Coming soon to a forest near you

It’s been tough for loggers in the West as the Forest Service steadily reduces timber
harvests on public lands. Now it will get even tougher as the timber industry turns
against its own.

by Mark Matthews- Writers on the Range

Plum Creek Timber Co. recently announced plans to sell 20,000 acres of its holdings
in the Swan Valley, about 50 miles northeast of Missoula. Why? For immediate
profit for their shareholders.

Since Plum Creek owns a total of 7.9 million acres in 19 states, loggers and
residents in other states should get ready for the same disrupting sales. It is the
second largest private landowner in the country, behind International Paper Co.

So much for the philosophy of "sustainable forestry" that Plum Creek has touted in
advertisements and commercials the last few years. So much for environmental
stewardship they claimed to be practicing, and so much for their boast of allowing
the public continued access to recreation through their holdings.

What’s more, the company is thumbing its nose at local loggers. In journalism, it’s
as if the owners of a local paper told its reporters that only foreign news will run from
now on, so that if reporters want a job, they’d better learn a new language and move
overseas.

Timber companies seem to have learned the same lesson that the Forest Service
should have learned decades ago: There’s no profit in growing trees. Or at least not
as quick a profit as shareholders demand. Ironically, the land Plum Creek is selling
off is land that the U.S. Congress freely bestowed upon railroad companies in the
1800s as incentives to build the continental railway system.

Implications of the land sales are numerous. Without doubt, there will be fewer jobs
for loggers in the future. Even though most of the acres were recently logged, the
premise of sustainable logging is that trees grow back. If managed correctly, a batch
of mature trees is ready to harvest at any time in a forest.

But though new trees on the land Plum Creek is selling will spring up, they will
emerge on land owned by a mishmash of private landowners. Owners almost
certainly will never be able to coordinate harvests of their timber. They may not want
to cut any trees at all.

The sales also complicate management for wildlife, especially the endangered
grizzly bear. Plum Creek says it will offer to sell the Forest Service 10,000 acres of
land within wildlife "linkage zones" in the Swan Valley. But those zones will be
punctured once people begin moving deeper into that mountainous region. Bears will
be attracted to garbage, gardens and bird feeders. The new residents will complain.

You know the drill: State wardens will trap the trespassing bears at first, then
inevitably they will shoot them. Speeding cars on the dirt roads and long driveways
will most likely collide with and kill some bears, as well as other wild animals. As
time passes, grizzlies will disappear from the landscape.

Local hunters, hikers, snowmobilers, skiers and others can also kiss their paradise
good-bye. Soon the trees marking the borders of private property will be marked with
orange slashes. (Hardware stores may as well order a big supply of "No
Trespassing" signs today.) Visitors will come upon locked gates, finding it more and
more difficult to access public lands that lie beyond the private holdings.

And always, there is wildfire. Homes scattered across mountainsides will create a
logistical nightmare for fire-fighting agencies. More lives will be put on the line to
protect homes that never should have been built in the first place because of the
inevitability of fire.

Of course, local government could address that issue by passing stringent building
codes before the sales even go through. But I forgot: This is Montana, home of the
private property-rights movement.

Company spokesman Jerry Sorensen says that Plum Creek hopes to get as much
as $5,000-to-$10,000 an acre even if the land is sold in160-acre parcels. With big
money to be made, there could be more sales in the area to come: Plum Creek
owns a total of 83,000 acres of timberland in the Swan Valley.

There is one small, bitter upside. Critics of the environmental movement in the West
might now understand why conservationists work so hard to get the government to
preserve public lands. Private lands, we’re learning, can turn exclusionary at the drop
of a dollar.

Mark Matthews is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a writer in Missoula,
Montana.

http://www.hcn.org/wotr/dir/WOTR_020305_Matthews.html