Lose An Industry; Lose A Forest

An interesting juxtaposition of events has the potential to teach a lesson both political decision-makers and the pop-environmental industry need to pay attention to. 

On the one hand, massive forest fires in the western United States are demonstrating what can happen when a forest products industry has been hounded nearly out of existence in states like Colorado, Utah, and others with the subsequent lack of attention to forest health attending the loss. 

These trees were dead before they burned.  They should have been used for lumber.

Even as the environmental devastation caused by those fires continues, the pop-enviros in my community are taking steps likely to help assure the end of a significant forest products sector in the community. 

Over the past month in the U.S. State of Colorado more pollution has been pumped into the atmosphere as the result of forest fires than is likely to be produced by all human activity in that state for years to come.  Incredible tonnages of a variety of greenhouse gases, particulate matter and metals actually smelted from the earth as fires burn (much of the mercury in the atmosphere, for example, is there as a result of forest fires) are circling the earth today because of those fires.

The intensity of the fires could have been significantly reduced had the massive numbers of dead trees the fires fed on been harvested, milled into useful products and sold to build homes, businesses and other structures rather than being left in the woods to serve as torches.

Lumber or Torch?  The pop-environmental community has consistently fought harves in areas like this.

A big reason those trees weren’t used, aside from resistance to harvest by a strong pop-environmental movement, has been the lack of a harvesting and processing infrastructure capable of making use of the trees.  All of Colorado, based on Forest Service analysis released in 2009 contains only 3 softwood sawmills, none of them large.  Many other states are equally underserved, especially considering the billions of board feet of potential lumber that could be milled from dead and dying trees. 

A business building being constructed out of lumber and logs milled from dead trees.  The bluish tint is typical of lumber cut from trees killed by the pine beetle.

Cut to my neck of the woods, Whatcom County, Washington.

Whatcom County’s first industry in the mid-1850s was a softwood sawmill.  The first non-native, permanent resident built a mill on a waterfall at the edge of Bellingham Bay and got to work.  At the turn of the 20^th Century dozens of sawmills, large and small, served the county’s forest products industry, mills fed by the 1.3 million acres of forestland contained in the County.

Times change; by the end of the 20^th Century well over a million acres of land in the County had been converted to national parks, national forests and other uses.  Today, about 100,000 acres, mostly owned by the State of Washington, remain formally set aside to provide the timber necessary to maintain an industry in the county while an additional 120,000 acres is privately owned forest, subject to conversion but, at present, mostly available to serve the forest products industry.

The former forest products industry was, of course, devastated by the constriction in supply.  Sawmill closures, reductions in the number of firms engaged in harvest and other losses reduced the industry to a shadow of its former self.  Today, only one softwood sawmill of any size operates in Whatcom County with a few additional mills available in neighboring counties.  The forest products industry has become a regional industry with most harvesting firms working in at least three counties and some in more due to lack of a sufficient supply of harvestable wood. 

Now, Whatcom County’s “environmental” community is preparing to administer what could be a fatal blow to the area’s forest products industry.  A desire to grow, over time, an “old growth forest” and a presumed need to avoid damage to a water supply even the State’s famously liberal Department of Ecology sees as unlikely, has led the pop-environmental community into promoting the conversion of about 8,700 acres of designated commercial forests into a “forest preserve” destined, for the most part, to never again see a harvest. 

The area to be set aside surrounds a local lake and was almost entirely incinerated in forest fires burning through the area a hundred years and more ago. 

The light tan represents areas of forest incinerated in the 1800s.  The X marks are the locations of the present day forest designated for commercial use but now under pressure for conversion.

So, now the question an environmentalist would always ask, a question that has received almost no discussion at all in the rush to judgment regarding the matter;   “Given recent events in Colorado, and elsewhere, should a community of 200,000 people, with almost immediate access to several hundred thousand acres of existing park land and millions of acres of park lands already available within an hour's drive, risk the health of its forests for the sake of yet one more park?”

I suspect the recently chastened people of Colorado would at least think about the answer to that question. 

Too many in Whatcom County answer simply, “Park good.  Cut trees bad.  It probably won’t burn anyway.”