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Protecting and restoring our Olympic forest
and aquatic ecosystems
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Housing Market Crashes—Good or Bad News for Our Forests?
by Bonnie Phillips
December 2007
The housing market crash is now old news; the more interesting question for OFCO is what this will do to logging on our national and state forests. Already there are timber sales that are not getting bids. An article in this newsletter discusses how the OFCO collaborative project on the Dungeness brought in only $11,000 where the earlier prediction was for $60,000. If this sale were offered today, it would likely have no bidders.
On the Olympic Experimental State Forest, timber sales attract few bids. This affects trust beneficiaries on state land and could start to look like recession in some timber communities. Beyond that, the threat of recession looms throughout the nation.
OFCO has concerns for local timber-dependent communities like Forks. Although we would like to see less logging, we also recognize that the industry’s characteristic boom and bust cycle is very hard on communities. But the markets are out of our control. The blame often heaped on environmentalists for job losses in the timber industry is typically greatly exaggerated; this time, any such claim would make no sense at all. A great deal of new information on the housing market crash is coming to the forefront.
I’ve been thinking hard about what the market tumble means to OFCO’s work. We want a lower timber sale volume and at the same time we want more environmentally sensitive sales to go forward. From a purely environmental perspective, less logging is good. But that doesn’t tell the full story.
OFCO as well as environmentalists across the country have been working on, and sometimes supporting, less environmentally destructive timber sales. Simplistically, this means sales that thin younger forests (under 50 years of age) and have no new roads. When prices were high, these sales got decent bids. And often the receipts went into decommissioning roads.
Collaborative groups throughout the national forest system have worked with the Forest Service to design decent timber sales, with receipts going to fix road problems and restore watersheds. But the market collapse may be a death knell for such efforts.
Since agencies see a need to sell timber even in this bear market, they’re likely to push for more extensive and “easy to log” sales. Thus, a very positive but fragile trend could soon collapse. This collaborative work is incredibly time consuming; unless the “good” sales succeed, what’s the point?
This is one of many thorny questions occupying OFCO’s board as we consider how best to deploy our limited time and resources. Please give us your ideas.
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