Timber Harvests Slowing Further
by the Rogue Pundit [here]
Today, there have been several news stories on Oregon’s timber harvest last year. Here’s part of one article and some additional data and thoughts.
Oregon’s timber harvests continued their decline since 2004 with 3.80 billion board feet being harvested in 2007, a 12 percent decrease from 2006.
This is the smallest Oregon timber harvest since the recession-based record low recorded in 2001.
The harvest in 2001 was 3.44 billion board feet. Last year’s harvest also topped the ones in 1998 and 1999. But before that, one has to go all the way back to 1938 to find a lower harvest (historical records here).
The reduction in timber harvest volumes came from declining harvests from private forestland owners. An 11 percent, or 344 million board feet, decrease in volume from forest industry land owners was accompanied by a 43 percent decline in harvests on non-industrial private lands, which declined from 422 million board feet in 2006 to 240 million board feet in 2007. Federal harvests remained at historically low levels, accounting for less than 10 percent of the cut.
Timber harvests were down in both western Oregon and eastern Oregon. Harvests in all of western Oregon declined 11 percent from 2006 levels, driven primarily by the 44 percent decrease on non-industrial private lands, from 351 million board feet to 198 million board feet.
Klamath County straddles the Cascades, but its totals are included in-and easily lead-Eastern Oregon. At 107 million board feet, its harvest is more than a quarter of the total from that side of the state. However, its harvest only topped six counties in Western Oregon, which confusingly includes Hood River County from the other side of the Cascades.
Lane County continues to lead Oregon’s counties in harvesting, despite decreasing by 15 percent to 504 million board feet in 2007. Douglas County was second with 479 million board feet, while Clatsop and Coos were third and fourth with 338 and 303 million board feet respectively.
Overall, harvests decreased in all western Oregon counties except for Curry, Hood River, Linn, and Yamhill, resulting in the 11 percent decline in that region.
Curry County and Jackson County totaled 95 million and 74 million board feet, respectively. And once Josephine County was next to last here in western Oregon, topping only Multnomah County (Portland). Last year’s harvest of 22.4 million board feet was the lowest here since 1939. Our peak was in 1952 at 318 million board feet. And note that none of last year’s harvest here was from BLM or USFS land…none.
Let’s not forget with the BLM’s former O&C lands…
Section 1181(a) of the 1937 O&C act reads that O&C lands “Shall be managed… for permanent forest production, and the timber thereon shall be sold, cut, and removed in conformity with the principal of sustained yield for the purpose of providing a permanent source of timber supply, protecting watersheds, regulating streamflow, and contributing to the economic stability of the local Communities and industries, and providing recreational facilities.”
The feds don’t have to backfill the reduction in timber fees due to decreased logging of the national forests, but they do owe us for the checkerboard of O&C lands (example map here). With the success our Congressional delegation isn’t having at extending the timber funds, why hasn’t the State of Oregon sued the feds yet (previous blog here)?
Meanwhile, here we sit… logging isn’t generating much in the way of timber fees, Congress isn’t replacing those timber fees, the majority of our county land isn’t generating property taxes, and the fuels load and thus the fire risk continues to grow. If we don’t raise our property taxes this fall to replace the lost timber funds, our Sheriff’s Office all-but-disappears. And if we’re burned out, it will be our fault for living near the forest.
[Note: for all the embedded links, please see the Rogue Pundit]
by bear bait
A terrible domestic lumber market has been only helped a little bit by the loss of strength in the dollar, which makes Canadian lumber more expensive due to exchange rates, while providing a ray of hope to US producers. So less lumber is being produced due to a paucity of demand in a crippled home loan and adjusting real estate market. Further meddling by Congress, imminent savings and loan failures, all will continue to put a lid on a fuel shocked economy. Fewer trees will be cut in the foreseeable future.
In Oregon, the issue is cutting to pay debt on large, long term land and timber deals. Weyerhaeuser has digested the Willamette Industries wood, paid for their purchase, and can now back off as debt is paid by selling their packaging division, and shuttering high cost production facilities. They have to be giddy now, having REIT tax rates without the restructuring costs. Buying yourself some key senators can do that for you. There can be no other reason for Congress to bestow a gift like that. It wasn’t a designated Nice Day in the Conference Committee on the Farm Bill; no, the dealing was backroom insider profiteering for a payoff
So the big timberland buy outs, Plum Cr taking over all the Georgia Pacific lands in Oregon, and Weyerhaeuser acquiring Willamette (which was composed of former Crown Zellerbach, Bohemia, Rex Clemens, Ralph Hull, Schneider Bros, Santiam Lumber, and Gerlinger interests lands) were two big deals that are now slowing down as debt has been paid off, and the market continues to wobble along crippled by our lagging economy.
If there was a saving grace to timber cutting in Oregon in the last year, it was the strengthening of the export market, again the result of a weak dollar and offshore tax avoidance selling to shell companies owned by US traders or affiliates. I would expect the export business to pick up even with escalating fuel costs for shippers. That at least keeps a skeleton of logging expertise working, and a base to expand from if markets improve.
There is no public will to log on public lands, even in rural counties with starving local government. This is the Entitled States of America, and evidently all you have to do is be worthy is purport to have a gender, race, ethnicity, or economic status, and the government will give you all you need to survive comfortably.
Getting paid for not logging is a dance only a few in America support. Getting paid for not fishing due to overfishing is not going to be supported by the general public. But, if you want to paid for not doing something, get it into the Farm Bill on an earmark in the dark of night, and later you can point at farmers when the stuff hits the fan.
The public consensus is not to log, and there are pandering PhDs out there riding that horse who claim that logging is the worst thing that can happen to a forest, and that all the burning, mayhem, and destruction that fires do are just good deeds cloaked in a public mis-perception of loss. Fire is good, and big fire better. Just let them burn, and the ecosystem will heal it all in a millennia or two, and things will be right with the world.
Of course, the paper assholed person telling you that does not have a home about to be oxidized into a mineral state, along with the family history and comfort. Don’t log and fire is inevitable. Don’t set fires to burn in the safer times of the year, and the very same fuels will burn just when you don’t want them to. And, of course, all that fire is but a mere drop in the bucket of air pollution on a world wide accounting.
How do I know? Dueling PhD’s told me so. Not unlike the legal state of the country, where you can judge shop the Federal court system to find a radical-minded judge, you can also mine academia for PhD’s who support your particular point of view, especially if it is Politically Correct as defined by the Far Left. The rush for federal grant and trust fund research money has made university science into a brothel where ideas can be bought and sold, and any perversion of supposed truth can be found for a price. Results-based science is where the money lands.
If you are the Nature Conservancy, out to buy land on the cheap and either lease or sell it for a profit, which will allow you to control more land, you can also direct money to simple-minded academics who will find the science that backs your economic desires. Dueling PhD’s, strutting their stuff in indignation at hearings and conferences. The only difference between them and the girls walking the streets outside the hotel is plumbing, most of the time. But they all get tarted up to express their professional proficiency, and you can easily spot them on either side of the hotel door. There are reams on safe sex, but little on safe science.