The Other Moutaintop Removal
Once again this week the Oregon Logging Conference rolled into town and set up shop at the fairgrounds. Huge equipment: skidders, log cranes, grapples, etc. Somebody always shows up with a truck full of trees too. And every year those trees are a little smaller. This year, I’d rate them somewhere between puny and not worth bothering with.
I’m a longtime carpenter and cabinetmaker, smitten decades ago by the miracle and beauty embodied in the trees of this planet. So, I get the draw on some level, but this event in particular as well as the broader relationship between people and forests here in Oregon have been squatted on by a morbid sort of pathos for a long time. I think a lot of the conference attendees actually feel it too. It might be my imagination or just the gloom-funk of late winter up here in the soggy Northwest, but it just doesn’t look like there’s a lot of joy in it any longer even for them.
The Oregon timber life from “Sometimes a Great Notion” passed away a long time before Ken Kesey did in 2001. The precise causes of death—a matter of vigorous debate up here in the 1990s—are worth reviewing as the Republicans rev up for another assault on the public lands that really do make America great. It’s a safe bet that destroyers like Jason Chaffetz will be back before long to take another whack at forest protections.
Of course, if you ask most folks at the conference why their way of life is something of an endangered species, they’ll say something about endangered species, effing enviros, bureaucrats, etc. It’s a script. It’s not really a thought process. But, to them it’s the reason their kids can’t be loggers or work in a mill the way they did. Never mind that very few if any kids these days want to work in a mill or even out in the woods.
The display trucks with their ever-shrinking log loads parked in the lot at the conference tell a better story, as do the ever more sophisticated harvesting and processing machines sitting next to them.
Puny logs count as conference trophies these days mostly because there are few truly big logs left. Estimates vary, but absolutely no one will look you in the eye and claim that we have even 20% of our old growth forest left. In fact, in 1991 a USFS study put the number in the Northwest—one of our richest forest regions in the nation—at 6%.
That was over a decade before GW Bush pulled a mini-Bannon and wrecked that part of the “administrative state” there to protect our intact Northwest forests….to increase logging of old growth by 700%. It’s a Republican thing. It’s what they do.
Obama partially put the protections back in 2009. But since then we’ve continued to harvest timber at breakneck pace. So, although it may be good political sport in some circles to hide behind scientific uncertainty, I doubt you’d find a working bookie in Vegas who’d put money today on there being any more than 5% of our native forests remaining up here in the Northwest. And...remember...this is the good side of the country. In the East, you’re probably looking at <1%.
So, bottom line: we’ve simply cut all the trees. There certainly aren’t any big trees left on private land. (That’s why they’re coming after public lands.) And, even on the public lands—which are included in the studies that generated the mentioned earlier—we’re down to almost nothing.
Trust me. Those loggers at the conference every year are proud people. If they had a nice truck or two of 6 foot diameter trees for show and tell, they’d bring them. We’ve cut the forests out from under our economy.
The other thing that killed the off the logger’s life here in the Northwest was automation. When I arrived here in Oregon in 1989, some mills were still staffed with dozens or even hundreds of workers. By the end of the 1990s, automation had replaced probably three quarters of those jobs. In 1996 I had a small front row seat as an expert witness in mill labor arbitration case. In a few years time, the mill had transitioned from a bustling hub of local employment to a mechanized ghost town where fourteen workers operated an automated facility the size of two football fields. In the arbitration case, some of the surviving workers were being denied a minuscule pay increase for having to retrain as computer programmers. The mill owners argued it was the same job...so no pay increase.
The story is the same in the woods before you get to the mill. If you sit on a hill day and watch a crew clear cut a forest on the next one over (I have), it’s a scary thing. Forget about the old pictures of brave and husky men swarming like ants on a giant tree to bring it down using saws and wedges. Today giant machines grab a tree, saw it off at the base, and feed it to another giant machine that rips all the limbs from the trunk and stacks it on a truck. In most cases, a human hand never touches the tree.
The way it’s done nowadays, we could cut every one of our remaining forests to the ground and the logging/milling jobs involved wouldn’t fill a backwater town much less register as a blip on state or federal employment reports.
So, let’s be clear. When Ryan Zinke or Scott Pruitt or Jason Chaffetz or any of them come pitching relaxation of stream protections, public land sales, or the rest of it as part of some “Make America Great” again, it’s a scam. Up here in the Northwest, it will mean nothing but further erosion of an already decimated and failing natural resource base. The very few jobs it creates will quickly dry up again once we’ve mowed our way through the small percentage of mature forest actually left out there. It will leave a sad trail of destruction in its wake.
What it will mean however is a temporary cash injection for big timber interests. That always makes them feel good. On the political front end, it will also mean a lot of good red meat for the Republican pols pitching MAGA nostalgia to their base. They’ll trot out a lot of nonsense about tree huggers and liberal bureaucrats. It’ll get them elected or re-elected in Western states where the custom is to give every handful of ranchers and their a senator all their own. At a state and local level, it’s a depressingly easy sell as well.
That’s the biggest ripoff of all: empty promises to revitalize a decadent and dysfunctional economic model that has zero future in the real world. Small towns go for it almost every time, mostly because there’s nothing better on the table and because they’re hurting.
So, get ready. First salvos have already been fired and more are coming. If you don’t want to trade the forests and rivers and other wild places that actually do make America great for nothing (except zero-trickle down corporate profits), don’t let anyone sell you the environment versus jobs snake oil.
