Loggers Try to Adapt to Greener Economy

LOWELL, Ore. — Booming timber towns with three-shift lumber mills are a distant memory in the densely forested Northwest. Now, with the housing market and the economy in crisis, some rural areas have never been more raw. Mills keep closing. People keep leaving. Unemployment in some counties is near 20 percent.

Yet in parts of the region, the decline is being met by an unlikely optimism. Some people who have long fought to clear-cut the region’s verdant slopes are trying to reposition themselves for a more environmentally friendly economy, motivated by changing political interests, the federal stimulus package and sheer desperation.
Some mills that once sought the oldest, tallest evergreens are now producing alternative energy from wood byproducts like bark or brush. Unemployed loggers are looking for work thinning federal forests, a task for which the stimulus package devotes $500 million; the goal is to make forests more resistant to wildfires and disease. Some local officials are betting there is revenue in a forest resource that few appreciated before: the ability of trees to absorb carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that can contribute to global warming.
Pragmatism drives the shifting thinking, but a critical question remains: can people really make a long-term living off the forest without cutting it down?
“I run into people all the time who think we’re lying and trying to go back to old logging ways,” said Jim Walls, director of the Lake County Resources Initiative in southeastern Oregon, a nonprofit agency that is trying to create jobs for rural residents in fields like biomass energy production and wildfire prevention. “It’s just not true.”
One new believer is Harold Jones. Hear him repent and reposition in the new economy.
“The only money I’ve ever made is cutting down trees,” Mr. Jones, 75, said just after coming in from thinning the stand of Douglas firs he has planted on 125 acres he owns here in Lowell. “So what I’ve tried to do in my retirement is to try to bring back and repay the Earth for a lot of the devastation I’ve caused it.”
Mr. Jones started logging in 1948 and has long rolled his eyes at “countercultural types” who protest timber sales. Yet in front of his property now are signs saying “Certified Family Forest.”
The certification process, supervised by the American Tree Farm System, requires Mr. Jones to manage and replant his land under the supervision of a professional forester. It is intended in part to give small tree farmers some credibility within the sustainable forestry movement, which promotes forest health, and to help them market their product as “green lumber.”
“It’s quite a process,” he said.
Restrictions on logging have prompted entrepreneurial thinking about the forest for years, but efforts have increased as states like Oregon and Washington have emphasized renewable energy and jobs that support it. In turn, the plummeting housing market has forced some timber companies to try to diversify — and even collaborate with environmentalists to protect forests from wildfires, disease and development.
“There’s been recognition in the last several years that we need the industry to carry out the restoration work we want accomplished,” said Jonathan Oppenheimer, a senior conservation associate for the Idaho Conservation League, which is negotiating with loggers and others with the goal of getting Congress to preserve parts of the Clearwater National Forest as wilderness.
For loggers and other rural workers, survival in the future might mean abandoning fights to cut older trees in exchange for being able to salvage smaller timber from burned forests. It might mean removing or rebuilding roads and structures on federal land, whether to reduce erosion or to improve recreational access. For the Forest Service, the stimulus money for thinning reflects an increasing emphasis on preventing wildfires, rather than simply fighting them, by removing smaller trees and brush from overgrown forests.
The work may be less profitable for big timber companies than clear-cutting a hillside, but it can create jobs in places accustomed to losing them.
In Lane County, Ore., on the wet west side of the Cascade Range, the county commission is looking for revenue to replace dwindling federal payments set up a decade ago to help governments in timber regions. Lane County received about $47 million this year, but the subsidies are declining and are scheduled to expire in 2012.
Now Lane County commissioners are asking the Legislature to draft a resolution urging Congress to pay counties that have large amounts of federal forest land for the carbon that their forests trap. Such a plan would depend on Congress’s developing a system for buying and selling so-called carbon offsets.
Not everyone likes the idea. Some loggers say it would be the final blow to their efforts to restore more logging on federal land. Jobs that have disappeared, they say, will never return.
“It puts us at risk,” said Robbie Robinson, president of Starfire Lumber in Cottage Grove, about 20 miles south of Eugene. Pyramids of Douglas fir rested outside his office window, no buyers to be found. “What I sense is another whole business being built, and the real problem is being able to harvest old trees.”
Forest economists say government spending, beginning with the stimulus package but also extending to any program to buy and sell carbon offsets, will be necessary to build a new economy in the rural Northwest.

Some supporters of sustainable forestry are concerned that, despite assurances by the Forest Service, the stimulus package will create only short-term jobs in the woods and miss the chance to invest in a complete “waste chain,” in which small timber and brush from thinning projects are put to use for lumber, biomass fuel and other purposes, potentially strengthening rural economies on many levels.
“We’re doing a lot of things here that nationally we say we want to do — biomass, fuels reduction, forest health, green jobs — we’re doing all of it now,” said Josh Anderson, the timber resource manager for Vaagen Brothers Lumber in Colville, Wash., which has worked with environmental groups to preserve wilderness land but has had to lay off about half of its 200 employees in recent months.
“We want to be here to be able to do that when things improve,” Mr. Anderson said. “We need to see something that moves a long-term trend toward work on these projects. It’s got to be pretty integrated.”
Mr. Walls, of the Lake County Resources Initiative, said a planned biomass energy plant in Lakeview, near the Nevada-California border, would generate 150 construction jobs, 50 to 75 permanent jobs in the forest and 15 at the plant. The plant would generate 13 megawatts of electricity, enough to power every home in the town of 2,300 and to contribute to the broader power grid.
But for the plant to operate, Mr. Walls said, it would need a steady flow of fuel, in the form of wood byproducts, from federal forest thinning and wildfire prevention, a pipeline that may or may not become permanent. The plant is seeking about $5 million in grant money under the stimulus package.
Mr. Walls said he was told by the Forest Service’s regional office in Portland that the project was a top prospect and that a decision was expected any day. He said its chances might have improved this month when Oregon’s governor, Theodore R. Kulongoski, appointed him to a committee to help oversee stimulus spending.
Even if the Lakeview project and others like it do fall into place, Mr. Walls said, many other struggling timber towns still will need the demand for lumber to rebound. “In the end,” he said, “the housing market does have to turn back.”

History of Logging in Vermont

The Beginning

Logging started in Vermont in 1794 with the first shipment of oak to Quebec by Stephen Mallet. 
Before railroads, logs were sent over Lake Champlain, rivers, and other waterways.  They were gathered over the winter by the waterways and bound together in large rafts.  The logs flowed north on Lake Champlain until 1823 when the Champlain Canal connected Lake Champlain with the Hudson River.  When Jefferson created the Embargo of 1807, it slowed trade with Canada and had a major effect on the logging industry.  The loggers found that by smuggling the logs north to Canada was both profitable and safe to do.  A shipment of White Pine and Oak logs could fetch $600,000 in 1810, at the height of the Embargo.  Burlington became the third largest lumber port in the nation because of the logs traveling Lake Champlain.  The success in the logging industry eliminated all the good lumber trees from the Champlain Valley by 1840.  This caused inhabitants of Vermont to import wood from outside territories.
In the beginning settlers took to the woods with axes held high, clearing places for their fields and pastures. They cleared away the trees to get the at the soil below.  The most of the first mills serviced local people and very few did commercial work.  Logging was the first non-agricultural industry in Vermont.  At first, few people realized the money that logging could make. 

Post Civil War Logging

Post Civil War logging was the most profitable and largest industry in Vermont.  George Perkins Marsh predicted that the more sophisticated technology became, the easier it would become to destroy nature.  He pleaded to the logging industry to halt, or at least slow down, the amount of trees that the loggers were clear cutting.  Clear cutting was doubled in effort because of increased railroad tracks through the woods and the demand for wood by the wood consuming industries.  Farmers could bring a cord of wood to the train depots and sell them to the railway men for 2.50-5 dollars.
Before 1880 most wood factories in Vermont were producing "treen" or boxes, cartons, etc.  After 1880 paper companies moved into Vermont and started taking the trees at an unchecked rate.  Loggers were finding that it was easier to send finished lumber by rail versus "raw" trees by waterways.  During the 1860's, Burlington became the fourth largest lumber port in the nation.  This is supported by the amount of board feet cut: 20 million in 1856 and 375 million in 1889.  In the 1870's most of the raw stock for Burlington came from Canada due to the depleted forests in Vermont.  Comparing then to now, in 1880 Chittenden County was 80% deforested versus 16.8% in 1980.  

A New Forest

Vermont looks more as it did before the settlers came, than it has in the past 200 years.  The first big cut of trees was taken in 1850 and the trees did not come back until after 1880.  After that, it was another 40 years until at least 50% of the forests would take Vermont back.  Staring in the 1920's, towns moved to reforest Vermont.  In 1927 alone, 17 towns planted 267,000 trees.  In the town of Sheffield in 1926, 126 men planted 25,000 trees in one day.  By 1921, Vermont no longer was a leader in the export of lumber.  At the end of World War II, the trees were back but the diversity in the species and the majesty of the gentle giants would no longer come back.

The Science of Forestry

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the creation of the science of forestry.  Gifford Pinchot, the first director of the U.S. Forest Service said, “[The] trees could be cut and the forest preserved at on and the same time.”  That idea soon crept up to Vermont and implemented by Perry Merrill, the state forester.  Merrill devoted his life to turning Vermont into a “working” forest.  This meaning that the loggers and other people who depended on removing the trees could still do so, and yet seem not to make any impact on the look and activities of the forest.
In the 1940's and 50's, forestry programs began to take hold in Vermont.  They were concentrated on fire prevention, eliminating insects and diseases that harm trees, reforestation, sustaining high forest yields, creating and fostering seedling nurseries, the creation of municipal forests and acquiring more state land.
The Department of Forests and Parks was created from the Forestry Department in 1955.  This department fond that 30 million cubic feet of wood was taken out per year.  In 1959, the lumber industry employed over 8,000 people and produced a profit of $30 million.
Private and public reforestation efforts continued in the 1970's, but the trees took it upon themselves and started reforesting naturally, taking over unused pastures and fields.  This is due to the return of the trees, not the wilderness.  The “wilderness” that is today is not what is has been or ever will be.  As long as there are humans living here, there will be no wilderness.  The days of the yard-wide pines are over.  Wilderness is a term Europeans concocted to define a woods they had no knowledge on how to deal with it.

After World War II, the state “sold” plans of reviving the forest to the populace.  The plans included replanting trees, helping them grow and thrive and maintaining the environments that the forests depended on.

“The chief reasons for planting trees are economic ones- planting trees pays.  Idle land is a liability; with forests, an asset.” Perry Merrill in a state report, 1947

Current Use legislation- p. 297

	Mandates that foresters and farmers who sign up for the program will only be taxed on the use to which the land is being put, and not assessed at its development value.
	Forest owners putting land into the program agree to create a forest management plan.  Both farmers and forest owners also commit to keeping the designated acres undeveloped for a certain period or pay a penalty for early removal.
	In return, the state pays towns the tax differential between the lands chronically under funded by the state, but that problem has now been largely resolved by revisions in the state’s property tax system called for by the recently enacted ACT 60 (’97).

	458,377 acres agricultural
	1,047,377 acres forest

Vermont Land Trust- major helper in protecting the state’s forest and farmland

Purchased (in December ’98) 133, 289 acres in the NE Kingdom from Champion International Paper Company

Help from The Conservation Fund

Will be used for recreation and for the logging industry

NE Kingdom heavily depended on industry for money

Though most people think that the land used for logging is owned by the major logging companies, yet they own only 15%, down from 25% a decade ago.  Loggers will tell you that they love the woods and need to be near it and they do it for the people that need the trees.  Contrasting that is the opinion of environmentalists that the woods should be left alone and become habitats for wildlife.  The land has been logged for centuries, dating back to the settlers.  Logging is a way of life; these people depend on the land to produce food and shelter for their families.  On the other hand, the woods are a home and food source for other species.  The environmentalists say that the forest is a temple and clear-cutting the trees is a form of desecration.  These two sides are fighting on close lines, as all the species involved need food and shelter to survive.  The forests will be worked as long as there are humans cutting timber or hiking on the paths.

 

Maple Syrup in the Spring

The first American Sugarmakers were early Native Americans of New England who called their delicious maple syrup, "sinzibukwud," which translated means, "sweet buds."  The world is forever in their debt for teaching their Sugarmaking trade to the first American white settlers.
   Since These times Maple Sugar Harvesting has become very popular.

There are only a few regions in the world suitable for maple syrup production. Vermont is, by far, the most famous!


The arrival of Spring in Vermont is anticipated long before the first buds appear on the wintry foliage, as the sweet aroma of boiling maple sap drifts upon the breeze.  The sweet scent of maple permeates the fresh New England air, signaling the arrival of the Vermont Maple Harvest.  
This annual event is a tradition founded on romance and ritual. The gathering of sap excites native Vermonters as they court the maples, determining the precise time to tap and capture the crystalline liquid traveling through its veins.  The syrup processing ritual is eagerly anticipated regardless of the hard work and long hours spent laboring over the sugar pots.  Why?  Because the maple syrup gathering season is short-lived and often unpredictable due to New England's variable weather conditions.
Time and weather are the primary keys to a successful maple harvest.  Weather plays the most significant role in maple sap production, as the maples rely on the freezing and thawing periods that usually occur in late February and early March.  In order for the sap to flow, the weather must grow steadily warmer until temperatures rise above freezing.

  I can tell a lot of stories of maple Sugaring, for I have had my hand in gathering sap, boiling and harvesting since I was a small boy, From my grandfather all the way to the Lewis farm where I sugared with Ed Lewis for a good few years.

   So when Spring comes, and the trees begin to thaw, I will be rootin on the Sugar makers of Vermont, hoping that, they have a good season.