For over a decade, the Forest Service has worked to create consensus on a transition from old growth logging to young growth sales on the Tongass National Forest. In 2016, this effort produced a historic agreement by the Tongass Advisory Council (TAC), whose members came from environmental and industry groups, Alaska Native Corporations, the State and hunting and fishing interests.
The TAC believed additional forest inventory was needed to support young growth product manufacturing and marketing research. They knew that the transition had been slowed by perceptions that not enough young growth is currently available, as well as uncertainties about the economics of harvesting, milling and marketing small-diameter wood. But new data from 2016-2017 inventory work conducted by the Forest Service, and recent pilot young growth milling study development efforts undertaken by the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Lab (PNW) show how 2020 could be the year to begin transition from old growth to young growth logging on the Tongass.
Here’s why.
In 2016, with a helpful push from U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Forest Service received $3 million from Congress to begin inventory on 50,000 acres of young growth stands. With 24,000 acres now inventoried, results show young growth timber could soon jump-start the transition.
This new data confirms that young growth trees are larger in diameter, straighter and taller than anticipated, and produce more merchantable volume per acre on a 55-year harvest schedule than originally envisioned. Significantly, the inventoried younger stands aged 40-49 years already appear to provide as much merchantable volume per acre as the 60-70 year old stands. This may be because of better post-logging slash removal rules the Forest Service instituted around the time these younger stands were cut.
The inventory results also suggest that from 2020 to 2024, 45 million board feet of wood supply could be made available to Alaska mills every year from readily accessible, previously-clearcut stands outside of stream buffers, steep slopes and sensitive karst lands. And that supply could increase to a 53 million board feet annually starting 2025.
And if the wood were locally milled instead of being exported whole, every 1 million board feet of wood processed could support approximately three full-time family wage jobs. Because the timber industry in Southeast is small, the resulting 135-159 jobs would represent a welcomed increase in job creation from the national forest.
Equally importantly, this rapidly approaching “wall of wood” could be accessed from existing open Forest Service roads, saving taxpayer dollars, and would be far less likely to be appealed or litigated, greatly reducing conflict and uncertainty. Consider this: the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon transitioned from old growth to young growth logging in the 1990s and has yet to experience even a single timber sale appeal, let alone any lawsuit.
With this new information, two pathways forward are called for:
First: Only 12 percent of accessible open-road young growth acres on the Tongass are over 50 years old. Understanding future volumes from 40 to 49-year-old trees, which make up more than 30 percent of open-road young growth acres, is essential to determining how fast a transition can occur. Much of the $1 million Congress just appropriated in March for more inventory work on the Tongass should be earmarked for this younger age class.
Second: The Forest Service PNW Lab should be immediately funded to move forward with its milling study. During the past two years, the lab has been finalizing a peer-reviewed study design to document wood volume and grade from 50-plus year-old trees to be processed at three Alaska mills. The study would also determine market demand for products manufactured from Tongass young growth, and field test small log processing technology upgrades for Alaska mills to efficiently process this new wood supply. Securing funding to harvest project volume this summer is crucial to determining how fast a transition can occur.
With the right Forest Service inventory work and pilot milling study done, 2020 could be the year that the Forest Service stops embroiling the region in controversy and gets going on the transition away from logging old growth — a move that is so important to residents and visitors alike, to subsistence users and to important drivers of Southeast Alaska’s economy, including the forest products industry.
• Catherine M. Mater is the president of Mater Engineering and is the lead author of the 2016 three-year study on the Tongass Second Growth Transition Project.
