Clear-cutting in South Is Latest Forestry Flap

PARSONS, Tenn. - Herbert Volner, who has lived all his 70 years here near the Tennessee River, walks a craggy ridge that until last month held a forest of oak trees. Now, it is a lunar landscape of stumps, dead branches and carved-out logging roads.

"It looks terrible," he grumbles, spitting tobacco juice into the red dust. "The way they're destroying our hardwood, there'll be not much left."

Mr. Volner is hardly an environmentalist. Actually, he has logged timber himself, for nearly 50 years and runs a 14-employee sawmill company, R.L. Volner & Son, that makes hardwood railroad ties. But Mr. Volner has joined a wave of unlikely Southerners who say logging in the region is out of control.

Remember the spotted-owl flap in the Northwest? The battle over industrial logging isn't over. It just moved. After the federal government drastically slowed harvesting in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, big forest-product companies have scrambled to tap the nation's last big wood basket: the South.

In the Northwest, the federal government could be tough with paper and lumber companies in its defense of owls and salamanders because it owned much, of the land. But the South Is another matter. More than 85% of Southern timberland is in private hands, and logging there is largely unregulated. Loggers aren't required to check for endangered species - or even notify most Southern states before cutting.

Chipping Away

At the center of the growing storm are "chip" mills. These relatively low-cost plants each can vacuum up more than 3,000 acres of trees and grind them into more than 250,000 tons of wafers a year. The wafers are in turn sent to pulp and paper mills - hardwood chips mostly to make office paper, softwood for corrugated boxes and brown paper.

The number of chip mills has grown as paper companies have beefed up their Southeastern operations in the 1990s in response to the supply pinch in the Northwest, where harvesting sank 45% between 1989 and 1997, according to Ehingir & Associates, a Eugene, Ore., consulting firm. In fact, the number of chip, mills in operation has tripled since 1986, according to Timber Processing, a trade publication. The U.S. Forest Service, which began counting the mills only last year in response to the public outcry, says about 156 were in operation in Its 13-state Southern region as of last December.

Endangered Bats


Critics, including tourism executives and local officials, say the mills encourage clear-cutting, trashing local landscapes and harming wildlife; indeed, the U.S. Forest Service last month halted logging on a national forest in North Carolina after environmentalists found two-dozen Indiana bats there, which are on the endangered-species list. "We think it's going to hurt the future," says Billy Povlin, president of the Chamber of Commerce for rural Humphreys County, Tenn.

But on the other side are many small landowners, who are grateful for a new market for their smaller and lower-quality trees. "It's nobody else's business," bristles Allene McPherson, 69 years old, whose neighbors complained when she had 180 acres of her hardwood forest in Chatham County, N.C., cleared.

Legal and political skirmishes have broken out across the South - from North Carolina, where environmentalists this past spring chained themselves to a chip mill's crane, to Tennessee, where two counties in 1997 imposed special taxes on trees cut for pulp wood. 

Rival Row

Even paper companies are squabbling about how much tree-cutting is too much. Timber titan International Paper jolted the industry by siding with environmentalists two years ago in opposing a proposed Weyerhaeuser Co. chip mill in Russellville, Ark. International Paper, which operates its own chip mill at its Pine Bluff, Ark., pulp-and-paper complex about 100 miles away, says it will oppose any new mills that it believes threaten the region's "sustainable fiber base." Rivals say International Paper's true intent is to limit competition for chips, something the company denies.

This past spring, four federal agencies and 13 Southern states began a two-year joint study of how the stepped-up harvesting is affecting the South's economy and ecology. Study director John Greis, of U.S. Forest Service's Atlanta office, says the goal is to provide facts for potential changes In policy at the state or federal level. The timber industry, fearing. possible regulation, is closely watching outcome.

The federal government's most recent data on Southern hardwood show that in the mid-1990s, 3.4 billion cubic feet were removed annually, while about 4.78 bill cubic feet grew. All sides agree that since then, logging rates, along with urban sprawl, have ramped up sharply, though numbers haven't yet been compiled.

Yet on a low-altitude flight over the 120-mile-long Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee, it is clear that the Southern landscape is changing. A sweeping panorama of hardwood forests is interrupted by a patchwork of clear-cuts as large as 500 acres each, which give way to large pine plantations that have been replanted in the clear-cuts.


Researchers at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., studied aerial photographs taken of one county on the plateau, Grundy County, by the U.S. Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency. The study found that new - pine forests which are fast-growing and more lucrative to timber owners than hardwood trees - covered 15,600 acres, or 12% of the county's plateau region last year. That compares with 1.7% in 1981.

The rapid conversion of these lands to pine plantations is "a vast experiment," says Jonathan Evans, a biology professor who helped perform the study. "And we have no control.

Many of the county's residents share the professor's sentiment. Jay Birdwell, a welder who lives in Grundy County, awoke one day two years ago to the sound of chain saws. By the time he could investigate, 15 of his 50 acres of forest had been clear-cut, as loggers crossed onto his property, he says. In the process, a spring on his land was destroyed. "I'm not an environmentalist, but I do know what happened to me," Mr. Birdwell says. "And it was pretty cruddy." He is demanding $750,000 in damages from David Burrill - the owner of the logging company involved - and others in a suit filed in state court in Altamont, Tenn. Mr. Burrill says he did nothing wrong and that he owned the timber rights to the property at the time of the cut - something Mr. Birdwell disputes.

The incident led Tennessee water-quality violations, fining him to $22,500 and ordering him to fix the spring. Shortly thereafter, the state implemented a "bad actors" policy, setting increased fines and other penalties against loggers who fail to follow state guidelines. Mur. Burrill says all the "corrective action" has been completed, and that he plans to vigorously contest Mr. Birdwell's suit.


Indeed, the Bovenders typify the dilemma faced by many small timberland owners. When they clear-cut about 70 acres of red and white oak on their property, neighbors complained that the Bovenders were ruining the aesthetics and ecology of the area. The Bovenders say they need the money from harvesting, in part to pay their yearly $4,000 property-tax bill; also, harvesting allows them to qualify for a $1,500 annual property-tax exemption, which is granted only to timberland owners who farm commercially. Mrs. Bovender notes that at least she and her husband won't have to sell out to real-estate developers, another pressure on Southern forests.

Still, the two worry about disappearing hardwoods and have hired a consultant to draw up a plan that would allow them to harvest without clear-cutting. "I feel like we're environmentalists, too," Mrs. Bovender says.

The chip mill that buys the Bovenders' trees has been a lightning rod for local opposition. In 1995, when Shannon A. Buckley was hired to start the mill for Willamette, he says he heard some grumbling from county residents about the project, which was intended to feed the Portland, Ore., paper company's Hawesville, Ky., complex. But, he adds: "I don't think anybody could have forecast how it would have mushroomed."

What followed was a series of community meetings, angry phone calls, local news stories and anti-chip-mill rallies. Opponents also tried to find legal grounds to stop the mill from opening, but quickly learned that chip mills don't tend to violate the kinds of pollution laws on which most such suits are based. In desperation, the opponents threatened to sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the Clean Water Act for allegedly failing to protect two small creeks on the mill property. But Willamette moved railroad tracks and built retaining walls to protect the creeks, and added buffers to quiet the plant's noise. Ultimately, no suit was filed.

The plant opened last year as planned - but that hasn't stopped opponents. In May, when environmental activists blocked the chip mill's entrance and chained themselves to a crane, Mr. Buckley had them arrested.

"Many, many people know now that there's an issue with chip mills in the Southeast," says Ed Stein,38, a hotel maintenance worker in Asheville, N.C., who spent a night in jail after being arrested at the demonstration. Mr. Buckley says the plant tries to be a good neighbor, but, he adds: "We're not going to apologize for being in the forest-products business. That's what we do."

Behind the scramble for Southern timber has been a change in production techniques. Companies this past decade have eliminated old-fashioned wood yards and set up "satellite" chip mills in their place, a move that reduces transportation and labor costs. Also, the mills themselves have become more efficient, with remote-controlled cranes to move logs into a whirl of high-precision bark-stripping and cutting devices. In fact, most chip mills employ only six to eight workers.

Also driving demand: exports. The massive Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway through northeast Mississippi and west Alabama opened in 1985, unlocking the Deep South's commodities to the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, Asian countries were increasing their papermaking capabilities, and demand for U.S. Wood chips jumped. Hardwood-chip prices rose 40% in the first halt of the decade to $23 a ton but have since slipped below $20 because of stepped up production and Asia's economic problems.

The spike in exports, however, has caused some nasty spats between rival paper companies. International Paper two years ago sided with environmentalists against its fellow paper companies in a debate in the North Carolina over whether to delete wood chips from the commodities that qualify for a state export tax credit. The company's complaint was that other countries, especially Korea and Japan, could easily buy U.S. chips - encouraging overharvesting - while still erecting barriers to U.S. paper products. Negotiations grew so tense that lobbyists for International Paper and Weyerhaeuser got into an uncharacteristic shouting match after one proposed compromise failed, the lobbyists say. In the end, International Paper lost the fight and the tax credit stayed.

International Paper isn't the only one to break ranks. Mr. Volner, the saw miller here in Parsons, Tenn., first started logging with his father in the 1950s, dragging felled trees out of the woods by mule. Mr. Volner says he is sorry that a battle line is being drawn between timber owners worried about regulation and those like himself who are concerned that "hardwood timber just won't be here in 20 or 30 years."

Mr. Volner went so far as to testify a few years ago against clear-cutting before a special state task force. More recently, angered by his local farm bureau's advocacy of clear-cuts, he resigned his membership after decades.

Last month, after he walked the scarred ridgetop not far from his mill, Mr. Volner drove his red pickup to the county courthouse in Parsons to find out who owned the property. It was Champion International Corp. of Stamford, Conn., which bought the 354 acres in 1995.

"If they left that timber alone, we would have something that's be worth something. But they're just destroying it," he says.

A Champion spokesman says that the tract had been heavily cut before the company bought it, and that clear-cutting, properly done, leaving about 100 acres standing, was the best use for it. He says the company plans to replant in pine.

By Dean Starkman
The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 1999.