Alaskan logging may lack market

By Felicity Barringer
The New York Times

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The Bush administration recently stoked their hopes, and infuriated environmentalists, by opening 330,000 acres of Tongass National Forest, old-growth rain forest and marshland the size of West Virginia, to logging roads.

But few, certainly not federal or state officials, bother to say the traditional debate between jobs and the environment is almost beside the point. Global timber markets have undergone fundamental shifts, producing a glut. Logging costs in southeast Alaska historically are much higher than in other countries, making profits elusive at best.

Economists and others who study the Northwest timber industry say they doubt that companies returning to the Tongass' stands of old-growth hemlock, cedar and spruce will find buyers willing to pay enough to keep local loggers in business.

Gov. Frank Murkowski, a Republican, said in December that the rule change, announced that month, was "a vital step in our plan to rebuild the southeast timber industry."

But Brian Zak, president of the Coast Forest and Lumber Association, an industry group in British Columbia, offered a starker assessment. "Anytime you lose market share," he said, "it's nigh impossible to get it back."

Scott Fitzwilliams, a federal Forest Service employee who spent the past three years in Sitka, northwest of Ketchikan, said the debate over logging in Tongass always had more to do with emotion than with economic reality. For opponents of logging, the Tongass has a strong emotional pull as a remnant of the primeval immensity of the North American wilderness.

"I really believe it gets down to the real or created vision of the last of the last great places," Fitzwilliams said. "The thought of punching a road in there or taking a chain saw to it gets to people."

Not all environmentalists favor ending logging. Wayne Weihing, a former sawmill worker who is now an environmental advocate in Ketchikan, sees no problem with current logging in Tongass, which at 50 million board feet annually or less is barely enough to support one medium-size sawmill.

"We have to reinvent the industry," Weihing said. "We're logging and building roads in places where we don't need it. These places are much more valuable as recreation areas."

In the mid-1990s, logging and wood products made up 12 percent of the employment base in Ketchikan, a 1999 study by the Alaska labor department found. The closing of the mills, with 500 jobs, cut that share in half. Cruise ships now are a core industry, and the city is the largest employer.
 
Three moderate-sized, family-owned sawmills remain in Tongass: Pacific Log and Lumber in Ketchikan, Silver Bay Logging in Wrangell and Viking Lumber in Craig. The Forest Service, besides giving them and smaller competitors access to timber that had been off-limits, recently announced that it would allow logging companies to cancel money-losing contracts and would offer those rights at reduced prices.

Richard Buhler, president of Silver Bay, is turning back thousands of partly harvested acres east of Ketchikan, saying he cannot cut the remaining trees profitably at the price he bid more than seven years ago.

"I believe that it's got a future," Buhler said of the Alaska timber industry. "One of our big strong points is that the tree farms can't compete with the quality of our wood."

As Peter Butzelaar, a consultant with R.E. Taylor & Associates in Vancouver, B.C., said: "That resource does have market potential. The market does value Alaska's resource. But can it get to market competitively today? Conditions say no."

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