Carving out a niche

Bob Love doesn’t advertise.

He doesn’t market his outfit, doesn’t have a sales pitch.

Yet, in a world where loggers’ saws sit cold in pools of oil, where the timber industry continues to decline by whatever yardstick you use, the Columbia Falls-based forester has more work than he knows what to do with.

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

http://missoulian.com/articles/2004/01/12/news/top/news01.txt

"I can’t keep up," he said. "That might sound strange what with all the mill shutdowns and so on, but I can’t keep up with demand."

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About this series

Reading today’s headlines, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Montana’s traditional timber industry is struggling, mired in combat with global markets and local environmentalists. But those who are still thriving in the industry say timber has a future in Montana, and that its future is grounded in creativity and collaboration. The key to that future lies in regaining the trust that has been lost in public land foresters. In a series of six stories over three days, the Missoulian looks at some of the people who are working to re-establish that trust, people who are providing some solutions, albeit partial solutions, for securing a sustainable future for Montana’s wood products industry.

Series schedule

Sunday: With production, jobs and salaries down, new approaches are needed for Montana’s timber industry.

Today: Selective logging has presented new opportunities for timber workers.

Tuesday: Seeing beyond the traditional two-by-four approach has allowed some mills to prosper.

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Love is a very selective logger, working acre by acre on mostly private land. A few years back, he showcased his craft on a public forest, participating in an experimental stewardship sale with the Forest Service (see story in Sunday’s Missoulian).

The result, he said, is easy on the eye, a technique he honed by working in people’s back yards.

"When people look at a forest and can’t really tell it’s been logged," he said, "they’re happy. It looks natural, and it just sells itself. That’s what the Forest Service doesn’t understand."

As more and more trees are cut in the urban interface – especially as part of fire-proofing communities – Love predicts the Forest Service will be increasingly pressed to do something new: good forestry that looks good.

Tom Horelick agrees.

"Logging by itself isn’t bad or good," said Horelick. "But bad logging is obviously bad, and good logging is invisible.

Horelick is a longtime Libby-area logger and, like Love, overwhelmed with work and tired of the seemingly endless appeals and bickering over timber sales.

Ever since the public lost trust in federal Forest Service bosses amid years of demonstrable logging excesses, Horelick said, the agency has been grasping to regain some of its former credibility.

The problem, he says, is that for years the federal cart’s been out in front of the horse.

"We’ve got the forestry following the trees," Horelick said. "We don’t say, ‘Let’s go do some good forestry.’ We say, ‘Let’s go get some trees.’ You need to do the forestry first, and then figure out how the logs fit in, not the other way around."

Forestry is about forests, he said. Logging is about logs.

"If you want logs, we know how to cut them," agreed Love. "But I think most people want to see healthy forests."

And no one seems to disagree with that.

"We advocate forestry and silviculture and watershed management," said Ellen Engstedt. "And those aren’t just buzzwords to us. We believe in those approaches."

Engstedt, executive vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association, says most of the group’s members are committed to healthy forests.

According to Love, that means loggers need to learn to "mimic natural processes and take care of the soil."

Love is big on soil.

"Everybody’s worried about the wrong end of the food chain," he said.

People point to a deer in a clearcut as proof of a healthy forest system, he said. But deer are generalists and can thrive just about anywhere.

If you really want proof of a healthy system, Love advises taking a look at the dirt underneath your feet. Forget the deer, he said, and focus on the nematodes.

"Because," he said, "if you don’t have those, you’re going to compromise everything else."

The big machines used by the big timber companies, he said, are compacting the dirt, "and the soil is getting hammered like it’s never been hammered before. I can go in and clean up a mess, but I can’t remediate the damage that might have been done to the soil by all that big equipment."

And in that soil, he said, are the roots of the food chain.

Love says his style of logging means taking cues from nature. It means clearcutting lodgepole sometimes, because that’s essentially what Mother Nature does with fire. But, instead of a big square on the side of a mountain, he advocates "more randomness, diversity, a mosaic."

Lately, he’s been working a patch of Douglas fir for a private landowner. A few years ago, he thought he’d leave the stand pretty thick. Now, after four years of drought, he can see the stress in the trees, and he’s shifting even as conditions shift.

Following nature’s lead, he’ll space it out a bit more to accommodate for the drought. He’ll leave more downed and woody debris to hold what moisture there is, and, he says, he’ll pick equipment that is appropriate for the landscape.

Sometimes, he said, it makes sense to use big machines. Other times, it makes sense to use smaller tools. Sometimes helicopters, sometimes horses.

"The technology isn’t as important as the brain that’s pulling the lever," he said. "Ideally, you log when there’s an ecological reason, not just when there’s a resource to be cut."

Like others looking ahead to the timber industry’s future in Montana, Love believes the first step to a sustainable timber business is to admit you’re not going to please everyone. The second step is to do the job right.

"Loggers need to do a good job on the ground," he said, "and prove to the public they can do it right. Then when the public begins to trust in that, the radical fringe is marginalized."

Patrick Heffernan agrees, and says only by re-establishing public trust in public land managers will the industry find a way out of its current logjam. Heffernan, a former logger and former staff forester for the Montana Logging Association, now works to create collaboration between loggers and environmentalists.

Heffernan blames decades of mismanagement on public lands for the current problems. Looking for efficiencies, he said, public land managers were too quick to turn to cheap and easy logging – clearcuts, for instance – when other methods of forestry were more appropriate.

Now, he said, the agencies are faced with the hurdle of proving they can do it right, despite criticism from an ever-more skeptical public.

"It’s true that foresters have to do a better job of mimicking nature," Heffernan said, "but we also have to recognize that sometimes nature does things that look a whole lot like traditional industrial logging. You might have an area of 110-year-old lodgepole pine with a beetle infestation, and you might have to clearcut it all, just like a wildfire will do."

Today’s loggers can become better foresters by way of accredited logger programs, he said, but it’s equally important for landowners to become better stewards by learning about their lands and the needs of those lands. At some point of critical mass, it becomes a self-sustaining circle: landowners informed through classes such as the Montana Forest Stewardship Program demand loggers who are accredited in doing the job right, with an emphasis on forestry instead of logging.

Yes, Heffernan said, the agencies such as the Forest Service need to practice good forestry to regain trust, but at the same time the public needs to trust that sometimes good forestry might look a bit like industrial logging, because nature can look a bit like a clearcut.

The trick, he said, is to ground every decision in sound forestry, which puts the forest before the log.

"But no one’s going to trust the agency," warned Horelick, "if it’s acting like a logger and not a forester. What we need are creative bureaucrats, and there aren’t many of those around."

Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at [email protected]