Just look at all the trees in our state. Alaska has 129 million acres of forested land, which is nearly 20 percent of America’s total. If our forested area were a state, it would be the third largest behind Alaska and Texas.
We also boast the nation’s largest national forest, the Tongass. The Tongass National Forest has over 16.8 million acres with ten million of it forested. Just how massive is the Tongass? Ten states are smaller than it.
So why is it that we cannot see the forest industry for all the trees in Alaska?
The truth is abundant resources alone are not a guarantee of success. If they were, Alaska’s forest industry would be booming with activity, jobs, investment and government revenues.
At one time, the forest industry was the second largest private sector employer and the economic lifeblood to communities in Southeast Alaska. However, since 1990, our forest industry has been in decline. That year, we harvested 1.1 billion board feet of timber statewide and employed 4,600 people. Today, our annual harvest is less than 200 million board feet (21 million from the Tongass compared to 473 million in 1990) and there are only 584 people directly employed in forestry, logging, and wood products jobs. After closures of sawmills and major pulp mills in Sitka and Ketchikan in the 1990s, we are now left with one medium-sized sawmill and no pulp mills remaining in Southeast Alaska.
What happened?
We certainly did not run out of timber since only seven percent of the total productive old-growth and 15 percent of the highest volume stands have been cut over the last 100 years.
Over the past 20 years the industry has suffered repeated blows – many of them from the hands of “We, The People.” A 2009 research paper from the U.S. Department of Agriculture nails the problem on the head: “From a policy perspective, timber ownerships and federal forest management policy changes have been determinants of change.”
Those ‘policy changes’ were described in great clarity in the Timber Jobs Task Force’s June 2012 report to Governor Parnell. The Task Force found that “Federal policies and management practices fail to provide sufficient timber supply for Southeast’s timber industry” and that “Environmental groups have exerted undue influence over USFS policy and direction related to national forest management in Alaska.” Needless to say, federal policy has also created a venue for extensive and crippling litigation.
Just recently, RDC submitted comments on the Tongass National Forest Five-Year Review. Our comments succinctly pointed to the problem, “Although the TNF was established as a working forest, today it is being managed more like a national park.”
The role of government is to set policy and the role of private industry is to make decisions based on that policy. Despite massive high quality timber resources, industry is not investing. Whether it was intentional or not, government policy is killing an industry that only a few decades ago was a cornerstone of Southeast Alaska’s economy.
We need to re-set the balance by demanding that our government change our policy to one that supports the timber industry in Alaska. We need to have policies that balance legitimate environmental concerns with the equally legitimate need for resource development. We need to remind everyone that Alaska was allowed to join the union because of the expectation that we would develop our vast resources.
As a society, we have forgotten that real wealth is based upon what we produce. This means our wealth as a nation and society does not come from the fact that we have an abundance of our natural capital. It comes from the extraction, development and manufacturing of our natural capital – our resources. Governments at all levels need to value private sector resource industry jobs at least as much as they value public sector jobs, because those private jobs are the ones that create wealth.
While the issue is largely at the hands of federal government policy, the State of Alaska needs to pay close attention to the policy framework it sets, too. Regulation, taxation and process will support and encourage or hinder and discourage investment.
You may say “So what. Why should I care?”
Keith Coulter from Koncor Forest Products said it best at the 2012 RDC Conference: “If the effort that halted forest management on Alaska federal lands was this effective, your sector is just as much at risk.”
A long time ago, miners used to put a canary in a cage and take it into a coal mine. It was an early warning system to the encroachment of dangerous gasses into the mine. The canary would show the effects of the danger long before the miners could and it would allow the miners a chance to live.
My friends, the forest industry is our canary. Let’s pay attention.
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