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In Alaska, Help for Logging Comes Late

This town of 7,500 people, clinging to tide-swept black rocks near the bottom of the southeastern archipelago of this state, still sees its future in its past. Jilted by the timber industry that was a central part of the economy for 40 years, many people in this town and other former timber centers in the region believe that the bays will be paved with logs again, and that the 2,000 missing jobs will return.

By FELICITY BARRINGER

The Bush administration recently stoked their hopes, and infuriated environmentalists, by opening 330,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest, old-growth rain forest and marshland the size of West Virginia, to logging roads.

In a classic struggle between jobs and the environment, the government has tilted the balance in favor of jobs, citing as a reason for its decision "the severe effect on the social and economic fabric of life in southeast Alaska from the decline in the timber industry."

But few of those involved, certainly not federal or state officials, bother to say that the traditional debate is now almost beside the point. Global timber markets have undergone fundamental shifts. There is a worldwide timber glut. Logging costs in this region are historically much higher than in other parts of the world, making profits elusive at best.

Economists and others who study the Northwest timber industry say they doubt that companies returning to the Tongass’s stands of old-growth hemlock, cedar and spruce trees will find buyers willing to pay enough to keep local loggers in business.

Gov. Frank H. Murkowski, a Republican, told reporters in December that the rule change, announced that month, was "a vital step in our plan to rebuild the southeast timber industry."

But Brian Zak, president of the Coast Forest and Lumber Association, an industry group in neighboring British Columbia, offered a more stark assessment in a recent interview, saying, "Any time you lose market share, it’s nigh impossible to get it back."

Scott Fitzwilliams, a federal Forest Service employee who spent the last three years in Sitka, northwest of Ketchikan, said that the debate over logging in the Tongass always had more to do with emotion than economic reality. For opponents of logging, the Tongass has a strong emotional pull as a remnant of the primeval immensity of the North American wilderness.

"I really believe it gets down to the real or created vision of the last of the last great places," Mr. Fitzwilliams said of the debate. "The thought of punching a road in there or taking a chain saw to it gets to people."

The wildness is still palpable in Ketchikan, which is shouldered onto a riverbank so close to cliffs that one lane of the main highway goes through the cliff itself. It is as common to see a bald eagle flying low above the streets here as it is to see a sea gull in Greenwich Village.

The industry’s growth here was a product of the national imperatives of the 1950’s, said Stephen Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. In cold war terms, Alaska was close to the enemy. It was considered strategically prudent to increase the population.

But what were the new residents going to do? Well, there were a lot of trees. So Washington encouraged the start-up of three pulp mills by giving them 50-year contracts. By 1973, the Forest Service reported, timber harvests had increased ninefold, to an average of about 350 million board feet a year.

Then the environmental movement focused on the Tongass. Legislation to extend the contracts for 15 years failed in Congress in the face of sharp opposition from environmental groups, and in 1993 and 1997, the last two pulp mills closed.

Without the mills, profitable harvesting was difficult. The mills made pulp from hemlock trees, which are abundant in the Tongass but are smaller and less valuable than other species when sold as logs. With the closing of the mills and the rise of tree farming around the world, the old economics no longer worked.

Not all environmentalists favor ending logging. Wayne Weihing, a former sawmill worker who is now an environmental advocate in Ketchikan, sees no problem with the current level of logging in the Tongass, which at 50 million board feet annually or less is barely enough to support one medium-size sawmill.

"We have to reinvent the industry," Mr. Weihing said. "We’re logging and building roads in places where we don’t need it. These places are much more valuable as recreation areas."

In the mid-1990’s, logging and wood products made up 12 percent of the employment base in Ketchikan, a 1999 study by the Alaska labor department found. The closing of the mills, with 500 jobs, cut that share in half. Cruise ships are now a core industry, and the city government is the largest employer.

Three moderate-sized family-owned sawmills remain in the Tongass: Pacific Log and Lumber in Ketchikan, Silver Bay Logging in Wrangell and Viking Lumber in Craig. The Forest Service, besides giving them and their smaller competitors access to timber that had been off-limits, recently announced it would allow logging companies to cancel money-losing contracts for timber and would offer those rights at lower prices.

Richard Buhler, president of Silver Bay, is taking up the Forest Service on its offer and turning back thousands of partly harvested acres, including the Upper Carroll area, on the mountainsides that rise from a glittering inlet east of Ketchikan. He has logged part of the tract but says he cannot cut the remaining trees profitably at the price he bid more than seven years ago.

"I believe that it’s got a future," Mr. Buhler said of the Alaska timber industry. "One of our big strong points is that the tree farms can’t compete with the quality of our wood."

But Alaska is not alone in its economic doldrums. Along coastal British Columbia, timber sales have bumped generally downward for about 15 years.

Niche markets endure: Alaskan yellow cedar is still used for Japanese tatami rooms and Sitka spruce for sounding boards in high-end guitars.

As Peter Butzelaar, a consultant with a Vancouver firm, R.E. Taylor & Associates, said: "That resource does have market potential. The market does value Alaska’s resource.

"But can it get to market competitively today?" Mr. Butzelaar asked. "Conditions say no."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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