A different spin - environmental protection in Oregon

American Forests, Jan-Feb, 1995 by John H. Beuter

Timothy Egan's upbeat article, "Oregon, Foiling Forecasters, Thrives as It Protects Owls," in the October 11 New York Times, was heartening to anyone who cares about having both a healthy environment and a healthy economy. Unfortunately, what Mr. Egan's observations reveal is less important than what he overlooked.

As a long-time Oregon resident, forest-resource economist, and Bush Administration deputy assistant secretary of agriculture overseeing the Forest Service, I have been immersed in the "jobs vs. owls" debate. Since returning from Washington in 1993, I have spent a lot of time driving Oregon's back roads, sharpening my sensibilities about our landscape and economy. From none of these perspectives do I agree with Mr. Egan's Panglossian view.

His optimism is based on Oregon's surging population and the new industry moving to the state. He also notes that even the timber industry is thriving, despite the loss of 15,000 jobs.

The federal government owns over half the roaded and accessible timberland in Oregon and over two-thirds of the standing volume in trees of harvestable size. But timber sales from federal timberlands have been curtailed, drying up half of Oregon's timber supply. To the extent that the timber industry is thriving, it is doing so almost entirely on timber from non-federal forests. Recent harvest volumes from small woodlots are running 65 percent above the average for the past 30 years.

The frenzied timber cutting has been fueled largely by high timber prices resulting from the loss of federal timber supplies. The woodlot owners are also concerned that pending endangered-species regulation will deprive them of an opportunity ever to harvest their timber. The accelerated cutting rate cannot continue for long--at least not without cutting younger trees needed to provide timber supplies for future generations. But many woodlot owners feel they have little choice but to cut while they can.

Mr. Egan suggests that there is a tradeoff between the wood-products industry and the "pristine place" and "quality of life" that make Oregon attractive to new high-tech industries. But if yesteryear's crude logging practices and periodic natural disasters, such as forest fires and windstorms, haven't ruined Oregon's pristineness and quality of life, it is hard to believe that timber production under today's highly regulated forest practices would be much of a threat in the future.

It is ironic that Mr. Egan now extols industrial growth and development for Oregon, considering the nature of his critical reporting on the wood-products industry during the few years he has covered the Northwest. Many Oregonians fear that surging growth and development are a greater threat to our environment and quality of life than the wood-products industry, which has been the mainstay of the state's economy for over 150 years.

Mr. Egan is cavalier about the loss of 15,000 (actually closer to 20,000) wood-products jobs--more than a 20 percent reduction since 1990 in the state's largest manufacturing industry. He cites offsetting new jobs in industries that are moving to the state. However, the new jobs are mainly in urban areas along a narrow corridor from Portland to Eugene. Most of the lost wood-products jobs were in rural communities that depend upon that industry for economic opportunity. Mr. Egan obscures this fact by observing only that the number of unemployed is declining in some rural counties.

The statistical decline in rural unemployment has less to do with new employment opportunity in the rural areas than it does with an increase in Los Angeles-style commuting to the urban centers where the new, often lower-paying, jobs are being created. In short, the new vitality of the urban areas is masking the economic and social disruption occurring in rural communities.

Part of Mr. Egan's optimism centers on government programs to retrain displaced wood-industry workers, or "beneficiaries," as Charles Osgood recently referred to them in a CBS piece on Oregon that paralleled Mr. Egan's. Both Egan and Osgood reinforced that spin by featuring only interviews with displaced workers pleased with their turn of fate, and recipients of government funds who conduct the retraining programs. Nothing was said about the devastation heaped on thousands of other displaced workers and their families throughout the state.

Few in Oregon would argue against the benefits of the economic diversity that is occurring. Even so, well over half the state's employment still derives from the management and use of natural resources, at least one-third front wood-products activity alone. As Mr. Egan notes, new industry is helping offset the turmoil affecting the wood-products industry, but that's not taking the analysis far enough. We need to understand that wood products and other natural resources are still vital to Oregon's long-term economic stability.

Most of the new industries could have located anywhere in the world. Oregon's quality of life may have been an important factor in bringing them here, but sizable tax incentives and infrastructure cost-sharing may have been even more important. Will these industries stay when tax incentives from elsewhere are offered to the next generation of cost-cutting managers?