4/8/2002

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

The Shifting US Forest Products Industry

When limits on timber harvests in environmentally sensitive areas of our public lands are proposed, one of the familiar timber industry responses has been that such harvest limits simply shift the lost harvest to other areas. We are often explicitly told that if we collectively are not willing to reduce our consumption of wood and paper products, we cannot ethically put any limits on the harvest of the trees that provide that wood fiber.

What this argument ignores are the ways in which we can increase forest products production without increasing the percentage of our forests that are primarily managed for commercial logging.

Consider the southern states during the first half of the 20^th century. Much of the South was a cut-over, exhausted, eroded region that had lost most of its forests to marginal agriculture and overharvest and primarily exported floods of heavily silted water to the nation rather than forest products. Public programs during the Great Depression as well as natural reforestation changed that, recreating one of the most productive forest regions in the world. Marginal agricultural lands in the western part of the South continue to be converted to forestlands today.

Because of the higher temperatures and rainfall, much of the South can be extremely productive for wood fiber production. This has led to high levels of investment in forest plantations on private land. Intensively managed, these lands can produce commercial saw timber and pulpwood in 20 to 30 years while it takes 60 to 90 years to do the same in the Rocky Mountain region.

Over the last two decades southern forest plantations that account for only 15 percent of total timberland have produced 35 percent of the harvests. Recent national projections indicate that fifty years from now 55 percent of softwood harvest will come from such private plantations covering only about 30 percent of the private timberland.

This does not mean that most of the forestland in productive regions will be converted to intensively managed plantations. In the South, over the next 50 years, plantations will go from occupying the current 14 percent of timberlands to 23 percent, but close to 50 percent of a much-expanded southern harvest will come from those lands. The higher productivity of these southern plantations will take the harvest pressure off of natural forestlands both in the south and elsewhere in the nation. Studies in Georgia found that plantations on abandoned farmland were more that five times more productive than natural regeneration of cutover lands. That is, one acre of new plantation on abandoned farmland could free up five acres of natural forest for non-logging purposes.

As a result, total national harvest will expand by over 40 percent but the acreage of forestland that is harvested will decline. Eighty percent of the increase in harvest over the next 50 years will take place in the South primarily because of its much higher productivity and lower management costs. That does not mean that timber harvest will cease in areas like the Rocky Mountain West. The projections are for growth in harvest here too, but in 1997 we contributed only 4 percent to the total national harvest. Growth in harvest within the Rocky Mountain region will expand as rapidly as the national harvest, but this will represent a minor contribution then as now. Almost all of that expanding harvest in this region will take place on private lands.

The point is that we can both protect our public forestlands and continue to enjoy the benefits that forest products bring to our lives and economy. This is partially the case because as timber supplies have gotten tighter and wood fiber prices have risen, we have gotten better and better at conserving in the use of wood fiber. Until the 1950s shiplap and tongue-and-groove boards were used for floors and walls in our homes and buildings. Plywood displaced the use of those boards, allowing a greater utilization of the tree. Now oriented strand board is displacing plywood, using wood chips rather than round wood. Similarly, manufactured trusses, glue-lam beams, and wooden I-beams are displacing the use of 2x10s and 2x12s.

But that is just the beginning of the increased utilization of wood fiber much of which had previously had simply been wasted. Consider the pulp and paper business. In 1986 about 50 percent of the wood fiber that was used to produce pulp and paper in the US came from roundwood, trees that were harvested for that purpose. In 1996 that had fallen to 40 percent; by the end of this decade the use of roundwood for pulp is projected to be down to a third and fifty years from now down to a quarter of the fiber used for pulp and paper. The change is the result of the increased utilization of wood wastes from lumber and plywood mills and the increased recycling of paper and paper board. Over the last decade or so we went from recycling less than 30 percent of paper and cardboard consumption to recycling about half of it.

Limiting harvests on environmentally sensitive forest lands tends to raise the price that all wood fiber users have to pay for their raw material. Indirectly, some of the environmental costs associated with timber harvests get incorporated into the cost of wood fiber. As a result of the higher raw material costs, all users of wood fiber are more careful in that use, conserving more of the fiber, stretching it further, recycling it, inventing new products that make fuller use of all the fiber a harvested tree can provide. In addition, production shifts away from the remnant natural forests where access, harvesting, and environmental mitigation are all more costly and non-timber values are higher. The harvest shifts towards areas where intensive wood fiber production can take place more cheaply and where there are fewer conflicts over forest use. Private plantations that reforest abandoned agricultural land and cutover forestlands are examples of these opportunities.

Environmental damage at the levels we currently see is not an inevitable result of a modern standard of living. Often that environmental damage is the result of bad incentive systems and government subsidies that encourage inefficient and destructive behavior. By confidently demanding better performance from those who wish to use our shared natural environments, we trigger economic changes that bring forth entrepreneurial adaptations that allow us to both protect the environment and have a productive economy. Before we start talking about “tragic” economic choices between the environment and the economy, we first should squeeze the extensive resource waste out of the system. We can live prosperously off of that waste for a long time to come.