The U.S. Forest Service Transition strategy is based on faulty assumptions and the USFS professionals know it.
The Forest Service’s recent decision to transition too quickly to young growth harvesting some 30-years ahead of schedule is predicated on some faulty assumptions. The agency asserts that, under the young growth transition scheme, the agency will achieve much better plan implementation than the 20 percent success rate they have achieved since 2008, but the agency has proposed no changes in the harvesting guidelines and constraints that caused that lousy implementation performance. Agency professionals admitted this transition plan would not work as recently as last summer in a field trip attended by Congressional staff and municipal officials.
Further, the agency’s EIS analysis uses young growth timber values that appear to be based solely on log exports to China and estimated harvesting costs for both old-growth and young-growth timber appear to be based almost entirely on mechanical harvesting. The ground conditions have not changed and the industry is still often compelled to use helicopter and cable logging systems which costs more than double mechanical harvesting costs. There are several other errors in the EIS and no question that manufacturing the young-growth trees decades before maturity will not be financially feasible. Even the trees in the oldest young-growth stands are much too small to make the higher value products that allow our sawmills in Southeast Alaska to compete in lumber markets that are at least 800 miles away. Additionally, these same young-growth stands currently have less than half the volume they will have at maturity. Consequently, the sawmills will have to harvest twice as many acres to get the same volume and consequently endure double the cost of delivering timber to the mills.
It doesn’t take much foresight to figure out that if young-growth trees are cut and shipped to China 30-years ahead of maturity, there will never be mature young-growth timber in the region. The actual date at which sawmills can transition to young-growth will be delayed by however many years this premature transition is allowed to proceed.
The transition plan was the brain child of the anti-timber harvest Wilderness Society and the current Secretary of Agriculture who claims to care about rural America everywhere but in Alaska. Forest Service professionals have been muzzled as part of this process. Let’s hope a more rational plan can be restored very quickly by the new administration.
• Owen Graham is the executive director of the Alaska Forest Association in Ketchikan.
