Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [25]
In the decades since the Clearcut Controversy, Forest Service annual timber sales have decreased by more than 80%—in part because of environmental regulations mandated in the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and requirements for national forests to maintain habitats for all species, and in part because of the decline in easily accessible big trees due to logging itself. When the Forest Service now proposes a timber sale, environmental organizations file protests and appeals that take up to 10 years to resolve and that make logging less economic even if the appeals are ultimately denied. Virtually all my Montana friends, even those who consider themselves dedicated environmentalists, told me that they consider the pendulum to have swung too far in the direction away from logging. They feel frustrated that logging proposals appearing well justified to them (such as for the purpose of reducing the forest fire fuel loads discussed below) encounter long delays in the courts. But the environmental organizations filing the protests have concluded that they should suspect the usual disguised pro-logging agenda behind any seemingly reasonable government proposal involving logging. All of the Bitterroot Valley’s former timber mills have now closed, because so little timber is available from Montana publicly owned timberland, and because the valley’s privately owned timberland has already been logged twice. The mills’ closing has meant the loss of many high-paying unionized jobs, as well as of traditional Montanan self-image.
Elsewhere in Montana, outside the Bitterroot Valley, much private timberland remains, most of it originating from government land grants made in the 1860s to the Northern Pacific Railroad as an inducement for building a transcontinental railroad. In 1989 that land was spun off from the railroads to a Seattle-based entity called Plum Creek Timber Company, organized for tax purposes as a real estate investment trust (so that its earnings will be taxed at lower rates as capital gains), and now the largest owner of private timberland in Montana and the second-largest one in the U.S. I’ve read Plum Creek’s publications and talked with their director of corporate affairs, Bob Jirsa, who defends Plum Creek’s environmental policies and sustainable forestry practices. I’ve also heard numerous Montana friends vent unfavorable opinions about Plum Creek. Typical of their complaints are the following: “Plum Creek cares only about the bottom line”; “they are not interested in sustainable forestry”; “they have a corporate culture, and their goal is ‘Get out more logs!’ ”; “Plum Creek earns money in whatever way it can from the land”; “they do weed control only if someone complains.”
Should these polarized views remind you of the views that I already quoted about mining companies, you’re right. Plum Creek is organized as a profit-making business, not as a charity. If Montana citizens want Plum Creek to do things that would diminish its profits, it’s their responsibility to get their politicians to pass and enforce laws demanding those things, or to buy out the lands and manage them differently. Looming over this dispute is a basic hard fact: Montana’s cold dry climate and high elevation place most of its land at a relative disadvantage for forestry. Trees grow several times faster in the U.S. Southeast and Northeast than in Montana. While Plum Creek’s largest land holdings are in Montana, four other states (Arkansas, Georgia, Maine, and Mississippi) each produce more timber for Plum Creek on only 60 to 64% of its Montana acreage. Plum Creek cannot get a high rate of return from its Montana logging operations: it has to pay taxes and fire protection on the land while sitting on it for 60 to 80 years before harvesting trees, whereas trees reach a harvestable size in