Active Forest Management Needs Improved Rural Manufacturing Options
Eldon "Tope" Knauf argues that effective forest management depends on robust rural manufacturing infrastructure—including sawmills, pulp mills, and byproduct facilities—and that the loss of these industries is leaving billions of board feet of timber without viable markets, driving up hous
Active Forest Management Needs Improved Rural Manufacturing Options I would like to point out that timberland management necessitates the conversion to a product. If I was to give you each an acre of forest -- standing on your acre are merchantable trees that are measured to be 20,000 board feet -- [and] you have a medical emergency needing $2,000. In this case, if you were offered a hundred dollars per 1,000 for your trees by a sawmill, you'd probably take it.
If that sawmill was not there, what is the value of your trees? Today's competitive world takes more than one sawmill. It takes a manufacturing group to have successful forest management. The primary function would be to produce lumber.
You would need a placement for your byproducts, chips and shavings, produced in the production of lumber. Historically, that has been a pulp mill, a particle board plant, medium-density fiberboard plant, which used your byproducts.
A current example that has just occurred in Missoula, Montana. In the area around Missoula there was once a pulp mill, a particle board plant, and sawmills. Without these facilities there is a large volume of timber that now has potentially a negative value, becoming a liability. Both private, tribal, and public timber -- which could be worth billions of dollars located north of Missoula to the Canadian border west to Bonners Ferry, Idaho -- [but] there is no ability to convert to products of the timber in that area.
Another thing, due to closure of sawmills over the past approximately two years, three to four billion board feet of lumber production has been eliminated. This will increase the cost of homes and prevent the usual use of catastrophic impacts. We can't use the fires that takes place on the forest and ultimately reduces the value of standing timber.
As a nation we have lost jobs, skills, and communities who were involved in forest management through their efforts. We no longer manage our forest land. Our only tool available is fire, which we, as human beings, have little or no control of.
