High stakes, gentle touches - how Fibreboard Corp. reconciles timber production and forestry management

American Forests, July-August, 1994 by Herbert E. McLean

It's just possible that a growing environmental sensitivity may save the day for this company and its several thousand workers.

PRE-WINTER RAMBLINGS through California's Sierra Nevadas aren't my usual routine, but here I was in November, off-road in patchy snow at 6,000 feet, as storm clouds glowered. I remembered the blizzard-doomed Donner Party: In 1846, a couple of mountain passes north of here, 47 survivors of that group clung to life by eating the remains of their dead comrades.

Today, in remote country near little-known places like Rattlesnake Creek, Burnt Corral and Thunder Hill, I was aboard a Ford F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup on a quite different trek: scouting the survival scenario of a corporate creature.

California's Fibreboard Corporation (92,000 acres of timberlands in California and Nevada, 2,500 employees, $265 million in annual sales) was in my sights, as were details of the company's bold new entry into environmental forestry.

Unlike a lot of studies I've seen that look promising on paper but not on the forest, this one is for real:

* Light-touch helicopter logging where needed.

* Proactive, computerized wildlife consciousness.

* Sustained logging sequences that include mostly selective harvesting, occasional "fuzzy" clearcuts, and plenty of consideration for streams.

* High-tech understory thinning aimed at healthier stands and fuels reduction.

Fibreboard's major motivations in this program are three: a survival stance in a highly charged environmental climate, the corporate profit imperative (which has to drive any successful enterprise), and the company's resolve to succeed over the long haul.

GOING CRITICAL

Under conditions that would have boggled the Donner pioneers, Fibreboard today is "going critical" as it emerges successfully from a decades-long asbestos-products flap, ponders its immediate future, and ventures forth environmentally.

True, the company ended 1993 with a humongous deck of 90 million board-feet of logs at its sprawling Standard and Chinese Camp sawmills in the Sierra foothills. It's the biggest stock in years, thanks largely to Forest Service salvage sales from bug-kill and a devastating fire in 1992. But the deck is deceptive.

The company, which relies on the Stanislaus National Forest for more than half of its log needs, today faces dangerously diminishing supplies from that source--down 75 percent from 1987 levels--as environmental pressure, federal government downsizing, and related budgetary constraints put a hammerlock on timber sales throughout the Sierras.

In addition, Fibreboard deals with a progressively burdened Forest Service that seems to be trapped under an avalanche of legally required impact statements and analyses, environmental and technical assessments ad infinitum, lawsuits, appeals, moratoria, reviews--and forest-management plans that take years to organize.

"The Forest Service is in gridlock," one local told me.

Meanwhile the company maneuvers with high caution through environmentalist-orchestrated storms in the woods, while hurrying to understand the biological needs of the California spotted owl and other disputed creatures on its property. And if all that weren't enough, the company at press time contemplates a possible takeover by Minnesota baseball team owner Carl Pohlad.

The dangers to Fibreboard are reflected in other situations close at hand: In early March, for example, Michigan-California Lumber Company, which produced lumber largely from timber stocks on the nearby Eldorado National Forest, announced plans to permanently close its 105-year-old, 280-employee sawmill in Camino, citing "radical groups using legal technicalities."

Ross Johnson, forest-practices staff chief for the California Department of Forestry, counts "several dozen" similar operations down the tubes since 1987, thanks to legally tied-up timber supplies on both private and federal lands. And thus California joins the Pacific Northwest in the great free-fall drama surrounding timber supply.

But strange and marvelous things can happen when the corporate issue is survival, to say nothing of producing a profit. Which explains in part why Gary Whitson, a lanky Fibreboard forester who plods along in size 13 boots, was talking to me this morning in an upfront way about his company's environmental forestry, seemingly the strongest card in its survival deck.

Loosely defined, this type of forestry aims at maintaining forest health on a sustained-yield, clean-water, habitat-sensitive, profit-producing basis, while also factoring in issues like the spotted owl, old-growth logging, clearcutting, and the use of herbicides to promote regrowth in the forest.

As defined by the Forest Service, "ecosystem management" places forest watershed health first, with timber production becoming a byproduct. Fibreboard's approach admittedly puts timber production first while encouraging responsible, gentle-touch forestry.

HELICOPTER LOGGING

My first favorable vibes about Fibreboard had occurred four years ago in melting slush adjacent to Yosemite National Park. On an unseasonably warm January day, I stood at a log landing on North Mountain on the Stanislaus National Forest. Nikon in hand, I watched a huge Chinook helicopter, the nation's largest, doing "turns" (trips to and from the woods) every four minutes or so, dangling bug-killed but prime sugar-pine logs weighing up to 28,000 pounds from a 250-foot "long line" cable.