[MCN] BARK: An Important Lesson from Montana

[Lance Olsen]

>From: Brenna Bell, Bark
>Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 3:12 PM
>Subject: An Important Lesson from Montana
>
>
>
>Want to know what really happened to all those timber industry jobs?

Many thanks, Matt. The answers to the question of 
what has really been happening to forest jobs 
have seldom been framed in straight talk, so it 
was welcome in what you posted. I hope this time 
around we can see more of it.

There's some good precedent for it -- some 
straight talk about forest jobs showed up in the 
Autumn 1984 issue of the UM business journal, the 
Montana Business Quarterly. The article by 
Charles Keegan pointed out that, just in Montana, 
jobs for people working in mills and out in the 
woods would be cut by 1000 to 3000, stripping 
$20million to $60million consumer spending out of 
the Montana economy.

Back then, three decades ago, Keegan's analysis 
showed that the loss of jobs would be forced by 
an expansion of mechanized operations in the 
logging and milling industries.

Why would industry be replacing muscle with 
machinery? With the controversial and damaging 
boom in taking down big old growth trees coming 
to a close, the industry was already buying 
machines (e.g., feller-bunchers) capable of 
handling the smaller logs that seemed the future 
of logging.

Same as today, we have plenty of people who never 
got that side of the logging jobs story, and are 
still getting stories of conservationists accused 
of being the great jobs-destroyers.

Here today, gone tomorrow
Ironically, people in the mills and woods whose 
jobs depended on the big trees from old growth 
stands were effectively employed in digging 
graves for those jobs, and there was at least a 
grain of inevitability to it. To actually save 
jobs dependent on old growth required saving the 
old growth itself, which was what many a Montana 
conservationist wanted. There would have been 
fewer jobs that way, too, but they would have 
been based on an industry offering some long term 
value.

Not long after the Montana Business Quarterly 
sketched out a prediction of lost jobs, the Wall 
Street Journal ran a page one article that said, 
to paraphrase for brevity's sake, big timber 
companies were rushing into the forests of 
Northwest US, planning to get what they could in 
a logging boom, then close up shop, get out, and 
shift their efforts to the Southeast US.

Lance

-- 
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"We present responses of a mixed woody-herbaceous 
ecosystem type to an extreme event: 
regional-scale pinon pine mortality following an 
extended drought, and the subsequent herbaceous 
green-up following the first wet period after the 
drought."

Paul M. Rich, David D. Breshears and Amanda B. 
White. PHENOLOGY OF MIXED WOODY-HERBACEOUS 
ECOSYSTEMS FOLLOWING EXTREME EVENTS: NET AND 
DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSES. Ecology, 89(2), 2008, pp. 
342-352 Ó 2008 by the Ecological Society of 
America

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"Habitat loss and deterioration represent the 
main threats to wildlife species, and are closely 
linked to the expansion of roads and human 
settlements."

Aurora Torres et al. Assessing large-scale 
wildlife responses to human infrastructure 
development. PNAS  Early Edition 7/5/2016
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1522488113
Abstract
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/07/05/1522488113.abstract





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