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Foreshadows from history? The rise and fall of timber

By Drew DeSilver
Seattle Times business reporter

	STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Near Penticton, B.C., a logging truck carrying pine logs zooms down Highway 3 on its way to the sawmill. Competition from Canadian lumber mills hammered Washington's industry in the 1980s.
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A premature eulogy for Washington's aerospace industry? Nope — a description of the wood-products sector, which literally built Western Washington but is now something of an economic footnote.

"Who talks about wood products anymore as a factor in the state economy?" asked Paul Sommers, an economist and senior research fellow at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs.

The decline of the wood-products industry — as a source of jobs since the late 1970s, as a major part of the economy since the end of World War II — reminds us that Washington's economy has gone through wrenching structural change before.

Washington's lumber industry began almost as soon as the first white settlers arrived on the shores of Puget Sound. First supplying lumber to the Gold Rush boomtown of San Francisco, by 1902 the state was the nation's leading producer, and Washington lumber was exported throughout the Pacific Rim.

By 1939, wrote historian Robert Ficken in "The Forested Land," millworkers and loggers were 42 percent of the work force.

But the industrial boom that began during the Second World War transformed Washington and pushed forest products from center stage. Cheap hydropower from Columbia River dams begat aluminum smelters and airplane manufacturing. Puget Sound became a shipbuilding center. The plutonium-processing plant at Hanford brought major industry to Eastern Washington.

Sawmills and pulp-and-paper plants stayed busy during the war, and benefited from the postwar housing boom. But the action was clearly elsewhere: While lumbering employment fell 8 percent between 1947 and 1953, primary-metals employment rose 31 percent, chemicals 40 percent, and aircraft manufacturing an astounding 154 percent.

Figures from the state Employment Security Department show that the forest-products work force was fairly stable throughout the 1950s, '60s and most of the '70s, at 60,000 to 70,000 workers. But with the work force as a whole almost doubling in that time, wood products faded from public consciousness.

"So many people moved in during and after the war who had no connection to the timber industry," Ficken said. "Or people would move from the rural areas to the cities to take jobs in the new industries, and their kids didn't have a connection to timber."

The industry had always been cyclical, but in the 1980s, wood-products jobs began disappearing for good. Recession and a consequent slowdown in housing construction, along with strong competition from lumber mills in the Southeast and Canada, hammered the industry.

In the 1990s, timber cutting in federal forests was sharply reduced to protect the endangered spotted owl; the timber harvest in Washington and Oregon fell by half from 1988 to 1996.

As of July, just 24,200 Washingtonians worked in logging or manufacturing wood products, less than 1 percent of all jobs in the state.

The lumber, paper and wood-products industries together account for about 3 percent of all gross nonfarm business income in Washington, according to the state Revenue Department; aerospace, by contrast, accounts for 7.5 percent of that income.

Government and business leaders have warned that if Boeing's 7E7 goes elsewhere, it could mean the beginning of a long, slow decline for the state's aerospace industry. Even if that's true, the history of the lumber and wood-products industry shows that it would be nothing new for Washington.

"The lumber economy was part of the global economy too, and at least in part because of changes in that global economy, it ended up moving somewhere else," Ficken said. "And that may be what we're seeing now with Boeing."

Drew DeSilver: 206-464-3145 or ddesilver@seattletimes.com..

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