Timberlands tomorrow.

TIMBERLANDS TOMORROW Industrial foresters hear the winds of change shrieking as they gear up to supply the nation's appetite for wood products in the 21st century.

When America's industrial foresters peer into the crystal ball to foretell what lies ahead in the 21st century, they see a big dark cloud that wasn't there a decade ago. It's a cloud that shapes itself into the letter E. And the E-word is Environmentalism.

"No question about it," says Scott Wallinger, senior vice president of Westcavo Corporation and immediate past president of the American Forestry Association. "Industrial forestry is operating in a new arena. We're dealing today with a population that is better educated, better off financially, and essentially urban. They're concerned with such things as water quality, estuaries, and recreation, and we're going to have to address these environmental issues more aggressively than we have to this point."

On the other side of the country, John McMahon, Weyerhaeuser's vice president in charge of the corporation's 5.6 million acres of timberland and an AFA director, agrees. "Our biggest challenge is convincing the public and its elected officials that the industrial forestlands can be managed for timber production while ensuring a high degree of environmental protection," he says. "Environmental concerns are sure to increase in the decade ahead of us, and our challenge is to achieve full productivity and an economic return to our stockholders while meeting those concerns."

"Industrial foresters are on the firing line," sums up Glenn Wiggins, vice president of Washington state's pioneering Merrill & Ring timber firm. And from New England's north woods to California's redwood country, his colleagues agree that nothing looms more menacingly in the future of industrial forest management that his battle over the environment. And no other factor will have more influence on how industrial forestlands will be managed in the decades to come.

"We're past the point where we're making muddy water," admits Bradford Wyman, woodlands manager of James River Corporation in Berlin, New Hampshire. "And we need to work on limitations on clearcutting, although I don't see how we can eliminate it." All across the nation, industrial forest managers say their companies are having to pay more attention to such matters as erosion control, slash burning, road construction, riparian zones, wildlife habitat, and recreational values.

Even so, few are ready to jump on Jerry Franklin's New Forestry bandwagon (AMERICAN FORESTS, November/December 1989). New Forestry includes such practices as leaving eight to 15 large green trees for each acre of cutover land, leaving behind woody debris rather than burning or chipping it, and bunching clearcuts adjacent to existing cutover areas.

"Franklin has some interesting concepts, but I question if they are applicable to industrial forestlands that have to be managed with economic return as the fundamental consideration," says Weyerhaeuser's McMahon, and that lukewarm concession is about as far as most industrial foresters will go toward accepting Franklin's sweeping proposals.

Yet all the forestry managers I talked with agreed that industry absolutely has to do a better job of getting its story across. (See "Industry Takes Its Show on the Road," page 60.)

"Property ownership is a collection of rights granted by society," Wallinger explains. "But the public concept of these rights is changing. If we aren't willing to change too, we'll get into a tug of war with industry on one end of the rope and everybody else on the other. We just can't win a tug of war unless we get some of the people in the middle to come over and pull with us."

Steve Berntsen, director of an ITT Rayonier limited partnership that controls 400,000 acres of Washington forestland, agrees: "Industrial forest owners will have to make adaptations in their management philosophy. The larger the ownership, the more public concerns there are over such resources as wildlife and water quality." He argues that the problem arises in "balancing these longstanding rights of property ownership against how much say the public has in how we manage our private property."

Donald F. Smith, Boise-Cascade's vice president for timberlands, puts it more harshly. "Ignorance is driving lots of these environmental restraints," he maintains, "and we have to learn how to deal with this ignorance. Looking into the future, it's going to take a really serious educational effort."

Forest managers agree that the urbanization of America is exacerbating these concerns as suburban sprawl bumps against, or even into, productive forestlands. "The new inhabitants of suburbia will dictate the terms of how their neighbors log their property - if at all," is the gloomy view of Harold R. Walt, chairman of California's State Board of Forestry.

No one is saying that America's industrial forestlands are doomed. But when the managers of those timberlands look ahead to the 21st century, they foresee the need for revolutionary changes to balance demands of a growing nation for lumber and pulp and paper products against our population's new environmental concerns. As John McMahon puts it: "As timber gets more valuable, we simply will have to move toward more production per acre. The continued growth of the GNP will keep pushing up the demand for industrial wood products."

With acquisition of more timberland virtually ruled out by soaring land costs, and with harvest levels being reduced in national forests that are devoted increasingly to other uses, a lot more wood will have to come from the present industrial acreage.

As forest managers take aim on this target of producing more timber from the same acres most agree that though they've seen more changes over the past few years than in all the years that have gone before, the decade to come will bring even more. Included will be wider use of genetics, better timber utilization, new harvesting equipment, a broadened species mix, and new wood products.

Along with these changes in forestry management, a shift is developing in ownership patterns that forebodes a different future ahead. What I am referring to is the new phenomenon of institutional investors, primarily big insurance companies, buying up industrial forestland. Most forest managers see this as a positive development, for it means forests will be managed for long-term productivity rather than for immediate supply.

The word genetics wasn't in the vocabulary of old-time loggers. But it is sure to play an increasing role in achieving the higher productivity that will be demanded from industrial forests.

"We're getting away from relying on the uncertainties of natural reseeding," says McMahon, pointing out that 75 percent of Weyerhaeuser's conifer seedlings - and 100 percent in its southern pine holdings - now come from genetically improved stock.

The process begins with foresters banding off plots of about 100 trees in even-age single-species stands, usually Douglas-fir in the Pacific Northwest. By visual examination they select the best tree for diameter and height, then drill out a core to check the growth rate as shown by the rings and to measure the specific gravity, or density, of the wood. Through this process they usually select a couple of outstanding trees for each plot. A scion, or branch tip, is nipped off the tree and grafted onto root stock at a seed orchard such as Weyerhaeuser's at Sequim, Washington.

In this breeding orchard each tree has a clone number, and pollenization is carefully controlled so that the ancestry of every seed can be traced back to its exact parent tree out in the forest. Seeds are bagged separately and sent to a Weyerhaeuser nursery, but the selection process is continued at the orchard, with the goal of making each new generation an improvement over its predecessor. All this would be impossible without the computer, which has come to play an increasingly important role in forestry technology over the past decade - as it has in every other facet of modern life.

"Seventy-five percent of what we do is paperwork," says Bob Wright, Weyerhaeuser's seed-orchard manager in Sequim. "We couldn't operate without computers - we'd have to hire everyone in the county to keep track of all the detail!"

John McMahon predicts that starting in the '90s, more industrial forest owners "will see the benefit of continuing investment in genetics, especially in the South." But improved stock is not the only thing foresters have in mind to increase productivity.

"We're moving toward a `plantation economy' in industrial forestland," Wallinger of Westvaco says, "and away from the historical pattern of acquiring woodland in a natural state and then managing it." He believes this will bring more such agricultural practices as fertilization.

Foresters also will have to take into account changing climatic conditions as the century ends, Walt predicts. They will have to develop species that can adapt to global warming and be more resistant to air pollution and acid rain.

Meanwhile, better utilization of existing timber resources is already increasing productivity, and farsighted forest managers see that improvement as even more important in the future.

"What I've seen happen in the 16 years I've been in this business is just amazing," Berntsen says. "Utilization has improved both the quality and size of all species we're harvesting. We're finding uses for ever junkier wood, and using species you couldn't even get people to look at a few years ago, like alder." (See AMERICAN FORESTS, January/February 1990.)

He adds that northwest foresters are now eyeing lodgepole pine, another onetime "weed tree," for possible harvesting. And now that the redwoods have virtually disappeared from California's timber production, Walt even foresees a possible commercial future for the lowly madrone.

Forest managers agree that burning slash (debris left from logging), one of the major environmental concerns, is rapidly being phased out as improved utilization leaves less slash to burn and "whole-tree logging" becomes the norm. And McMahon points out that the higher petroleum prices go, the more demand there will be for these forest residuals for use as boiler fuel.

Another way to produce more timber from the same acreage is to speed up the rotation cycle, which now runs about 50 to 55 years for northwestern Douglas-fir and hemlock, about the same for northeastern fir and spruce, 40 to 60 years for East Coast hardwoods, and 25 to 35 years for southern pine. Most forest managers are seeking to shorten this cycle by improving silvicultural practices, but a recent study by Terry Brown, searcher, casts doubt on these attempts. Brown asserts that when trees grow faster they accumulate more juvenile wood, which he contends has more undesirable characteristics, such as warpage in dimension lumber and lower pulping value.

But forest managers counter that while young trees do have a larger percentage of juvenile wood at the core, this part of the tree can be used for chips, and as the tree ages, the juvenile wood ascends to the tip.

Going hand in hand with better utilization to spur forest productivity is improved harvesting equipment.

"The old days of all that hand cutting and slash burning are over," Walt affirms. "Sweden is light years ahead of us, and we need to look at their type of engineering, which is highly mechanized." Smith agrees that as old-growth disappears and better utilization brings ever smaller trees to the landings, logging systems will have to change. "You can't take toothpicks out of the woods with a helicopter," he says.

Wallinger points out that industrial forests' transition away from random woodland growth and toward evenage plantations "will create new opportunities for an evolution to a more agricultural type of wood harvesting," with trees planted like row crops.

Other farsighted forest managers predict that coming decades will see more widespread use of equipment just now showing up in the woods: hydraulic faller-bunchers that slice off trees at ground level; de-limbers, or harvesters, that eliminate the dangerous and labor-intensive work of bucking trees in favor of picking up the whole tree, slicing off limbs, and sawing it into lengths ready to load on the truck; and forwarders, or mobile skidders, navigating slopes up to 45 degrees and bringing larger loads back to the landing with less terrain damage. Such machines replace traditional equipment that foresters agree is too heavy, cumbersome, and too apt to cause severe ground damage.

But improvements in utilization will not be confined to the forests. "Reconstituted wood is the thing of the future," Walt asserts. As his colleagues look to the next century, they agree that the wood-products market will see revolutionary changes.

Robert Kellison, research forester at North Carolina State University, also sees a strong future for reconstituted wood, made by gluing chips and pressing them into such products a particleboard, waferboard, and oriented strandboard, which looks like veneer or plywood and can be used in construction, roof decking, wallboard, and forms. He predicts that by 1995 this new product will have 40 percent of the plywood market.

Oregon State University's Terry Brown adds that some southern plywood mills already are using new spindleless lathes that can peel logs down to a one-inch core, compared with the standard four inches or more. He also foresees more laminated lumber and fewer 2 x 20s and 2 x 12s. "And there won't be as much clear wood in the future for things like molding," he adds. "We're going to have to do as Japan does - saw lumber thinner, and use more glued veneer."

The new look in industrial forestry will carry right on through the wood-products industry. Mills on the East Coast long since adjusted to smaller logs, and West Coast mills will follow suit or perish. The last sawmills built to handle big old-growth logs in the Northwest was in the '70s, while the newest being built on the conifer-rich Olympic Peninsula is geared to handle only smaller second-growth timber. Wood products will be manufactured from pieces as well as whole logs, as is the practice now in alder processing, and mills are taking logs down to three-inch tips that they had no use for a decade ago.

Pulp mills will also see radical improvements, Kellison predicts, with the yield of dry fiber increasing as much as 50 percent per ton as the mills move away from traditional chemical processing to thermal mechanical and chemothermal processes.

The overseas market should be even more profitable to American forest industry in the future, Walt predicts. "China needs 18 million home starts a year, compared with three million in the U.S.," he says. "And they have no wood! But to meet that market, we'll need to produce finished or reconstituted lumber the way they want it, which means cutting to the metric system."

In summary, forest managers agree that though change has come with breathtaking speed the past few years, that's only a foretaste of what the 21st century will bring. For the most part, they're optimistic about that future. They don't see much expansion of industrial forest acreage, but they predict an ever-increasing demand for forest products, which in turn will require much higher productivity. "We will continue to see a growing demand for wood products, and any kind of positive economic growth will add big numbers to that demand," says Boise-Cascade's Donald Smith. "But the public will have to decide whether that demand will be satisfied by Brazil's rainforests or from our managed forests."

With all these problems and challenges - would you want your son to be an industrial forester?

"I've told my two sons to stay away from it," says ITT Rayonier's Berntsen. "I don't think it will require as many people in the future."

But most of his colleagues disagree.

"There's a good future for young people in forest management," McMahon contends. "But competition will be keener, and careers will be focused more on good silviculture and forest productivity." Smith sees it as "a very productive career, with lots of satisfaction and rewards in a business that thrives on imagination and hard work." Or as Wyman puts it: "The career challenge is to prove that you can cut wood and still retain our forests for future generations."

But that's really more than just a career challenge - it is the overriding issue facing every industrial forest manager as a new century looms ahead.

PHOTO : This claw is one of the pieces of equipment used to harvest second-growth Douglas-fir near Shelton, Washington.

Earl Clark, a freelancer from Port Angeles, Washington, wrote about alder for the January/February issue of AMERICAN FORESTS.