentive, but it’s grim. I never spend any time there, whereas spending time in the mixed growth (still pine heavy!) is pleasant - hunting, camping, photography, riding ATVs, hiking (I have maybe a mile of trails, so maybe we’ll call it “walking” :-) ) - all feels natural. I’m not a professional, so maybe it’s not actually natural and healthy, but the amount of animals and plants I see and hear, it certainly feels like it is.
We don’t have bark bettle problems there, and whenever we do, the state and county would very happily help you to get rid of it - these things are the rural equivalent of a “national security” risk. The county foresters are a call away.
I’ve seen the devastation these beetles do in Germany just this year (vacation, but I also grew up there - saw it in the Harz and Sauerland), and it’s _incredible_.
I feel like our pine plantations have it coming if we (American timberland owners, that is) continue like this. But unfortunately, my 30something acres have nothing against the thousand of acres that actual, professional timber companies own. That’s billionaire territory.
The lumber industries in the 90's were dead set on aggressively clearcutting old growth forest. Once environmentalists started having successes slowing them down, the lumber industry started using salvage logging exemptions to bypass environmental regulations and log protected areas. If a small fire ran through an old-growth area (a good and healthy event!), you could bet that it would soon be followed by an effort to cut down the 'damaged' surviving trees.
The Timber Wars podcast is a pretty great recent look at the forest politics of the 80's and 90's. I think it does a great job of presenting many sides of the issues. At the end, it demonstrates a much closer relationship between current working environmentalists and lumber operations, with environmentalists even working to keep a mill open at one point. (Because they, too, support selective logging and healthy forests.)
The USFS offers up every inch of its territory for logging, but nobody wants it because western mountain forests are just too difficult to harvest, compared to tree plantations in flat territory. If you want these forests better managed we have to throw out the idea that a marketplace can solve it.
True but let's not pretend the logging industry has a long and rich history of good conservationism.
They are there ( obviously ) for the money, and clear cutting everything and "investing" by planting huge areas of mono cultures is anything but "less damaging"
Also, most of the timber doesn't actually burn during these fires, most get cut and sold as it's perfectly good wood if you don't let them rot in 1-2 years.
As always and anything, the virtue is in the middle. A good system where these companies can cut tree and be economical viable but also rules that keep the biodiversity alive and well. A long and not-corrupt department.. That's why these things are so difficult.
The access to nature is sold, but not by the people advocating for it.
Imagine if people who advocate for cutting timber on public land proposed that the government should cut down the trees and sell the results, because they just love lumber and want everyone to have access to high-quality lumber.
Unless you have a system in place to take responsibility from seed to logging to long term encapsulation I'll be highly skeptical of that.
What's to say it wont be slashed and burnt to make room for agriculture? What's to say the surplus of timber wont decrease the price and cause less trees to be planted elsewhere?
Tree farming is probably one of the biggest issues in the pacific northwest today. They spray Glyphosate (round up) after every forest fire to prevent Aspen from growing (a natural firebreak), and then they plant GMO pine monocultures. This + pine beetle + putting out any small forest fires, lead to massive fuel build ups, which leads to massive forest fires (and subsequent flooding in the winter). It's definitely not sustainable.
I have no problem with timber companies managing their tree farms, so long as they protect water ways (offsets), slopes (no clear cuts causing mud slides), etc. I also think we need new management practices (eg permit more smallers fires to reduce likelihood of huge fires).
My problem is when timber companies must extract every board foot from every acre, threatening critical habitat, from public forests. To add insult to injury, we (the public) build the roads, and sell the timber at a loss.
I wouldn't mind so much if the mythical "free market" was working, so that timber, mining, fishing, and ranching companies actually paid fair market price for the resources they're stealing.
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