CURSING the men who take their axes into the woods is nothing new. Plato looked at the bare hills above Athens and wept for the lost trees. The new thing is that nowadays people are listening. The protectors of nature—the environmentalists, ecologists, greens—are making life hell for the timber industry.

"Chaos" is how one forest economist describes things in North America, the timber-basket of the world. The North American part of the industry already has to contemplate a fall in the amount of wood that nature has made available for cutting. Now, on top of that, it has to cope with the fact that it has become cripplingly unpopular. Some kinds of wood are boycotted by environmentalists; logging roads are sometimes sabotaged; many jobs may be lost because the industry is being forced to reduce its activities. In the United States, the world’s largest producer of forest products, one outcome is a timber shortage that may not ease until after the year 2010.

Today forest products are worth about $190 billion a year to the United States.

Along with auxiliary industries, the business accounts for 4% of the country’s GNP; in parts of the south and the Pacific northwest, it is an economic mainstay.

All over the world the battle between greens and woodmen pits new ideals against the centuries-old utilitarian view of trees. Wood was something of great value in ancient Greece and Rome; in Athens its export was banned. Some historians reckon it was medieval Europe’s abundant forests that gave it the economic and material edge over the Arabs as Christianity and Islam competed for world leadership.

Yet the story of man in the forest has always included chapters of abuse. The Mediterranean countries, Britain and much of Europe were largely denuded of trees by the 18th century. In the 19th century colonialists cheerfully hacked down forests. The deodars of the Himalayas are now the railway sleepers of India. And it has got worse.

In a recent book, "Global Forest Resources", Alexander Mather comfortingly notes that perhaps as much as 80% of the world’s pre-agricultural forest is still there.

But that figure is not as reassuring as it looks. Between 1975 and 1985 the planet lost forested lands equivalent in area to three Britains. At present, taking the world as a whole, the average man can count on a wooded area only the size ofa soccer pitch to support his needs for wood, paper and fuel, not to mention forest by-products such as medicines and clean water.

In the name of owls, etcetera

What worries American environmentalists is not that the amount of woodland in the United States is shrinking. New planting more than matches the number of old trees chopped down. The greens’ concern is what the logging industry does to nature in the process.

In particular, they fret about the loss of ancient forests. In the states of Oregon and Washington, greens have won wide sympathy for the northern spotted owl, a creature that relies on mature forests for its living-quarters and is therefore threatened by the axeman. On some estimates, stopping work in the owl’s favourite habitats might mean the end of 40,000-plus jobs, at a cost of $1 billion or more a year in lost wages.

After the owl comes the salmon. The greens observe that the streams in which salmon spawn are frequently damaged by logging. A move to list one of the kinds of salmon in the Columbia river as an endangered species could make timber companies in Oregon, Washington and Idaho alter their timber-cutting practices even more.

Then there is "biodiversity". Greens decry the industry’s practice of replacing a varied natural forest with a managed monoculture. In North America mixed forests of Douglas fir, cedar, spruce and oak are often supplanted by Douglas fir alone, a species favoured for building purposes because it has a relatively fast 50-year maturing-time. Greens claim this practice makes forests vulnerable to disease, and hurts the forest ecosystem. Indeed, eastern Oregon has a spruce budworm infestation because the native Ponderosa pines have been replaced by more valuable, but less pest-resistant, trees.

That private companies put timber before owls is not surprising. American environmentalists have tended to get even more indignant about the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, which in 1989 accounted for about 15% of all domestic logging. Neither agency is required to sell timber at a price that will cover its costs. In practice, much federal timber is sold below cost. The owls lose—but so do American taxpayers. Worst of all is the case of the Tongass, Alaska’s cold rain forest: the government sold this ecologically unique old-growth timber for 2% of what it spent preparing the forest for logging.

A report published in May by a group led by Senator Tim Wirth and—until his death earlier this year—Senator John Heinz protests that federal taxpayers paid $365m in 1989 for such below-cost timber sales. Some of the cash was spent on building new roads, which often cost more than the value of the timber shipped along them. "If the Forest Service were a private firm," says the report, "the value of its assets would place it among the top five of the Fortune-500 list of largest corporations, while in net-income terms it would be classified as bankrupt."

Think trees, as well as timber

The timber industry has been less than brilliant at persuading people it is not Darth Vader with a Stihl chainsaw. Still, things have changed. The industry has had to come to terms with environmentalism. Some companies have listened to the greens’ complaints. Better technology, plus greater care in the woods, now extract more value from trees and do less harm in the process.

In the forests big "feller-bunches"— tank-like vehicles with enormous garden shears mounted on the front—snip marketable trees at the base and lay them carefully down to avoid smashing small, still-growing trees. Mechanised skidders used to haul logs out of the forest are being fitted with extra-wide tracks or oversized tyres to spread their weight and reduce damage to the forest floor. In some parts of Canada horses have come back to haul out logs where machines might do harm.

A technique called "new forestry" says that tree-harvesters should leave behind them the odd mature tree, dead sun-silvered trunks, and the usual litter of the woods. The result is that, as new trees grow, they do so in surroundings not unlike what would follow a natural fire or windstorm, which the forest can survive. The birds like it too.

Sawmills have sharpened up. They use computer-guided saws to get as much lumber as possible from a log. Waste material is used to fire boilers that provide the mill with electricity. In the paper industry new equipment greatly reduces the amount of poisonous bleaches used on pulp.

The boffins have also turned their ingenuity on to the stuff they produce. Since 1983 MacMillan Bloedel Ltd in Canada has invested C$150m ($130m) in Parallam, one example of a new kind of manufactured wood called parallel-strand lumber. Made by pressing glue-covered strips of wood together and baking them in something like a microwave oven, Parallam uses cheap wood veneer to create material that once required large, expensive trees. It is now made in Georgia and British Columbia, and a plant opening this autumn in Minnesota will use a modified Parallam process to make high-

quality stock for companies such as Andersen Windows, whose old supplies of Ponderosa pine are running out.

So the greens have chivvied the timber industry into more responsible behaviour. But the price has been high. Jessica Lange went to Washington to draw attention to the human cost of the squeeze on the farmers. Nobody looks like doing as much for the 100,000 west-coast people dependent on the forest industry who may soon lose their jobs. The losers are bitter. The newspapers report that a number of dead spotted owls have been found nailed to signposts. An ugly business, but many loggers believe they are being forced out of work because of a short brown bird few people had heard of two years ago.

The timber industry says its confidence has been rattled by all this, and it is a trade where confidence matters. Planting trees is an act of faith, says Lynn Michaelis, chief economist of Weyerhaeuser, a huge timber company based in Washington state.

If the planter wonders whether he will be allowed to get at the grown tree, his interest in expensive forest-management fades. Forests left to grow again on their own do so slowly, over 80 or 90 years, compared with 50 or 60 in a managed forest. Weyerhaeuser woodlands demolished by the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens are now thickly carpeted with 18.4m planted trees. Some are already 25 feet (7.5 metres) tall. Nearby lands left as a "volcanic preserve" remain barren.

So replanting, and the ability to do it with confidence about the future, do matter. The odd thing is that in the United States and Canada, both supposedly enlightened tree-growing countries, not enough attention is being given to replanting. In Canada in particular it is almost ignored. More than a quarter of the Canadian timberland harvested in 1985-86 has not been replanted. Less than 3% of Canada’s forestry budget goes on intensive forest management. In Sweden the figure is 40%.

In fact, replanting does not always please the greens. As practised by commercial foresters, it usually creates areas covered with trees of the same age and (generally) the same species. As a result, the wildlife is less diverse. Things that live in dead trees, young trees, big trees and clearings can all live in a naturally regenerating forest; but only things that live in one kind and age of tree can live in a replanted forest. Biodiversity suffers from replanting as much as from straight felling of old growth. it does not suffer from the felling of replanted stands: one low-diversity fauna replaces another. This makes nonsense of the claim by some timber men that all that matters is how many trees are growing.

Shortage now, glut later?

The industry likes to point out that more trees are growing in North America than at any time in the past 30 years. True, but most of the trees are relatively young. Recent plantations mean not only less biodiversity but also less timber ready to chop down. Although a 40-year-old tree may look large enough to run through a headsaw, it is not ready for cutting. Nature can be prodded a bit, but not rushed.

So, despite a recent fall in demand from the American house-building market, everybody wonders whether there is going to be enough American wood in the next few years. Mr Michaelis recalls that they were talking about the expected timber shortage of the 1990s when he joined Weyerhaeuser nearly 20 years ago. Since then most private North American landholders have vigorously cut their mature trees.

The industry had expected the Forest Service obligingly to make up the shortfall with public timber. Itwas wrong. The Forest Service, this time pleasing the greens, has taken large chunks of public woodland off the market. Darius Adams, of the University of Washington, now forecasts a drop of 40% or more in the timber harvested on public land in the western United States by the end of the decade. Private land can make up the shortfall for, at most, three or four years.

The western United States has plenty of company, says Mr Adams. Even in the south of the country, a booming timber region since the early 1960s, production is going to drop because there has not been enough replanting over the past 30 years. Canada is in for a particularly sharp shock; it seems to have hit its harvest peak in 1987, and a combination of pressure from the greens and far too little replanting makes the outlook uncommonly bleak. All in all, by the end of the decade North America will probably be providing much less of the world’s timber.

To some extent the North American shortfall will be made good elsewhere. Radiata pine plantations in Chile and New Zealand are heading for a period of peak productivity. Both of those countries are well placed to take advantage of the big, and growing, timber market in the countries of the Pacific rim. Japan is the world’s largest importer of forest products. Demand is expanding in Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea. The North American manufacturers say their valuable fir, cedar and spruce ought to help them maintain their market-share in these places; but rising costs may mean that they are disappointed.

Might the Soviet Union help to plug the gap while North America waits for its trees to grow up? Probably not.

The Soviet Union’s vast eastern forests contain anything up to half of the world’s conifers. But the country has neither the transport nor the mills to get much of its timber out, or to process it at competitive prices. It has its own increasingly vocal green movement. And it has a spectacular political complication, in the prolonged tug of war between Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet government and Boris Yeltsin’s government of the Russian republic—which contains much of the country’s standing timber. The Russians, it seems, are resisting efforts to expand timber production until they, as distinct from the Soviet government, get more of the profit.

To be sure, the Soviet authorities have made it clear that joint ventures with western companies are welcome. Last year an Oregon-based firm, Louisiana-Pacific, shipped Soviet larch and pine logs to a mill for test processing. But this sort of thing is not much of a deal for the western partner; at bottom, the Soviet government is asking for western capital, technology and marketing skills in return for raw logs and a lot of irritation. Certainly there will be no big expansion of western imports, or building of western-style mills in Siberia, until it be-comes clear whose government is in control of the Siberian trees.

Anyway, some forestry people are starting to wonder whether the North American timber shortage of the next few years is about to be followed by a timber glut. Technologies like Parallam are already making a larger amount of wood products for the consumer out of the same amount of harvested timber. The recycling of paper has the same effect.

Japan recycles about 50% of the paper it uses. The United States manages only about 25%, though Weyerhaeuser runs a pulp mill in Washington state that draws 85% of its raw material from waste paper. If American recycling gets as good as Japanese, paper will need far fewer trees. And then, on top of all this, in 20 or 30 years vast stands of replanted wood in western North America will be coming on to the market.

Whether or not this portends a glut is unclear. Mr Michaelis believes that third-world economic growth will need a lot of wood; in the past, developing countries have tended to consume vast quantities of the stuff. There have been forecasts of a 50% jump in demand for forest products over the next 50 years. Others disagree. Britain’s Forestry Commission is about to publish a collection of studies of the prospects for forestry, which includes a paper by Michael Arnold arguing that prices are unlikely to rise in real terms. The reason is the scale of recent investment in temperate forests not only in Britain and America but in Canada, Australia, France and Chile.

New uses, new values

If a glut comes, foresters may find that they are grateful, after all, for those maddening owls. The forest industry will then realise that the value of forests is not just a matter of the wood that can be hauled out of them. As people grow richer, they prize—and will pay for—the recreation they can find in woodland, and the pleasure they win from the knowledge that they are preserving nature.

In Canada the cutting of timber has increased five-fold since the 1920s; the recreational use of forests has leapt 100-fold. The study by Senators Wirth and Heinz, looking at forestry in the United States, went a step further: it points out (see chart) that about two-fifths of the value of the country’s forests comes from recreational uses. That figure represents partly what people now pay to enjoy them, and partly what people say they would pay to preserve them.

That is ample justification for spending more money on forest conservation. To some people, it also suggests that a larger proportion of that money should go to those who live near the forests, and who now worry that their livelihoods are threatened by an end to below-cost timber sales.

The study by Britain’s Forestry Commission tries to take another step down that road. It includes a paper by David Pearce, an economist who advises Britain’s environment secretary, in which he attempts to attach values not only to the recreational opportunities that forests provide but also to their use as a "carbon store".

Growing trees lock up the carbon dioxide that may cause global warming. So planting more trees could help to keep the world at a bearable temperature. Last year President Bush announced a massive tree-planting programme as part of America’s attack on global warming. One American utility, Virginia Power and Light, has already said it will pay for tree-planting in Guatemala to absorb the equivalent of the carbon dioxide escaping from the chimneys of a new power station.

The Pearce study suggests that the recreational value of forests may range from £5 ($8) per hectare per year for plantations on remote uplands to £220 per hectare per year for mixed plantations in the lowlands. As a carbon store, if valued by the cost of the damage that might be done if the carbon were not locked up, trees are worth considerably more. But Mr Pearce sees a problem. The best way to lock up carbon may be to plant fast-growing softwoods on cheap land. The best way to increase the recreational use of forests is to plant mixed woods near towns, where land costs much more. The best way to increase the value of forests as habitats for wildlife maybe not to plant or replant them, but to let them follow their own gradual cycle of regeneration.

In the long run, forestry management may well become a more valuable activity than logging. For the present, the logging continues. Yet there remains a solid case for a timber industry, at any rate a chastened and more careful one.

People who live in houses, and like furniture, and read books and newspapers, still need the products of the woods. Some of them—a great many, in certain places— depend for their livelihood on satisfying that demand. Between indiscriminate slaughter of trees and a decent harvesting of what is needed there is all the difference in the world. Provided the industry does its harvesting in a fashion that will leave the 22nd century with a proper covering of greenery, it deserves a modern Plato’s approval.

Source : The Economist, June 11, 1991

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