On June 8, 2010, Cook County Commissioner Jim Johnson reported to the county board some of the things he had heard at a National Association of Counties conference he had attended in Billings, Montana. One thing he heard was from a Montana forester who predicted that the bark beetle and fire would totally destroy Montana forests within the next eight years. It is a problem that some believe is largely preventable, but not necessarily in the current political climate.
Johnson talked about a presentation he heard from Dr. Robert Nelson who wrote a book called A Burning Question that contends that the U.S. Forest Service should be dismantled because it can no longer fulfill the mandate it was given when it was commissioned. The U.S. Forest Service was commissioned with the task of making use of the natural resources on federal land. Lawsuits by environmental groups have halted logging to a large extent, Johnson explained. Less logging led to more fuel buildup that has led to an emphasis on fighting fires and doing prescribed burns to prevent large fires.
According to Nelson, Johnson said, the U.S. Forest Service focused on maintaining productive forests until the 1960s. Because of political challenges over the next couple of decades, that emphasis shifted to ecosystem management rather than utilizing natural resources. U.S. Forest Service money now goes to firefighting, lawsuits, and management plans that are challenged in court, Johnson said. He said Nelson believes the solution lies in putting federal forests under more local control, and he advocates greater management rather than no management of the land.
“There’s a huge frustration over the way national lands are managed,” Johnson said. It is a “push and pull” that leads to nothing getting done, he said.
The U.S. Forest Service began in 1905, and the guiding principle of its first chief, Gifford Pinchot, remains today: to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people in the long run.
Nine percent of our nation’s land is owned by the federal government.
Minnesota timber production history
The peak year for Minnesota lumber production was 1900, according to an article entitled The Future of Forestry in Minnesota’s Economy by Jim L. Bowyer, published in 2009 in the Rural Minnesota Journal, a publication of the Center for Rural Policy and Development. About 4.6 million cords of wood were sawn, and the industry employed more than 38,000 people. Ten years later, the supply of large trees started to decline.
By 1950, the Minnesota harvest was down to less than one million cords, but in the 1960s the state’s paper industry began to expand and new products were created, such as recycled paper products and oriented strand board and lumber. Secondary wood product industries producing such things as cabinets, building materials, and windows imported most of their raw materials from outside the state, however.
In the 1990s, Minnesota’s paper industry expanded and modernized, increasing its output by almost 80%. The forest industry became the state’s third largest manufacturing industry.
Biomass for generating industry
Commenting on a new planning rule proposed by the U.S. Forest Service, the American Forest & Paper Association wrote, “The forest products industry accounts for approximately 6 percent of the total U.S. manufacturing GDP [gross domestic product], putting it on par with the automotive and plastics industries. … Many of our members rely on a steady source of timber from national forests and from private timberlands that are adjacent to national forest lands.”
A Generic Environmental Impact Statement on Timber Harvesting was commissioned by the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board, and it determined that harvests of more than four million cords could be sustained indefinitely with minimal environmental impact.
A study on using local biomass for energy and heating undertaken for the Blandin Foundation by Dovetail Partners, a Minneapolis-based research organization, concludes that decimating the nation’s forests is not a threat. According to Dovetail Partners, “Growth exceeds harvests on U.S. timberlands by 33%, and the total acreage of US. forests had remained essentially unchanged for nearly 100 years.”
Over time, the price of wood has increased, and at the same time, products from fast-growing tree species from around the world have become increasingly available. By 2000, 27% of the world’s fiber supply was coming from fast-growing plantations that covered 3.5% of the world’s forest area. Bowyer stated that between 1999 and 2005, U.S. import of wood products, measured in dollars, increased 49% while exports remained flat.
In 2006, 40,000 Minnesotans were employed in the forest products industry. The industry peaked in the mid-1990s and in a seven-year period in the last decade, direct forest products employment dropped an estimated 42%.
In recent years, Minnesota has grown more wood than it harvested, and a far greater percentage of wood was harvested from private forests than from federal forests. For the first five years of this millennium, Minnesota imported more wood than it exported— an interesting trend in a state with vast timber resources.
This is the fourth in a series of articles on issues related to utilizing biomass from the Superior National Forest as a source of local renewable energy and its potential to benefit the economy of Cook County.
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