Environmental challenges, economics cut state logging

BIG SPRINGS, Ariz. - Forest ranger Scott Nannenga points to the ponderosa pines on one side of the logging road his government-issue truck is traveling.

``Fifteen years ago, all these large trees would have been harvested,'' says Nannenga, the supervisory forester for this part of the Kaibab National Forest. The grove of widely spaced trees, the site of logging operations four years ago, includes some ``yellowbellies'' - ponderosa pines more than a century old with distinctive, yellowish bark.

``Over to the north,'' Nannenga says, pointing to the other side of the road, ``there's an example of the older management practice. There's no mature trees left in this stand.''

Most of the trees on that side are no bigger around than your wrist. Nearly all trees but the smallest ones were cut down in that area during the 1980s.

Times have changed dramatically since then. A revolution in timber management practices, repeated challenges by environmentalists and simple economics have combined to make logging increasingly rare in the high, dry forests of the Southwest.

``We think the timber industry is on the way out in Arizona,'' said Peter Galvin, a biologist with the Tucson-based Southwest Center for Biological Diversity. The center is one of several environmental groups whose administrative appeals and lawsuits are a big reason for logging's decline.

The U.S. Forest Service sold the rights to cut 377 million board feet of timber over 185,000 acres of national forest in Arizona and New Mexico in 1987, the region's logging heyday. That fell to just a million board feet on 4,190 acres in 1996, when environmental groups had the region's logging plans tied up in court.

Legal logging blocks

``They have, over the last decade by using these appeals and litigations, greatly raised our costs of doing business. They've also forced some changes in the rules.''

Another reason for logging's downfall is simple economics. With fewer large, profitable trees available to cut, most sawmills in the Southwest have simply gone out of business.

At the Kaibab National Forest, for example, many past timber sales went to Kaibab Industries Inc. The company had a sawmill in Fredonia, the town at the base of the Kaibab Plateau where the forest rangers and loggers lived.

But Kaibab Industries closed its Fredonia sawmill a few years ago and now is out of the timber business entirely. Several times recently, the Kaibab National Forest has advertised timber sales only to have no one bid on them, Nannenga said.

``The reason that the timber harvest has declined is that there's no money in it anymore for the big timber corporations,'' said Sam Hitt, president of the New Mexico-based environmental group Forest Guardians. ``The big trees are gone, and there's no reason for the large corporations to invest in the equipment to use the smaller trees.''

Johnson said the problem is not that there are fewer big trees around, but that regulations and lawsuits forbid cutting many of them.

``There's plenty of trees,'' Johnson said. ``What we have had in the past few years is a tremendous influx of sales with small trees. We're looking at trying to use the sales not to supply jobs and boards so much as to treat the ecosystem and improve the condition of it.''

Big blow to small towns

``We had three mills here and we now have what you might call half a mill. It's gone from just over 500 employees to about 40,'' said Jerry Stewart, director of the Round Valley Chamber of Commerce in Springerville. ``It's what you would call the end of the timber industry here.''

The northeastern Arizona town near the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest was forced to shift its economy from timber to tourism to pick up the slack, Stewart said.

``After logging went bad, a lot of people had to leave,'' said longtime Springerville resident Dutch Phelps, 71.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, aren't declaring victory. They say the decline of logging in the Southwest may be too little, too late - and they agree with Forest Service officials who say the forests crammed with smaller trees pose a terrible fire danger.

``If people have the idea that everything is better in the forest, that's not true. There's still destructive logging going on,'' Galvin said. ``When you log the hell out of an area for 20 years, you don't recover that in five years.''

Still, the response to forest fires has been another battleground between the Forest Service and groups like the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity. After the Bridger complex fire charred about 53,000 acres on the Kaibab National Forest in 1996, the center tried and failed to block so-called ``salvage logging'' in part of the burned area.

At the fringe of the Bridger fire site, Nannenga points to a cluster of about five tall, partially burned trees. They were saved from the chain saws under Forest Service regulations requiring several living trees and snags, or dead trees, per acre.

``These (trees) are probably going to die, but they're right on the line, so we're going to save them,'' Nannenga said. ``If they die, they'll be snags, and if they live, they'll be trees. We want to err on the side of conservation and give them a chance to live.''

Galvin said his group tried to block the Bridger timber sale because it allowed cutting of too many scorched but living trees.