Does it pay to let chips fall where they may?

Fred Cubbage, who holds a doctorate in forest economics, heads the forestry department at N.C. State. Dan Richter has a doctorate in soil science and ecology from Duke, where he is a professor. They're studying the economic and environmental impacts of stand-alone wood-chip mills in North Carolina.

BNC: What's all the fuss about?

Cubbage: It's that chip mills lead to clear-cutting. The thesis behind that is that timber companies are putting in a mill and clearing a 75-mile radius around it. Some of the controversy, too, is the traditional environmental opposition to timber harvesting in general and clear-cutting in particular. That's been a theme since the 1960s. The trend has been for less harvesting, less clear-cutting on public land like national forests. The chip-mill debate is an extension of that debate to private land. Of course, then you get into the larger question of the public interest in protecting forests vs. private property rights.

BNC: Do environmentalists have a point?

I haven't run the calculations yet, but it would be extremely doubtful that chip mills would have as large an impact on the landscape as environmental groups say. But that's what we're trying to figure out.

BNC: Why are chip mills increasing?

Ever since we've bought wood for pulp and paper, since 1909 or something, we've had some type of chipper at plants - taken round logs, broken them into chips and fed them into a digest to become pulp and paper. The thing that has attracted the current attention and dissatisfaction is the extension of chip mills to stand-alone facilities where wood is chipped, then shipped to different plants or overseas. That's a more recent phenomenon.

BNC: Why is it happening?

A lot of reasons. It's not good to bring tons of wood into one large mill. You run into a logistics problem of storing a lot of wood in a place where you've already got a manufacturing facility. Chip mills also provide more economical means to ship wood longer distances. It's difficult to ship tree-length logs. They're big. They're unwieldy. They throw bark and junk all over the road. And they can't be loaded well because they're heavy on one end, light on the other.

BNC: From '90 to '96, chip exports grew 28% a year. Where did they go?

Probably Japan. Japan is willing to pay a higher price for our chips than people locally are. They have a large pulp and paper industry for domestic consumption and Asian export. And they're short on fiber.

BNC: If exports are growing and harvests on public land are decreasing, is available timber in North Carolina diminishing?

Richter: That's an issue of great uncertainty. For many decades, probably from the '30s on, the forest has increased, both in the amount of wood and the amount of land. But with the recent boom in population, less and less of the forested land is able to be commercially utilized for timber. At the same time, the forest is increasingly valuable because it's the principal supplier of the highest quality water. The water demand of North Carolina has increased tremendously the last couple of decades.

BNC: So the crux of the conflict is water quality and a healthy environment vs. jobs and renewable resources?

As an environmental historian recently said, "Agriculture is the South." For hundreds of years that was the case. But in the Piedmont and the mountains, that's no longer the case. One result is this incredible forest resource that has regenerated on cultivated and pastured lands. One of the ways rural economies can benefit is by forest management. A broad view would see that this is quite a bit less demanding on the soil and water than the several hundred years of agriculture that preceded it.

BNC: Part of the problem is that we impose city standards on agricultural areas?

Cubbage: Have you been to Caswell County? There's a Hardee's there and not much else besides a lot of forest. To what extent can you impose Cary values on Yanceyville? When you move to the mountains, those debates about land use and its effects on tourism and recreation become much more contentious.

BNC: How do you think things will end?

Dan sent me a copy of a letter from several famous ecologists opposing the expansion of wood-chip mills in the South. Among them is Edward O. Wilson at Harvard, arguably the most famous conservation biologist in the country. That suggests it will be extremely widespread. It may well turn into a mini-referendum on Southern forestry.