7/17/2000

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

The Ethics and Economics of Limiting the Lands We Log

The forest products industry has expressed ethical outrage at those supporting the Roadless Area Initiative for suggesting that our economy and communities can survive and prosper even if millions of acres of unprotected National Forest roadless areas are put off limits to roading and logging. The timber industry accuses environmentalists of being hypocrites or worse because those same environmentalists use paper and wood products but support placing limits on where and how wood fiber is extracted from public lands. This timber industry moral indignation is based on serious ethical and economic confusion.

Consider the ethical position that, if you use a raw material yourself, you must support unrestricted production of that raw material. If that is the case, then none of us could ethically support the continued protection of Glacier and Yellowstone or any other National Parks. Apparently, we must also support roading and clearcutting the Bob Marshall and all other wilderness areas. We should also harvest the trees that line our streets and shade our city parks and backyards and turn them into paper to be thrown away.

To assert that, if you use a product, you ethically must support unrestricted production of that product leads to positions that are obviously ethically nuts: If you use oil products for energy, must you support the burning of all oil paintings, including classic art treasures, in order to extract their heat content and also ban all further oil painting? If you make use of a building for your home or business, must you support the conversion of the cathedrals and temples of the world into factories, office buildings, and affordable housing?

That is the opposite of an ethical position. Ethics involves the acceptance of restraints on what we are willing to do individually and collectively in the pursuit of our self-interest. The proposal to protect the remaining National Forest roadless areas is just such an ethical restraint: Collectively we would be saying that in the pursuit of new homes, businesses, and more disposable packaging, we will not road and clearcut every last acre of public land. There simply are limits to the damage we are willing to do.

The economic error in this criticism of the placing restrictions on where and how we harvest timber lies in the assumption that if we reduce access to raw materials on public lands, we must necessarily either go without the goods those raw materials could have helped us produce or harvest the same volume of trees elsewhere with the same negative environmental impacts.

But that is not how a market economy works. When the supply of a raw material is constrained, its market price rises, triggering a long string of economic adjustments that work to offset the effect of that supply constraint. Consider the dramatic fall down in timber harvest from our National Forests since the late 1980s. When the National Forests stopped flooding markets with publicly subsidized timber harvests, the price of standing timber rose significantly, triggering all of the following:

With timber more costly, there was an incentive to be more careful and efficient in the use of wood products. Technological innovation continued to produce building materials that conserved on wood fiber. Where long ago we sheathed our buildings with one-inch boards, we turned to much thinner plywood. Now we use a variety of fiberboards. Where once we built with huge timbers, we now manufacture lighter and stronger trusses.
Wood fiber that previously was simply wasted was converted into valuable products. This included both forest slash that was previously left on the forest floor to burn as well as sawmill wastes that increasingly flowed to fiberboard and paper mills. Paper mills across the nation reduced their use of round wood and increasingly relied on recycled paper and lumber mill wastes.
The higher timber prices better conveyed to forest products users the full environmental costs associated with logging. Incorporating more of the environmental costs into the prices we pay appropriately encourages us to conserve in our use of forest products.
The export of raw logs to other countries declined dramatically. Those logs instead flowed to our mills, supporting our jobs, instead of flowing overseas.
Private, non-industrial woodlot owners were given an incentive to manage their lands for timber production along with other forest values. Private non-industrial timber harvests increased dramatically.
Clear citizen concern with how trees are harvested has led to a variety of forest product certification programs that pressure forest products firms to reduce the damage they do as they manage their forests and harvest their trees. Consumers are willing to pay more for forest products produced in less damaging ways.

Seeking to restrict the damage we do to our public lands and resources so that those lands can continue to provide the noncommercial values that make Montana and the Montana way of life unique is both consistent with our ethical values and with our ongoing economic prosperity. We can both improve the environment and our well-being by reducing waste and gratuitous environmental damage. It is those who reject any restrictions on the commercial use and damage of our public resources who are ethically and economically confused.