Tapped Out
by Anders Hove

In the Pacific Northwest, a closure of sorts is nearing between the two sides of one of the most hardened political divides in the country, environmentalists and the logging industry. In an often overlooked show of political force, the Clinton administration has made a tentative decision to stop constructing new logging roads on lands designated as roadless by the 1964 Wilderness Act. But — surprise! — just when you'd expect the logging industry to bring out the big guns, they're packing up and leaving town.

Like many feuds, the fight between conservationists and their foes is a romance of sorts. Originally the forest reserves were there for both conservation and logging. After 1900, however, conservationism split with logging, and gradually each side adopted a nostalgic vision of what the West meant. To the conservationists it meant open space, a frontier unsullied by human affairs. To logging communities, on the other hand, it was a way of life. Environmentalists forgot that humans couldn't help interfering with the forests and controlling them. Logging advocates forgot that the average logger stays with the industry only two or three years before moving on to less hazardous work. Both ran to the Forest Service for help in enacting their respective visions onto the landscape — either as wilderness areas or as roaded lands ready for timber sales. Roadless lands, the chips in the pot, became a potent symbol of the fight (nevermind that many of those lands are barren, rocky ground useless to loggers).

You couldn't pick an agency less well-suited to mediating such a squabble. The Forest Service was a federal revolving door between schools of forestry and the logging industry. Indeed, the Forest Service exists to build free roads to trees and then supervise their sale at below-market rates. Members of the Forest Service have testified to Congress on the benefits of logging, and generally preached the gospel of "the cut." In 1993 Bill Clinton appointed a biologist as head of the agency, hoping he could to change the culture. The biologist went up in flames. The Forest Service is under the Department of Agriculture for a reason, so they say.

In the last decade, however, change has come to the forests. Dramatic change. Environmental lawsuits have done their part. So too has the Clinton administration. Timber sales have been curtailed and lands taken off the table. But there's more to the story than that. After all, in the first quarter of fiscal 2000, 144 million board feet of lumber were carted off federal lands in Oregon and Washington. That's almost a fifth of the entire timber cut on all federal lands — all this in the backyard of the infamous spotted owl. Logging on federal land is down, but not out.

Big Timber is moving out of the Pacific Northwest because the forests are tapped out. The cut on the public lands isn't the issue — there are plenty of trees for the taking. But these are new growth trees. Trees planted in the wake of clearcut timber harvests a generation or more in the past. In the West trees grow slowly. In old clearcuts, trees are all the same age and height, and they grow close together and deprive one another of light. It's not grandpap's forest anymore. The trees are thin, and so are the profit margins.

It doesn't matter how much dough you have to wait out environmental lawsuits if you're Champion International, a company freshly merged with a huge European logging conglomerate. You've just spent the last 20 years sawing through the last 10 million acres of your own old growth trees on your company-owned lands in the West. You've got to keep increasing your earnings — not squeezing blood from the stone of federal forest lands. You need big trees to feed the equipment that only takes big trees. Small trees take more labor, more machines, more time. Small trees in hard-to-reach roadless lands don't look so attractive anymore.

If you're Plum Creek Lumber, you've just taken hundreds of thousands of acres of second-growth timber in Montana and Idaho, shorn it of trees, and given it to developers for ranchettes, each one advertised as "adjacent to federally-owned forest land." In fact, you've just decided to become a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), and you told the SEC you made more from rural land sales than from logging. You've just bought 900,000 acres of trees in Maine — that's going to be your real profit center.

If you're Potlatch Lumber, you've just bought 22,000 acres in Oregon for a high turnover timber farm. Trees that took 200 years to grow on your 700,000 acres of land in Idaho will only take a generation in Oregon.

If you're International Paper, stalwart member of the Dow looking to become a multinational, you're thinking about the 200 million acres of forests in the South, 85 percent of them privately owned, where 1.2 million acres of trees go to the mill every year. In the South trees grow faster by a factor of two or three. Your net margins are 2.9 percent on sales of $25 billion. That dwarfs all the timber sales from public lands — even if you assume the federal wood is sold below cost (In case you wondered, it's 640 acres to the square mile).

If you want to know why the Clinton administration's proposal to permanently ban road construction on 43 million acres of designated roadless land seems to be trundling toward acceptance, look no further than this. The big logging industries are picking up and moving out, no matter what the federal government decides. They care less about the symbolism of roadless lands than about the fact that the land, theirs and the government's, looks tapped out.

That may spell doom for the romance of logging heritage. Of course, a Bush administration could well reverse the ruling — something his Republican confidants in the West are already advocating. But chances are good the fight over roadless lands is nearing closure, and ultimately that will help heal the West's social and economic divide.

E-mail Anders Hove at hove at rand dot org.