How to cut your forest and save it too

American Forests, Sept-Oct, 1994 by Earl Clark

While others clearcut timber in the rush for short-term profit, Merve Wilkinson has some ideas that are better for both the forest and the bottom line.

The Way by Lloyd W. Olson

Forests vibrant as a million dreams, drag all our used-up days through twisted trails. Sculpted right and wrong, they yoke us with a troubled song.

Can we take these hoary trees from off the watching hills, yet relish forest life? Can we saw the timbers, and prize the browsing deer, tremble with spring flowers, splash in water clear?

A forest is a wood-framed home, a lonely streamside glade, a logger's pearl, a path, a cushion for our soul. With the mountain lion, as she needs and tends her cubs, we bear a steward's role.

We cannot own a forest. Our hoards of titles, cash and law form a filmy net, spun too fine to hold the weight of time. The forests of our children are bent by sweat today. There is no single answer. There is no perfect way.

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The old adage that you can't have your cake and eat it too doesn't apply to Merve Wilkinson. In fact, this 79-year-old owner of 137 acres of forest land near Ladysmith, on British Columbia's Vancouver Island, reworks the saying by demonstrating that you can cut your timber and save it too.

How's that again?

Wilkinson's answer is selective cutting as the mainspring of a sustained-yield forest-management policy that meets the standards of the new eco-forestry movement, roughly defined as combining forest management with good ecological standards. It's a view that makes him an anomaly on Vancouver Island, famous--o infamous--for the rapacious clearcutting of ancient forests by big timber companies working hand in hand with a complacent government.

Merve Wilkinson has nothing but scorn for the clearcutters. But rather than dismissing clearcutting out of hand, he has come up with what he maintains is not only a better way to produce timber but also one that is more profitable in the long run. That's why the guest book in the modest log house he shares with his wife Anne--the logs and all the interior woodwork coming from his own property--has been signed by foresters from all over the world, most recently from Australia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

A book he co-authored with Ruth Loomis (Wildwood and Forests for the Future, available from Reflection Publications, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada) has gone through three editions, and he is in constant demand to conduc workshops and seminars, consult with woodlot owners, and instruct classes on hi forestry practices.

"We can no longer afford to clearcut" is his motto, and he stresses that this applies to owners of small woodlots just as much as to big timber companies. During the past year, hundreds of small timber owners in the Pacific Northwest have been scrambling to whack down every tree on their properties, to take advantage of the booming log-export market to the Orient. Wilkinson cites the 45-year record of his own forestry experience to demonstrate the foolhardiness of this rush for profits.

"When I bought this land in 1939, I was offered $1,500 [a tidy sum in those days] for the estimated 1,500,000 board-feet of timber on this property, although my own cruise showed 100,000 feet more," he recalls. "Now, if I had taken that money and invested it at the then-current interest rate of 6 1/2 percent, compounded, I would have $74,000 today.

"Instead, I have cut 1,670,000 board-feet of timber in that 45 years and still have almost as much left as I started with! In fact, I clear at least $1,500 on every load that is trucked to the mill."

By contrast, he continues, the small woodlot owner who clearcuts his land for immediate gain has rendered it worthless for the next 100 to 150 years as a timber resource. Big-business clearcutters are guilty of the same shortsightedness, Wilkinson says.

He also disagrees with the industrial forestry tree-farm concept of replanting clearcut lands with new trees that will be harvested in 60 to 65 years.

"Up to 60 years, trees have no value," he contends. "In fact, it's not until then that they start putting on growth. You might as well grow them at least another 20 years to get more value out of them. What happens when the timber companies cut at 60 years is that they have to cut more than twice as much acreage as if they had waited!"

From his own experience, Wilkinson says that cedar and grand fir, once they've aged 65 years, will quadruple their board-foot volume in the next 20 to 25 years. Douglas-fir will increase by 2 1/2 times, and hemlock 1 1/2 times. "And you don't have to worry about losing money if you wait a few years," he adds. "The way the world's timber supply is decreasing, prices will never reach rock bottom."

So how does Merve Wilkinson cut his timber and save it too?

To start with, his selective cutting keeps in mind the ultimate goal of preserving the forest. After all, the old-time loggers practiced selective cutting of a sort. They simply went after the biggest trees in the forest, but everything in the path of a falling giant was demolished when the tree crashed to the forest floor. It was after World War II that clearcutting came into vogu as a method of retrieving the most possible timber, with the small trees burned up as "slash."