1st Mondays, 6:00-7:30pm at Cozmic Pizza (199 W. 8th Ave.) in Eugene, OR

Part 4 is Monday, May 7

See the Events page on this site for more details, and visit the official series website: conversationsontheforest.org where you can find audio and handouts from Parts 1-3.

Watch Part 3: Forest Ecology on Community Television of Lane County Channel 29 on Mondays at 3:30 pm  and 10 pm for the next 2+ weeks. 

Many thanks to videographer Chris Kelsay and Ch. 29 for making these conversations accessible to more Lane County community members. And thanks to Cozmic Pizza! 

See our new Page – Exports Exposed – for more !

By Roy Keene

Politicians, industrialists and environmentalists seeking to bolster timber revenues and jobs by increasing logging are ignoring the elephant in the room: log exports.

Without downsizing log exports, we won’t solve our timber problems. Why? Because it’s not just about how much timber is logged. It’s where this timber goes, who works on it, and how it’s taxed that has the real effect on our economy.

In a Register-Guard guest viewpoint on Oct. 11, Lane County Commissioner Peter Sorenson said, “History has taught us that we can’t cut our way to prosperity.” Indeed, in 2010 a substantial boost in timber cutting failed to increase local jobs or revenues.

According to U.S. Forest Service and state of Oregon data, Lane County’s timber harvest levels increased 35 percent from 2009 to 2010, yet revenues and employment dropped during this period. At the statewide level, timber harvesting rose 17 percent, while jobs and revenues also decreased.

Claims that more logging creates more prosperity are even more dubious when log exports are tallied.

In the third quarter of 2011, U.S. Forest Service data show that 560 million board feet of raw logs were exported from the Northwest, an increase of 27 percent from 2010. Half of the volume came from Oregon. That implies that a third of Oregon’s annual harvest is being exported as logs instead of finished lumber.

In the third quarter of last year, 255 million board feet of finished lumber was exported from the Northwest. Only 7 percent of it came from Oregon; Washington exported fewer logs and shipped 10 times more finished lumber than Oregon. Northern California exported far fewer logs and three times the lumber.

Is Oregon being manipulated like a Third World country?

Other industrial countries protect their forests, people and economies by charging tariffs on raw log exports. Russia recently reduced log export tariffs from 80 percent to 15 percent in order to join the World Trade Organization. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, extolling the virtues of maintaining his country’s tariff, said that, “In seven years, all of the timber they harvested would be processed in Russia.”

In Oregon, export logs are selling for 30 percent or more above domestic prices. Suppose a tariff split the difference, and added 15 percent to export log prices. Export log values average about $650 per 1,000 board feet, so a 15 percent tariff would come to $97.50 per 1,000 board feet. Multiplying Oregon’s projected 2011 log export volume by a tariff at that level would generate nearly a $100 million a year. Tariff receipts could be directed to the counties in which export logs are harvested to bolster revenues.

Lane County produces the largest annual timber harvest in Oregon, loading more than 100,000 log trucks in 2010. How much of this timber is exported? How many local jobs are lost to the huge volume of logs being shipped abroad? How much revenue would a modest export tariff provide? How much damage do forest resources suffer from clear-cutting the timber that fills the boats?

To see how our streams and fisheries are affected by massive log exports, use Google’s satellite images to soar above locked logging roads and over the corporate forests in the McKenzie, Row, Siuslaw, Long Tom and other crucial watersheds. Scan the Mohawk’s eastern tributaries into Weyerhaeuser’s huge tree farm to connect visually the company’s heavy clear-cutting with recent erosion and flooding downstream.

At President Bill Clinton’s Forest Summit in 1993, the state historian questioned nonsustainable timber harvesting and log exports that costing timber workers more jobs without protecting spotted owls. He was dismissed rudely instead of answered.

Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan divided up the remaining federal old growth while ignoring the corporate half of Oregon’s forests. Clinton also ignored the science of his plan, which emphasized that, “Non-federal lands must be an integral part of any forest strategy.”

Dividing federal forests between those to be logged and those to be preserved hasn’t resolved today’s forest resource shortages. Considering the escalating log exports from already overcut corporate forests, federal forest fixes won’t resolve it in the future.

Surely county and state leaders can find other remedies for so-called timber shortages besides giving away more public land. Why hasn’t Oregon’s delegation even discussed protecting our forest resources and industries by taxing forest liquidation and restricting log exports?

Citizens of Oregon’s timber counties — especially in Lane, the state and the nation’s timber epicenter — deserve less biased forest fixes and better representation.

Roy Keene of Eugene has worked for 40 years as a timber cruiser and broker. He is a founding member of an informal forest research group, Public Interest Forestry.

(This article appeared in the February 13, 2012, edition of The Register-Guard with the less apt title, "Log exports, not harvests, key to timber future.")

Rests with corporate owners, not the BLM
By Roy Keene

In his retort to Oregon Wild’s confused comment on the Bureau of Land Management’s forest management, Lane County Commissioner Faye Stewart reminds the group that BLM forests are under a unique management mandate, the 1937 O&C Act.

Directing BLM forests to be sustainably managed, the act also says to sell “so much (timber) thereof as can be sold at reasonable prices in a normal market.” In seeking to increase BLM timber sales in today’s dismal domestic log market, some commissioners also misunderstand the act’s directives.

To bolster local timber supplies and jobs, commissioners should be working to reduce rampant log exports. They should also be working to reduce unearned tax exemptions on corporate forest lands and timber harvesting in order to increase revenues to counties.

Regional log export volumes tripled in the last two years. At 570 million board feet, 2011’s second quarter exports were threefold BLM’s entire 2010 timber harvest! The same large multinational corporations rapidly exporting their forests pay no harvest tax and little or no property tax on land and residual timber.

Though this is a double whammy for counties, commissioners have yet to even comment on these huge forest resource and tax losses. Why don’t they discuss invoking the Export Administration Act? Why don’t they review the huge unearned tax exemptions on corporate forests and timber harvesting? Might some commissioners also have financial interests in maintaining a failing forest status quo?

In seeking to ecologically and economically improve forest management in Oregon, the real problem should be identified. It’s not the sustainably managed BLM forest, it’s the over-logged other half of the checkerboard — the equally vast industrial forest. Three quarters of the logging in Western Oregon occurs in these forests. It’s only fair that they should share responsibility for sustaining forest ecosystems, providing local timber, and paying equitable taxes.

Some will defend the wealthy owners, saying, “The public has no right to exert control over their property.” But common private property owners are, indeed, subject to public control. Zoning, building regulations, and even condemnation exist for the greater good.

Some will remind us of the “protective” Forest Practices Act. Oregon’s archaic FPA has yet to stop the liquidation of watersheds, massive forest poisoning, or the damage to publicly owned water, wildlife and fisheries entwined within the corporate forest. In reality, the FPA protects logging, not Oregon’s forest or people. As long as its toothless rules are given a nod, nonsustainable, destructive and even dangerous logging practices continue with legal impunity.

In 1977, Oregon’s forest owners were exempted from annual property taxes on the value of their standing timber. Instead, forest owners would pay a “privilege” tax at harvest. This exemption was to “Encourage (sustainable) forestry and the restocking of forestlands, enhance the water supply, prevent erosion, provide habitat for wildlife, provide scenic and recreational opportunities, and provide for needed products.”

Yet over the ensuing decades, many of Oregon’s richest watersheds were clear-cut by big timber corporations and left as unstocked, slash-filled eyesores. Hillsides eroded, streams were muddied, salmon runs declined and log exports boomed. Domestic mills, unable to compete for “needed products,” laid off workers.

Ironically, the next big timber tax break was shamelessly given to forest owners of over 5,000 acres. Passing House Bill 3575 in 1999, the Legislature relieved these owners of paying the “privilege” harvest taxes. The Oregonian newspaper reported the first-year reductions to have cost education $58 million. By 2004, the “privilege” harvest tax fell to zero, and the final financial impact to education went undeclared.

Oregon’s 1995 Budget Accountability Act says tax exemptions (expenditures) “provide special benefits to favored individuals and thus result in higher tax rates for all.” The act calls for “a review of the fairness and efficiency of all tax exemptions” and directs “the public and policy makers to make criteria based decisions on whether exemptions should be continued.”

The 2009-11 Tax Expenditure Report shows the exemption for privately owned standing timber in Western Oregon to be $313.3 million, with a “shift” of $63.4 million. This is the burden shifted to other taxpayers to make up for revenue losses. In 2011-13, this exemption rises to $394.9 million and the shift jumps to $79.9 million! Big timber owners will pay less tax in 2013, you and I will pay more.

Where is the “fairness and efficiency” of continuing tax exemptions to an out-of-state corporation like Weyerhaeuser, which is clear-cutting and exporting forestland in the McKenzie watershed while reporting revenues at $6 billion in 2010?

Why should the sustainably managed BLM portion of the checkerboard forest be logged harder to “fix” its perceived ecological and economic problems? Instead of confining “fixes” to public lands, why not fix what’s really broken? County commissioners should seek to constrain corporate forest owners to log sustainably, keep more logs at home and pay fair taxes.

Roy Keene of Eugene has worked as a forest consultant and timber broker in Oregon’s private forests for 35 years.

(This article appeared in the October 11, 2011 edition of The Register-Guard.)

More rarity than reality
By Roy Keene

Beginning with Bush’s 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act, there have been a number of politically powered, scientifically justified proposals to log more federal forests. These efforts to increase logging assert that our forests are unhealthy and, therefore, in need of “restoration.“

Cutting and burning a crowded understory releases a larch stand without logging

Sen. Wyden’s Eastside Forest Restoration and Jobs Act, proposing to triple logging in three million acres of already over-logged forests, brought in a new twist: Environmental organizations are working with the timber industry to promote this latest round of logging.

Jack Ward Thomas, ex-chief the Forest Service and a forger of the Northwest Forest Plan, publicly challenged this collaborative logging proposal. In an Oregonian op-ed, he questioned special interest groups dictating national forest policy, undercutting existing forest management laws, and expediting logging by reducing appeals and public participation.

Politically and scientifically driven logging to “restore“ our forests precedes the Bush and Wyden efforts by 40 years. In the early 1970s, massive clear-cut logging, called “regeneration harvesting,“ was sold as a way to bring decadent ancient forests back to health. Liquidating these “overly mature” forests was supposed to create more wildlife habitat, increase water flows and salmon runs, foster more diversity, and help prevent fire. It’s done just the opposite.

A Forest Service silviculturalist I worked with during that period jeopardized his career by calling “regeneration harvesting“ what it really was … deforestry. Wikipedia says using buzzwords is “stating goals with opaque words of unclear meaning; their positive connotations prevent questioning of intent.” In a Register-Guard opinion, Tom Partin of the American Forest Resource Council cloaked this latest logging scam in buzzwords without ever saying the “L“ word.

Fear of wildfire is heavily used to sell these forest “restoration” schemes. Logging has not been proven, in practice, to reduce fire frequency or intensity. Historically, the largest, most destructive blazes, like the Tillamook conflagration, were caused from logging or fueled by slash. Unlogged forests, cool and shaded, are typically more fire resistant than cut over, dried-up stands choked with slash and weeds.

Large-scale logging (by any name) has devalued our forests, degraded our waters, damaged soils, and endangered a wide variety of plants and animals. How will the current round of politically and environmentally propelled “restorative” logging proposals differ, in practice, from past logging regimes?

It’s a bad time for environmentalists to promote more logging even if it were truly “restorative.” In this historically low market, federal timber is sold very cheaply. Timber purchasers already sit on huge logging contracts in order to make windfall profits when markets rise. Selling more timber in a low market further devalues our forest and encourages industry to clamor for more.

Practicing forestry for 35 years, I’ve worked with federal and private foresters, tribal elders, citizen groups, and even industry to design many successful forest restoration projects that don’t involve logging. Fact is, when site and soil impacts are considered, “restorative logging” in federal forests is a rarity … more of an oxymoron than a reality.

Roy Keene is a local real estate broker and private timberland restoration specialist.

(This article appeared in the March 3 2011 issue of the Eugene Weekly)