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Voices of the Northwest
Sadler's Sense: Of Myths, Money and Machines, Why We Blame the Owl
The Northwest timber industry spent the last 50 years cutting 400-year-old trees with eight generations of wealth in the wood.
By Russell Sadler
Posted on Feb 25, 2005 |
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One of the reasons Congress now seeks to "revise" the Endangered Species Act is a claim that the listing of the Northern Spotted owl resulted in devastating loses of wages and jobs in the Northwest timber industry. Oregon's 2nd District Congressman Greg Walden is a cosponsor -- and he should know better.
This claim is a deliberately created fiction. As the late sociologist and New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said famously, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but everyone is not entitled to their own facts. Consider:
Between 1979 and 1989, the Northwest Douglas fir region -- Western Oregon, Western Washington and Northern California -- lost more than 25 percent of its mills, more than 34 percent of its workforce and more than 20 percent of its wages.
Yet in 1989 alone, the remaining Northwest mills produced more lumber and plywood than the entire industry had at any time since 1959 -- the peak year of the post-World War II housing boom. The spotted owl injunctions limiting logging in Northwest federal forests were not imposed until the early 1990s -- after the major mill closures and job losses of the 1980s.
Now, if the spotted owl was not responsible for the mill closures and job losses of the 1980s, what was responsible? Automation.
In 1979 it took 4.5 workers to mill one million board feet of lumber.
By 1989 it took just two workers to mill the same one million board feet.
Economists called it increased efficiency. Mill owners called it increased productivity. Mill workers called it unemployment. Merchants in mill towns called it bankruptcy.
Some experienced observers argue persuasively that the employment per unit of output in the wood products industry has remained fairly stable for the last 40 or 50 years. Increased employment in sales and distribution of wood products replaced jobs lost in the woods and mills. But most of the sales and distribution jobs are in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland and Eugene. That is cold comfort in Roseburg, Powers, Coos Bay, Astoria and Newport.
There was one other seminal event that closed many mills. The Northwest ran out of the old-growth timber needed to maintain historic levels of production and employment. By the mid-1980s private timber land owners in the region had liquidated their old-growth holdings. Mills that depended on federal timber expected to be able to do the same thing in the national forests. But public opinion changed.
Public awareness of the environment and the connected nature of ecosystems, begun by Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" in the early 1960s, raised questions about the apparent policy of turning the national forests into national tree farms. The Clinton administration's Northwest Forest Plan in the early 1990s limited the logging on the remaining five percent remnant of the region's original old growth. That is the remnant the Bush administration is struggling to return to the market to pay back its campaign contributors.
It is a futile gesture.
Most of the region's remaining mills have now been adapted to processing the smaller 60-year-old trees from privately owned second-growth forests that currently dominate the timber supply. The real purpose of putting more publicly subsidized federal timber on the market to drive down the price of private timber, allowing marginal mills to stay in business a little longer.
Trees are, of course, a renewable resource. But 400-year-old trees are not renewable in our lifetimes. The Northwest timber industry spent the last 50 years cutting 400-year-old trees with eight generations of wealth in the wood. There was plenty of money to go around.
Now the region's timber industry is dependent on 60-year-old trees with one generation of wealth in the wood. There is less money to go around. That means more automation, fewer workers and lower wages. Not even the Bush administration with its self-proclaimed pipeline to the Almighty can bring back a sufficient supply of 400-year-old trees to restore historic levels of production and employment.
The spotted owl is simply an indicator species. It's health -- or lack of it -- tells us about the condition of the habitat it depends on. The spotted owl was telling us that it was losing the same habitat the old-growth dependent timber industry -- its mill workers, mill owners, their families -- also depended upon. We didn't listen. We blamed the owl instead. Only when the mills closed because nearly all the old growth had been logged off did we realize the owl had been warning the humans who also depended on the dwindling old growth forest.
There may be some reasons for revising the Endangered Species Act. The spotted owl is not one of them.
Copyright © 2005 by Russell Sadler
Also see
A Forester Looks at the Healthy Forest Initiative
Russell Sadler is a journalist and lecturer at Southern Oregon University. Visit Sadler's Sense column's at West By Northwest.org:
Sadler's Sense: Not Window Dressing
Sadler's Sense: From Constantine to George, God's Will and Secular Power
Sadler's Sense: Credibility or State of Our State
Sadler's Sense: Look in the Mirror, Oregon
Sadler's Sense: Why We Must Pay the Piper Now
Sadler's Sense: A Short History of Measure 30
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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