Let’s be real about what kills timber jobs.
We need timber for jobs, housing and wood products.
We need the forests for clean air, water, fisheries and recreation economy jobs.
The timber industry wants to cut down our few remaining fire-resistant mature state forests.
They tell us they need that wood to support local jobs and mills.
They don’t say that timber companies are shipping vast quantities of raw logs overseas every year from private lands, 291 million board-feet in latest data.
That is almost two-thirds of what is harvested from state lands annually, which, by law, can’t be exported.
Then lumber and wood products for construction, $1.1 billion in 2023, are imported from Canada to Washington.
The other big job killer is the highly mechanized, expensive machinery that replaced most loggers in the 1980s.
Dave Upthegrove, a Democrat and candidate for state Commissioner of Public Lands, proposes we invest more in forest health. That means harvesting plantation stands in stock, leaving the few older forests to anchor the ecology so forests can grow back while protecting our watersheds and ecologically harvesting mid-age stands.
If we do that, we will once again need more skilled foresters, scaled harvests will need loggers, and we could have timber supply that stays here for local jobs and housing, rather than investment portfolios for timber brokers.
It’s not the environment vs. timber, it’s what wood, when, where and how, and who benefits.
Our choice.
Vote Upthegrove.
Patricia Jones
Quilcene