The Oregon Story; Rethinking the Forests

[Beep] [Beeping] Funding for production of the Oregon story was made possible through a generous grant from the United States Department of Agriculture rural development. Forest cover nearly half the land in Oregon. Just one reason they matter so much to the people here. Forests turn sunlight into oxygen and clean the air we breathe. They collect and dispense the water we drink.

They sustain countless species of animals and fish, insects and plants. People work here. And people recreate here, together pumping billions of dollars into the state's economy. But Oregon's forests are in trouble. [Transition music] Oregon has the worst problem of forest health of any state in the union, period. 33 to 36 percent of the wood consumed in the United States is imported. How come we're importing so much wood, when we got so much of it that's dying? We've got people that need work. We're on a terrible path. I mean, you need a viable timber industry to improve the health of the forests. Someone's got to go in and do that work. The one time, there were seven sawmills here. When I came, there were three sawmills here. Now there's one sawmill here.

Not only do we have high unemployment, we have this mass exodus of a skilled workforce. And they take their children with them. Most of Oregon's forest land, about 60 percent of it, belongs to the public. All of us. But we disagree about how to use it and how to manage it. We share no vision of what we expect it to look like, or even what a healthy forest is. There's so many people that don't understand how trees grow, that have a say on how to manage the forest. That's like me trying to tell somebody how to do heart surgery. I don't know how. We label each other, and we vilify each other. We battle it out in the halls of Congress. Our world mills continue to close. Our forests continue to burn. More species edge toward the brink of extinction. It doesn't really work for anybody. We need a little bit of a reality check in the values that we have as a country. We as citizens need time to say we value the environment, and we are

conservationists, and we want to make sure that those lands stay healthy. But at times, our behavior says differently. [music] [sound of chopping wood] Look back in history, and any time there was an abundance of anything, man wasted it. Probably that's what really started the environmental move, you know, was they were wasting our forests, overcutting them, you know, rape and pillage - whatever you want to call it. Timber harvesting in the northwest peaked in the 1950s at more than 9 billion board feet a year coming from a fairly even mix of public and

private lands. Heavy logging, often of large, older trees, continued through the 80s. And then our science started catching up with us. Not only our science, but the consequences of what we saw happening on the land from having that extreme and intense management occur. And we began stopping on the public lands. I don't think there are many foresters around today that wouldn't agree that there have been huge excesses in the past. Particularly with reference to to public land. [owl hoots] In 1990, the northern spotted owl, a denizen of the old growth forest environment, was declared a threatened species, triggering a salvo of new protections and restrictions. Timber harvesting plummeted on the federal public lands. A succession of mill closures followed to date, [music] with 160 in Oregon alone. Thousands of family wage jobs

disappeared. Dozens of rural, timber-dependent communities plunged into crisis. You know, we see increases in divorce. Families are fighting over money. And we see increases then in aid to single parents, you know. And then we see increases in juvenile crime and domestic violence. There is a social consequence to the shut-down of the timber industry. [sound of truck passing] Oregon timber production slowed to about half of its one time high, now coming mostly from private lands where, to keep the remaining mills open, timber companies began to harvest more trees and at younger ages. [construction sounds] The public forests, already protected from fire for more than a century and now largely off-limits to logging, accumulated flammable materials in record amounts. (Male interviewee) They've been allowed to become very dense. The trees are getting... are dying, and so there's all kinds of bugs and diseases and fire that's starting and happening on the national forests,

and of course, fire doesn't and bugs don't respect property lines and so they come across onto our places and we have to deal with it. And when you get that much dead fuel out there and it catches on fire, you lose it all. We lose our riparian zones for our streams. It burns it hot, burns the nutrients out of the soil, burns up all the humus, takes hundreds of years to grow that stuff back. The silt washes in the crick. There's no root structure there to hold it on the steep banks, get silt in the creek, kills their fish. Other unintended consequences ensued as well. Income tax payers now in Portland, Multnomah County, or around the state are basically funding our rural schools where they used to be self-funded from forestry. (Newscaster) And the effects extended far beyond the Pacific Northwest. (male interviewee) The spotted owl decision had a big enough impact on global timber markets that there was a noticeable effect in prices and in and in the wood flows around the world,

as a result of that one decision. Higher prices created new incentives to produce. Worldwide more lands were cleared for tree plantations, while new areas of very old forests in Canada, Russia, Asia, and South America were entered and clear cut. (Male interviewee) If 4 billion board feet a year -- and that's the amount that the harvests went down -- if 4 billion board feet a year doesn't come from Oregon in the future, where is it going come from? Are there any endangered species in that new region? And what will the environmental impacts of that be? And the answer by the way is huge. (female interviewee) The American public needs to be having a conversation about, you know, what is the future of public lands? Are we going to allow them to be subject to fire? Are we going to lock 'em up? Are we going to have some level of management happening on them? That kind of conversation needs to occur. Sustainable forestry to me is managing our forests today in a way that allows us to meet

our needs -- both our economic needs, from the industry that depends on the harvest of trees, but also our aesthetic needs, our recreational needs, our ecologic needs today, in a way that allows our future generations to still have those choices. [Music] This is old growth, or ancient forest. An ecosystem of complex biological interactions which science does not yet fully understand. All of it didn't used to look like that. It doesn't represent what every acre in the Coast Range used to be. But I wish there were more acres like that. Most of Oregon's remaining old growth is on public land, often protected in western Oregon, at least in designated Reserve. There is a really important role for reserves. if for no other reason than as a laboratory where we can learn how this stuff all works, and how it all fits together.

About 20 percent of Oregon's forests are industrial timberland like this in the Coast range. Of forest practices that are common in the States, it's clear-cutting that causes indigestion among most folks in the public. Clear-cutting is definitely a lightning rod for attitudes and conceptions and misconceptions about forestry in general. I don't know the specifics of this landscape, but what happens when land changes hands,

Is that timber gets cut, either to reduce the debt of the new owner or for the previous owner to liquidate their assets. So when you have an ownership change, typically you have timber being harvested. Ironically, while the scenes of clear-cuts feed the public anxiety about logging on public land, nearly all the clear-cutting we actually see is on private land. The Forest Service changed its policy on clear-cuts 13, 14 years ago. I'd say less than 10 percent of our forest management work in the Pacific Northwest and maybe even forest service wide is clear-cuts now. [Rainstorm] State law limits the size of clear cuts, and requires prompt replanting. And environmentally,

Oregon has one of the most progressive forest practices laws in the country. So in theory, at least, any trees legally harvested here, even on private clear-cuts, are produced under better, more sustainable conditions than almost anywhere else in the world. The bigger issue is this disconnect between our unbelievably consumptive behavior, the amount of wood and paper and other stuff from the force that we use, And on the other hand how that wood gets produced. There is this notion that somehow we can consume these vast and growing quantities of wood products without having any kind of a visible dent on the landscape. Whether it be great to put in Western red cedar and hemlock on each side of the bank, going about 100 feet on each side. Uh-huh.

(Male newscaster) Nationwide, most forest land is neither public nor industrial, but consist of smaller family forests. In the Pacific Northwest, Family Forestry is a relatively small piece of the landscape, 16 percent of the forested landscape in the state of Oregon. But it's the lower elevation, it's the riparian areas, it's where a lot of the habitat is. It's in some of the most productive forest-growing land around. So ecologically, that's a really important 16 percent. People have a lot of different values and ideas about the way things should be or not be, and maybe severing a tree is -- They don't like that. [Sounds of a chainsaw] I see it it's like growing corn or growing radishes or growing lettuce; you grow it to eat, and sustain yourself, and to provide some income.

And I grow trees that way also. It's harvestable crop. When I talk with forest owners, one of the kind of "aha" moments that I can almost count on having now, is the realization that they have some kind of understanding about something that's happening on their property that completely is outside the Conservative, Liberal, the Democrat, the Republican, the preservationist, the timber [piece?] -- completely outside of those kinds of dichotomies. There's a level of sophistication that you don't anticipate, sometimes. [Truck sounds] Family forests number about 40000 in Oregon. While the public lands hang in limbo and the industrial forest get managed for quarterly profits, much of the most exciting and innovative forestry today is taking place on small tree farms like these. [Music]

You see- most of all these trees you got all these little [inaudible] This is my pruner. You just take your stick and go like that. [Cutting wood sounds] (male interviewee) Instead of having little holes and little knots in your board, You have clear wood. You can use on a table top or a desk top or 100 years from now, when that tree's twice that size, you can cut it and you can take some beautiful, beautiful lumber out of it. I'm Leo Gobal? and he's Bob Jackson, and we bought this property in 1970. It hadn't been any logging down here. Kind of tied up in a state for quite a few years.

So, when we bought it we started thinning and managing. Well, we're doing what's best in the long run. But it's also what's best at this stage. My theory is that when these limbs die, the nutrients don't go out into limbs, they go up the trunk. Leo and Bob grow their trees a little closer together than some other growers do. They're growing logs, sawlogs, for the future. Keep them close enough that the lower limbs die and the tree trunk will lose its taper and they'll scale a lot more, you'll grow more volume per acre per year and then you will in the long run, by opening them up. Taking the idea one step further, they pay a local fellow to climb and prune some trunks as high as 60 or 70 feet. We've pruned Fourteen hundred and fifty, little over fourteen hundred and fifty trees. You don't find, typically, family forest owners all marching

in in line to any drumbeat. They tend not to be trend followers so they bring some diversity, to their forest management that the other ownership groups can learn from. This brush pile's from two years ago. The brush pile provides a habitat for the chipmunks and the pines squirrel. They give them a place to hide, to hide from the hawks. Every day when they go poop, they're releasing tens of thousands of nitrogen fixing bacteria so their manure's a fertilizer. Here there was 8 stems right here and I took five but I kept the three best trees, the three healthiest, best crowns. And that's those three pines, which now, 30 years later, I'm sure have put on some volume and growth. It's kind of like cattle and horses and sheep and stuff -- you save your best and ship the rest. And in logging most everybody high-grades it. They take the best trees because that's where the money is, and what they leave is

trash. Poor genetics and trees that aren't growing. This tree here died from Scolytus which is a white fur engraver. They bore a hole through the bark, cut a horizontal groove, lay their eggs in there. What they do is they girdle the tree and the cambium layer so that it loses its sap, can't flow up and down, and it kills the tree. And there's a lot of them dying on the forest [service], and they're not salvaging it. Literally thousands and thousands of trees. Leo and Bob harvest very few healthy trees. We try to take the dead and dying. Almost everything we did this summer was what I'd call salvage or pre-salvage. See that white fur right there. Getting teal thin up there. The limbs on the trunk are dying so it's dying from that Scolytus and it'll be

totally brown by next spring if we don't cut it. [Breathing] Well, it's pretty straight that way, so I put the wedges in it. I think I'll fall it down there across the road. [Chainsaw sounds] [Chainsaw sounds continue] You don't want to be standing right behind it [inaudible] [Tree cracking] A few miles away, a big timber company has clear-cut its land. But this part of Oregon doesn't get much rain. Clear-cuts here tend to regrow slowly and poorly. We don't have near the moisture they do on the west side, but if you keep a fairly well-stocked stand

of timber here ,you have a lot of shade and then you're able to retain most of that moisture. [Rain sounds] The men's years of record-keeping suggest that a tree puts on its best volume after the age at which many other growers harvest theirs. That chart shows how the growth increases, and after it gets to be three log trees, three 16s, at about 40 or 50 years ,it was putting wood on five times faster than it did in the first 40 years or 50 years. Every year when you're out here, if you're paying attention, you're going to learn something. [Music] We started out with a million 900 thousand feet on it. We've logged more than that- We've logged over 2 million and there's over 2 million feet left. So we've more than rotated the volume in 34 years. If we'd of clear-cut by now, we'd of lost over two million feet of volume. [Truck sounds]

[Truck sounds] But they could still lose volume if a fire ever spread from the Forest Service land next to theirs. That tree dies, just died, that died. This dead one, dead one dead one; dying one; dead one; dead one; dead one. They're not salvaging any of it. If the lightning would strike up here and get to burning in here and the wind's blowing that way, it would burn over on my property. So.. [Music] Steve Maley has worked as a forest ecologist for Boise Cascade, as a Director of Fish and Game for the state of Idaho, and while a Forest Supervisor for the U.S. Forest Service, he saw several catastrophic wildfires in Idaho and Wyoming, including the Yellowstone fires of 1988. [Fire sounds]

The turbulence caused by the heat and smoke blowing from west to east -- almost hurricane force in some cases -- What is simply taking these chunks and logs, five and six feet a foot in diameter and blowing them five miles over the crest onto the forests, and of course once the fire started there, then we had fire that covered more than 100000 acres, in less than 24 hours. And that makes an emotional impression on you. [Music] I still get angry when people say, "Fine, it was all right; those were natural fires." Nonsense. They were not naturally occurring fires. They didn't behave naturally. [Music]

The same conditions that fed those catastrophic fires -- heavy fuel buildups from years of fire suppression -- are now common across the Pacific Northwest too. Oregon's forests are tragically unhealthy. More than a third of our drier forests are at risk of uncharacteristic fire that will place at risk significant ecosystem components. And more than 40 percent are about to recruit into that condition. So that's easily more than 70 percent of Oregon's Forest, National Forests, principally, are in tough shape. Tough shape looks something like this stand of pines on the Deschutes National Forest where Leslie Weldon is forest supervisor. What is really challenging is the image that many citizens have of what is a healthy forest, and a lot of times, it's seeing lots of trees growing. The biggest risk that we have with these forests in allowing them to continue without some kind of treatment, either through fire or thinning, is losing all of it. When a wildfire comes through an

area that has lots of other trees in it's understory, it basically allows a fire to burn up the clear link of those trees into the over- story of the large beautiful old growth Ponderosa Pine that everyone wants to see persist on the landscape. So, it can kill those, and kill them very quickly, and put us in a place where we have to wait 100 and 200 years for those to come back. A healthy version of the same stand, sits just across the road. We did thinning in here, and then we followed that up with a prescribed burn. That would restore this Ponderosa site to what it would most likely have looked like 100 years ago, back when wildfire was burning on a regular basis and in such a way that would allow a forest stand like this to continue growing large Ponderosa pine trees without in-growth of a bunch of understory species, which is what we see in so many other areas that have been affected by fire suppression. Here's a perfect example of the legacy of fire that occurs with Ponderosa pine stands. Here's a tree. If you were to look in the overstory, it is perfectly healthy and

vibrant -- it's still growing. Ponderosa pines have lots of adaptations for being able to endure fire on intervals from seven to 20 years and still continue to grow. Unintentionally, when we were suppressing fires because we wanted to be able to harvest large trees for their economic value, we were doing the very thing that we're putting them on a course for being less healthy and more affected by fire in the future. [Music] Nearby the future has already arrived. This was the B and B complex fire of 2003, which burned 91,000 fuel-loaded acres of the Deschutes National Forest. The intense heat blackened the landscape and sterilized the soil. These big fires are resetting the ecological clock. Many

of the restrictions on logging public lands have carried over to thinning and fuel reduction too. Maley thinks the environmental laws lack a long-term perspective. (Maley) The laws are designed to avoid the short-term risks, and now we've learned that there are huge risks of inaction. But the laws don't compel any assessment of that. He says the idea of protection needs rethinking. Fish and Wildlife Service just completed a status review of spotted owls from 1994 to the present -- ten year assessment. What they found was spotted owl critical habitat has declined more than 3 percent in that decade because of habitat loss from uncharacteristic wildfire. This forests health problem. So that documents that owls protected owls, are disadvantaged by unhealthy forests. Now the question is, Well, fine, so what do we do? How do we go -- How do we go reduce the

risk to those owls, of forest, and fires that are killing them? We owe a lot to the environmental community, you know. Hey -- they hollered Whoa- When a whoa was needed. But then this foresters is going to heck in the whoa mode. You get overstocked. We have wildfires. You know, we have bug infestation. Sure, a lot of those things are natural. But we fooled with this forest for 100 years to make up a situation where these things now, when they happen, are catastrophic. We need to get out of this whoa mode and get into the solution mode. Before Howard Johnson started growing trees, which was quite a few years ago, he'd been raising cattle. It got to the point where I couldn't run [inaudible] without harm someone to help. So I decided

to sell the cattle. And then It was the timber. People that visit the place, it's up to them tell me whether I made a good deal or not. You see, most of these trees around here are pyramid tops. A round top tree. We'll have one last [inaudible]. You won't find any of them in here because probably they've taken them out. You don't clear-cut. You would take out -- Well there's a tree with the kink in it. Maybe, you take out a few of the large.10 or 15 years you come back and go through them again. And in the meantime you're getting more sunlight all the time. and those [inaudible]

Begin to fill in those trees. Howard is one of those people that is incredibly well respected. At 91 still goes to his own tree stand. And he's he's managing actively and he's taking a commercial return, and he's growing more and more volume every year. Well I say, if I'd have really retired and sat down in front of the TV until bed time. I wouldn't be here today. I'd be six feet under. You got to keep busy Doing something. See all the marks, slits. That's a pretty good indication that the tree's doing good. And that one over there the same, and this one. That's an indication that the tree has plenty of room to grow. The lightning fire that hit that in August, it hadn't been burned,

embers will fly all around here and set two or three more fires. (newscaster) Howard has had the occasional wildfire started by late summer lightning. It hit two trees back up here along the road, killed them both and set the fire. We had the pumpers from Molalla up here, and they brought some from Union County over. Of course, they had the fire out, this little bit. I think the lesson is that we probably out to have went through here and took out some timber before the lightning hit, so it didn't have a chance to get quite as hot. Doug McDaniel once logged this land before Howard owned the timber rights. (McDaniel) I was working as a logging contractor for Boise Cascade, I don't know, 35 years ago or so. And Boise was running short of

logs in winter time. Sent us up here to get as many logs as we could get. And we were logging when we shouldn't have been logging. The ground was soft. It was a very mild winter. The CATs were sinking into the ground 18 inches, and we were pulling 14 [chokers?] behind the CATs. We were plowing the forest and you know, you don't feel very good about that. But hey, I had payments on half a millon dollars' worth of equipment, 50 guys working for me, and when they said march, we marched. Howard came in here right after we logged, and started taking care of it. And this is what you have today. Howard, like many other small forest owners, sees his timber as a sort of bank account -- maybe even better than a bank account. (Howard) It's making you more money. Take that little fir tree there -- and come 10 years from now, it'll be 10 or

15 feet taller. That's made you money that you're not cashing in on. Every entry you make, you just stake out the worst stuff and leave the best. And pretty soon you've got a pretty good-looking piece of property. He's thinking, "Leave the best tree. Remove the mistletoe, forked tops, insect disease," as best he can. He's looking for species diversity, best formed tree, and vertical diversity. You want to form the structure, so you constantly have your replacement tree. Sometimes you take the biggest tree; sometimes you take a medium-sized tree. [Chainsaw] And he wants to space it, so there's room in that stand to get more

trees started. Bruce Dunn is a professional forester who manages 20,000 acres of industrial timberland for its owners. (Dunn) The intent here is to get maximum dollar over time, okay, sustain dollar over time. (Newscaster) His crew is working the hills near Wallowa Lake, one of the most beautiful areas in the state, and he intends to keep it that way. (Dunn) A private landowner has two choices. You can try to manage it, and keep it in a very healthy vigorous state, or you leave it completely alone and wait 'till Mother Nature burns it all up for you. That's what your choices are. [Chainsaw] [Chainsaw continued] We acquired this property about 14 years ago, and we're trying to create a multi-storage stand with four age classes, not only of vertical diversity with four

structures, but a species diversity. Right here from the crown we've got, we've got White Fir, we've got Douglas Fir, we've got Ponderosa Pine, we've got Western Larch. If we get a insect or disease infestation coming into one of those species, if we can have roughly an equal representation, we could remove that species and still have a fully stocked stand. The intent on having the vertical distribution is to constantly have replacement trees as you make an entry. Constant entries over time. Constant revenues over time. Constant watershed and wildlife values over time. [Machine noises] [Machine noises continued] These systems will not survive by leaving them alone.

We've played God in 'em for a hundred years; we've excluded fire. We've created an unnatural situation. Forest service folks, if you use their jargon, say "we've missed so many fire cycles." When you miss five or six of these cycles, you've got a completely unnatural stand. So if we're going to manage this so we have it for the future -- the public lands and the private lands -- then we actually have to manage it. You can't just say "I'm gonna leave it alone and it's gonna stay there." It ain't gonna happen. [Chainsaw noises] Is our strategy that we're going to act in such a way that we mine the most pristine possible for us in the world but never address the issue of wood consumption? Is our strategy just to use up as much as we can and get it from the rest of the world, no matter what the impact? Is that OK? (newscaster) Jim Boyer's research concludes that the public's uneasiness about timber

harvesting stems- in part - from misconceptions and wrong information. (Boyer) We find that Americans consistently believe that the forests of the United States are being cleared at a rapid rate. In point of fact, the area of forests -- the area covered by forest in the United States-- has been increasing for the last several decades. The vast majority of respondents believe that forests are being harvested at a rate faster than they're growing. The truth is exactly the reverse. And in fact, forest growth is substantially greater than harvest. Forests are becoming more dense; trees are becoming larger in diameter on average, and so on. We have more forest land in the United States today than we did in the time of colonization. And so, the forest is still here. We're still consuming the wood, but unfortunately, we're not consuming our own wood. What we've done is we've exported our problems. Rather than grow and harvest wood on a sustainable basis here in Oregon, we're saying 60 percent of our forest land, we're not going to use for production. We

have to import it from someplace else. And we're importing it for the most part from places that don't have the environmental protections that we have here, and frankly, don't have the productive capacity. Their stands are not replacing themselves as fast as they would here in Oregon. [Music] In the case of the spotted owl, many things that could have been predicted did in fact happen. We did transfer impacts to other places. We did have impacts on species that there was great concern about around the world. We did trigger environmental impacts associated with transportation that are very large. (newscaster) To offset the lost production here, harvesting increased in Canada and Asia, and in the American South, where several large timber and paper companies relocated, and where John Bliss studied the impacts. (Bliss) My work there for much of that time was looking at the relationship of the pulp and paper industry to community well-being in rural

Alabama. While many jobs relocated with the new industries, he says the long-term tax forgiveness used to attract them had a powerful negative impact on many local public schools. So, when we decide that we don't want the mess and the noise and the insecurity that comes with harvesting natural resources in our backyard, we want that to happen someplace else, we're also deciding a whole host of other things that we haven't even thought about. We're making decisions about how other people are going to live, about how other people are going to be affected. And, I mean, we're passing the buck. My name's Darvin Tanzey. Most people call me Butch. And I live in Wallowa, Oregon. I'm a logger. I own my own business. My two sons work for me, and two other guys plus myself work in the woods. Normally I keep two logging trucks busy.

Let's take this one out. This is some of the reason we're taking these trees out is the disease called dwarf mistletoe, and what dwarf mistletoe does is suck the nutrients out of the tree; it all goes into the limb that the mistletoe is on. And also, the mistletoe infects all the reproduction, the little trees coming underneath it; it shoots out a spore on them. So, if you don't get that out, not only will your tree not grow, but it'll infect all the new growth coming. This is some bad mistletoe up on these trees. They'll all have to go. Well, do you see one that doesn't have mistletoe? Hate to take that one. We logged when we needed a bunch of money, for the farm or whatever, and we didn't manage it when we did log. We would hire loggers, and they would come in and do it their way. They would take all the good stuff, and usually leave the bad stuff -- the diseased trees, the crooked trees -- and so now I'm dealing with that, and I'm coming in kind of starting intensive management, and I'm going to do just the opposite. I'm going to take out

when I log all the deformed trees and all the diseased trees and leave just the healthy good trees here. This is kind of where the bugs are starting, isn't it. Mainly, yeah. Right there, they are. They're in that one and -- yeah. See the pitch pockets? That's where the tree's trying to pitch the bug out -- the bug bored in there -- but it didn't work. The tree's dead. But I wanted to say that this [snag?] not knock it down. That is a nice big old wildlife tree. Yeah, I'll leave it for birds and animals to nest in it. I worked in a plywood mill for 19 years, and I didn't like it, but I was raising a family. I had to have a job. When my family got older, I decided I had to get out of the building, so I got a job cutting logs. And then one contractor I worked for decided not to log anymore. "Boy", she said, "why don't you buy the machine and a skidder, and we'll give you a job?" And so, I did. Financed my home, everything I own. Went to talk to three different finance institutions, and finally

scraped up enough money to buy half a million dollars' worth of equipment. Did it for two years. And I did real well. But then it wasn't economically feasible for Boise Cascade to keep doing what I was doing. So, they said they weren't going to have me do it anymore. And so then I had to go out and start knocking on doors of people with private land. And fortunately, I was born and raised here. I knew a lot of landowners, and they started giving me a job. I just process them right here to you thisaway, and then push the brush out there and you can deck your logs on both sides. Butch, like other loggers around here, took a big hit with the cutbacks on logging on the public forests. I kind of depended on three months out of my nine-month season to work on the federal Forest Service land. And so, I had to go look elsewhere. So, what I've done is I've had to go to different states. And so, we have to live away from home. And this is hard on people.

You know, I've got a boy that works for me has got three kids in school. It's hard to live away from home and come home on Friday night or Saturday morning and leave Sunday afternoon, you know, and be gone all week, you know. These are my preset buttons. I push that button automatically goes to the log blank. There's three wheels that run the log through. The bottom wheel measures it. And there's a chainsaw. We'll make a log for Pend Oreille Valley right there. Saw it off. The rest of it will be a piece of pulp. He really shifted his focus to one of stewardship. This little tree here is just a sucker tree and all it does is take nutrients from this. And if you ever get a fire in here, you know it's lighter fuel. And he operates in a way that is very management-intense on his part because not only is he removing the trees that are not the best reproducers, are not the type they would want in the

landscape, but he's also having to find markets for this stuff that traditionally would be trash in order to pay for his services. So, Butch is looking for markets. He's being incredibly innovative. Yeah, all the small stuff down to two-inch top, they'll take for pulp. So, the loader here does all the sorting, and the processor just does all the limning and cutting to the [link?] Now that right there would probably be a pole. And the top then would be a pulp. Every stick they've got to make a decision on. That big limb you see sticking up? That's a disease, mistletoe. I'm trying to clean that out of my stand. That's the reason I'm logging here right now, is to get rid of that disease and start fresh. My goal for my whole place here is to sustainably log. I own 900 acres here, and I want to do about 50 acres a year. And I think

I'll be able to do that forever. With Butch's equipment, the processors and stuff, he can go in and take smaller stuff now, and crooked stuff, and you can find a market for that. He also is very knowledgeable, and he is like a good forestry consultant, and he has really helped me learn how to intensively manage. [Machine noises] See, turn that. Knock that mistletoe limb off for me on that tree. And if he can get that mistletoe limb off, he can leave that tree there. It won't be infected any more. Come on, Butch, you can do it! [Laughter] He just saved it. Butch's complex system of marketing the logs he cuts is made more difficult by the shrinking number of nearby mills. These are Doug Fir saw logs. That's the long ones and the short ones. They go to Wallowa

Forest Products in Wallowa. These little four-inch top logs here, they go to Pend Oreille Valley, and they saw two-by-fours out of 'em. One shot through. The crooked and the rotten wood goes for chips. And then there's a few pine logs right over there in the brush. And that goes to whichever one pays the better price for the pine. These trees are the trees that we took out. The grains you can hardly even see where they were growing, but these were really infected with dwarf mistletoe. So, all the nutrients was going to the plant instead of the stem of the tree. They're real tight-grained, which should be a real high dollar value wood, but we can't find a niche market that's willing to to pay us a premium dollar for this real tight-grained wood. This is our post and pole plant. It's called Community Small Wood Solutions. And it is bringing in small pulpwood that otherwise is being shipped out of

the county or burnt in the woods, and trying to make a variety of value-added products from it. [Machine noises.] This used to be one of the biggest mills in Wallowa County. It used to be the Bates Mill. Back then, there were a couple hundred people working here, I believe, back in the '60s, maybe up into the '70s. Right now, we've got about four and a half people employed here. This is a fairly standard product for us. This is a pointed post, a five-inch and a four-inch post that would be used for barbed wire or smooth wire fence both on farm and residential applications. We can also drill holes in these posts and use rails instead of wire. That's your basic post and pole product. And then in addition to that, we're going to start producing 25-foot six- to seven-inch round poles that will go into the utility pole business. The new mill may be

small, but it's a big venture for the local non-profit group that owns it, Wallowa Resources. If we're going to restore the conditions that we believe are appropriate for this area, then we need to thin the smaller trees out of these stands and reduce the fire risk; improve the wildlife habitat; and improve the overall functioning of these forests. And we need to have markets for that material, if we're going to be able to afford to do that. If the Federal Forest Service was going to do what I do, there could be 20 outfits like what I have and would never run out of work. There's so much of it out there. And, but what we have to do is create more markets. We need something to do with the wood that we're burning up because there's no money in smoke. There may be money in steam, though, especially if it can be used to generate

electricity. Here at Warm Springs Forest Products, this plant produces all the power needed by the reservation sawmill complex. And that's just a fraction of the generator's nine-megawatt capacity. I think a lot of the old lumber towns, a lot of the old sawmills, had plants similar to this, but the demise of the timber industry and wood products industry -- a lot of those have gone away. Darryl Kelly oversees this wood-burning co-gen plant, called that because it generates both heat and electricity. Historically, the plant has burned waste from the mill. But a new source of fuel is showing up in the mix -- chipped materials from forest-thinning projects. [Machine noise] (Kelly) They take it and run it through a portable chipper, and they blow into a truck and

trailer, bring it in and dump it on our trailer dump here. And then our [CAT?] stockpiles it for use in the boilers. The hazardous forest fuels that everybody's trying to get rid of to prevent catastrophic forest fires -- that's giving everybody a renewed interest in getting that fuel to generate electricity. And it's not a new technology; it's been going on for years, but we're trying to kill two birds with one stone. The public forests are glutted with materials like these -- potential fuels for a wildfire or for a steam turbine generator. There's enough of this material in a 75-mile radius to run a co-gen plant twice as big as the one we operate at this time. It's out there, we just got to get commitments from the right people to

get it in here. These thinnings were cut as a pilot project on the Deschutes Forest. Some folks say we should do more of this kind of work, and spend less on after the fact fire-fighting. Why don't we put part of that money into prevention and give a whole bunch of people jobs? Everybody that has a job pays taxes, and that helps our country and gets them off the street. Let's get busy. Go to work. Warm Springs is building a new, larger plant right next door. When it's up and running, it will join about 50 others throughout Oregon. But using co-gen plants to burn forest fuels is still experimental, and there's no consensus on what material to remove or how to remove it. [Music] I think the horrific fires that have happened since the year 2000 have really

started the nation talking about public lands again, and what does that management look like. The conversation isn't "to manage or not to manage." It isn't about "to harvest trees or not to harvest trees." The conversation has shifted to, OK, we we understand that we need forest products, and that forests in some cases are in need of treatment. How do we best do that? How do we find ecologically sensitive and constructive ways to deal with our forests? That's a positive move. The bureaucracy is not going to change. You've got to go around it by letting your thinking be creative. By not saying -- by not being constrained by existing laws and regulations that were passed 30, 40, 50, 100, 150 years ago. We need to say, if anything were possible, what would it look like? Now, if you can actually do that, you've created a vision for the future, which then gives you the ability to identify -- what is it that's keeping us from getting there? Which is where the debate ought to be. My plan is to just to let 'em grow for about 30 years. They'll get a little

bigger. Already 91 years old, Howard Johnson may not be around to see these trees get too much bigger. I'm a little inclined to leave something for someone else. I guess that's about it. Sometimes you do something for someone else, as you grow up. I think you'd do the same thing. Don't you? [Laughter] Come on, girls. Come get your breakfast. And so you started buying this when you was, what, in your twenties? I didn't write it down. [Laughter] The squirrels take them up here and put them to dry, see? There are people involved in forest restoration. I'm kind of

picky about how I like my ribbon tied. There are people involved in timber harvesting. And in running a mill. And in trying to keep a ranch family together. And they don't make the headlines very often. But each one of these issues is rooted in real people trying to get along, doing the best they can and the best way to understand those situations is to get out and observe and to talk with those people and to listen to them. Funding for production of The Oregon Story was made possible through a generous grant from the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development.