EF! Fined $1million in Idaho

Don Baccus donb at rational.com
Sun Nov 24 00:12:35 EST 1996

In article <329741BA.7DE6 at rippers.com>,
norm lenhart  <lenhart at rippers.com> wrote:

>Where do people live ? in houses right ?

Yep.  We can build those houses out of second-growth, or even switch
to steel-stud construction, as has been done for over a decade (having
been prez of a company that moved into an office so constructed for
FIRE CODE, not environmental, reasons) in office construction.  They're
safer, apparently.  

But ignoring substitute materials, we can simply depend on second-growth
for our needs.  The issue isn't one of sufficient supply, it's one of
holding costs down by delaying the industry's capital expenses involved
in retooling mills.  And, the local costs of accelerating, in some cases,
the closure of mills in old-growth rich areas.  Note that ending of
old-growth logging for conservation only accelerates (not causes) conversion
or closure of mills, because the old-growth would be liquidated by about 2010
or so anyway.


Perhaps if the timber concentrated on working with conservation organizations,
instead of repeatedly telling us to *bleep* off, we'd all be better off.

The industry has, in the past three decades, opposed state (Oregon) and
federal legislation to:

1. Mandate replanting of timberland.
2. Mandate sustained (rather than cut-'n-run) yield forestry
3. Multiple-use laws, ensuring that our forests are managed for
   recreation and wilidife values, not just timber values.
4. The ESA.

Oh, there's more, that's enough for now.


The acreage involved is orders of magnitude greater for timberlands than
for urban lands.  Despite this, in Oregon we have strong land-use planning
laws, supported against attempts to get rid of them via the initiative
four or five times running, in order to curb sprawl in order to preserve
topsoil (prime farmland).  Our land-use laws were passed over twenty
years ago - do we get a gold star for anticipating your request by
over two decades?

>just wake up one morning and change thier entire existance. 

Well, many of these logging towns did just that, being boom-towns
that sprang into existence in order to exploit changes in federal
timber management practices that came into effect in the late 40s.

And, many of the inhabitants were loggers from the SE, migrating west
to take advantage of the new opportunities.  Let them leave or change
in the same spirit.  Again, conservation-based halting of old-growth
in many situations does not cause, but simply accelerates, the basic
cut-'n-run basis of the industry.

>ANY enviro group proposed to replace paper and wooden building materials

Nothing.  Just paper and building materials built of second-growth or
recycled wood products.  It is the safety industry that insists on
steel studs for certain kinds of construction, not conservationists.

In other words, you pose a false dichotomy.  The choice isn't "harvest
old growth or end wood products".  The choice is far less painful, perhaps
"harvest old-growth or quit exporting unprocessed logs to Japan", or
"harvest old-growth or drop trade sanctions against Canada".

>your own problem ?

Nope, there's really no correlation of the harvest of old-growth and
paper or wood-products production.   There's a price correlation, in
part due to the continued export of raw logs (Weyerhauser can ship
logs via the ocean to Japan and get much more per log than the domestic
price, even today when domestic prices are quite steep), in part due
to trade duties with Canada, in part due to limited milling capacity for
smaller logs.

>and you know it.

So, what will the loggers do when they win, and their employers
drop the chainsaw, the choker chain, the high-line, and switch to
big rubber-tired harvest machines that snip, transport, and load
little sticks in one fell swoop?  When the skills needed to run
such machines more closely match those learned by urban construction
machinery operators than those learned by logger?  Hmmmm?


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>
  Nature photos, site guides, and other goodies at:

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