Viewpoint: Wood manufacturers needed for sustainable forest management

While celebrating recent rain, the smoke and fire season is not over yet. This is the backdrop of a crisis that has in part been exacerbated by the loss of wood manufacturing businesses in Montana. Our collective ability to accomplish our long-term conservation needs at an affordable price is at risk.

The loss of wood manufacturing compromises our ability to protect old growth, watersheds, and biological diversity in addition to hampering strategies to address large, severe wildfires. It complicates maintaining our forests as natural carbon capture and storage systems, while providing renewable, sustainably grown wood to provide materials for our buildings, bridges, packaging, jet fuel and more.

Change is difficult, on a personal level, but more so on a societal level. In the late 1980s and 1990s there was a sea change in forest management. The emerging sciences of landscape ecology, conservation biology, disturbance ecology, along with the social demands for our outdoor recreation lifestyle, plus the desire to protect old growth forests, bull trout, wolves, grizzly bears, lynx, and cutthroat trout across our landscapes, drove the need for change.

We recognized the previous model of commodity wood production through forest management on an 80-year cycle and the exclusion of fire was inadequate. Increased frequency of droughts, longer fire seasons, larger, more severe bark beetle outbreaks driven by changing weather patterns and crowded forests began resulting in “mega-fires” and required a change of tactics.

Collaboration became the watchword, as public land managers, ranchers, loggers and mill owners came together to define a new approach to forest management. The Montana Forest Restoration Principles were developed. Stewardship contracts focused, not solely on economic output of logs, but included new desired outcomes: fire resilience, climate change adaption, habitat needs, and watershed protection.

In late June the Southwest Crown of the Continent Collaborative hosted a field trip to review the collaboratively developed Colt Summit Restoration Project north of Seeley Lake and the role it played in limiting the size and severity of the 2023 Colt wildfire.

Colt Summit was created and implemented by a wide array of organizations, including Missoula County, The Blackfoot Challenge, Montana Wild, The Wilderness Society, Montana Wood Products Association, Pyramid Mountain Lumber and many others. The restoration project protected and enhanced grizzly, lynx and bull trout habitat by eliminating old roads, especially near streams.

Harvest and burning patterns reduced the intensity and spread of future wildfire, all while producing millions of board feet of timber, processed at Pyramid, with the residual wood shavings and sawdust processed by Roseburg in Missoula. It was a great success, overcoming legal challenges from groups that refused to participate in the collaboration. For more details see the MSU Extension’s Family Forest Newsletter.

A recent scientific summary of over 40 research papers demonstrates the efficacy of harvesting and burning to reduce the negative effects of wildfires, which was on display during the review of Colt Summit/Colt Wildfire.

So, what is the crisis? The aftershocks of the Pyramid and Roseburg mill closures are still playing out on a large and small scale. Homeowners on the southern edge of Missoula had 20-30+ inch diameter ponderosa pines blow down in the July 24 storm and they are struggling to find a sawmill that will take the logs.

The two Sun Mountain sawmills in Deerlodge and Livingston are facing potential curtailment of their operations as they struggle to find buyers for their shavings and sawdust. It is a scramble to find a use for 24 truckloads of sawdust that used to go to Roseburg on a weekly basis.

Wood manufacturers are the economic engine of forest restoration work. Without them we can’t afford to do the work at the scale needed. This vital infrastructure provides climate friendly, renewable products while covering much of the cost of restoring resilient forests, simultaneously providing an important property tax base and jobs in our communities that keep the economy running.

Colorado, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and other states have lost their integrated wood products infrastructure and struggle to sustainably manage their forests. Montana must not go down that road.

Juanita Vero, Missoula County Commissioner; Dave Atkins, President of the Montana Forest Owners Association, Forester and Ecologist; Matt Arno, MT DNRC Forestry Assistance Bureau Chief; Tim Love, former District Ranger at Seeley Lake and former Coordinator of the Montana Forest Collaborative Network