NEW SECURITY FOR FOREST COMMUNITIES

DAHL J. KIRKPATRICK.

The Sustained-Yield Unit Act was designed to permit the Federal forest-management agencies to combine public and privately owned forest lands for joint sustained-yield operation. It also authorized the designation of dependent forest communities as the manufacturing points for Federal timber.

The need for such legislation as a measure to assure community stability was recognized on the Pacific coast a generation ago when the ultimate result of excessively rapid private timber liquidation became apparent. The measure was enacted by the Seventy-eighth Congress on March 29, 1944, as Public Law 273 (58 Stat. 132; 16 U. S. C. 583-583i).

The law promises to be of considerable help to communities that depend on the forest industries for their economic support. It can assure sustained-yield management on large areas of the private forest lands that otherwise might be subjected to liquidation with the inevitable aftermath of community deterioration and ruin.

An example of how the legislation works is illustrated by a review of the first case to which it was applied, the Shelton Cooperative Sustained-Yield Unit.

The Simpson Logging Co. started its operations in Shelton, the seat of Mason County, Wash., in 1895. At first, the company's operations were confined to logging. The entire output was sold on the log market of Puget Sound. The company grew and prospered with the new community. By the time the Sustained-Yield Unit Act was adopted, the frontier town of Shelton had become a flourishing town of 4,800 population, and the Simpson Logging Co. had matured into a substantial concern that operated two large sawmills and a Douglas-fir plywood plant at Shelton, as well as two outlying logging camps in the tributary forest area. The other important source of industrial support for the community was a pulp mill of an annual capacity of 75,000 tons.

DURING THE FIRST HALF CENTURY of timber operations in and about Shelton, the vast virgin forest, which had stretched back almost endlessly from the shores of Puget Sound, had shrunk to an alarming degree. Serious losses from forest fires in 1902 and active timber cutting by several large operators pushed back the forest frontier.

Then, one by one, as the virgin forest was depleted, the operating firms closed down or moved away. The last to reach the end of its holdings was the Henry McCleary Timber Co., which, besides its logging facilities, operated a sawmill at Shelton and a plywood plant and sash and door factory in the nearby company town of McCleary. The Simpson Logging Co. bought out the McCleary concern in 1942.

Unlike most of its contemporaries in the logging and lumbering business on Puget Sound, the Simpson Logging Co. did not let its cut-over forest lands revert to the counties for taxes, as was then customary. It kept its holdings and, as the opportunity permitted, extended its ownership of reproducing forest lands by buying the cut-over areas of other operating companies and by redeeming lands that the counties had acquired through tax foreclosure. Simpson pioneered in urging and securing the establishment of a forest fire-protection system in Washington. The firm's forest-land program was based upon a belief that forestry in western Washington would ultimately be a profitable business enterprise that the ownership and protection of young growing forests would be the foundation on which such an enterprise would be built.

A few years after lumbering operations started near Shelton, the unappropriated public domain in the remote mountainous country, beyond what was then considered to be the economic limits of timber exploitation, was set aside as a part of the Olympic National Forest.

Little public notice was taken of the action; the reservation was largely beyond the zone of high-quality old-growth Douglas-fir, in rugged terrain where logging would be difficult and costly, and far from settlements and the Puget Sound log market. The values involved were so low that the withdrawal action was of little local concern.

During the time that the better and more accessible private timber in the lowlands was being used up, the national forest stumpage almost went begging. But with the development of transportation systems for harvesting the private forest zone and the introduction of improved logging equipment, the national forest resource became physically and economically accessible. It was no longer a remote area of low-grade timber in the back country; it became a valuable forest property whose management was vital to the well-being of the people in Shelton and McCleary.

When the Sustained-Yield Unit Act was passed, the Simpson Logging Co. owned 20,000 acres of virgin timberland that contained a billion board feet of timber. Simpson also had 140,000 acres of reproducing forest lands that supported young trees from 1 to 70 years old. The annual log requirements of Simpson's manufacturing facilities amounted to about 100 million board feet. About 7,400 persons depended for their livelihood on the continuation of the company's operations at that level of production. The national forest resource in the area tributary to the company's operations consisted of 110,000 acres of forest land, 89,000 acres of which were old-growth timber stands having a total volume of 4 1/3 billion board feet.

Under sustained-yield harvesting, the cut from the national forest lands alone would have been 48 million board feet a year. Simpson's holdings could not practically have been subjected to sustained-yield management if anything approximating the current plant requirements were to be supplied. The company did not own enough mature timber. The 100 million board feet per year rate of cutting would have forced the company to liquidate its timber in 10 years; after that, production from company lands would have dropped to next to nothing for 30 years or so until the trees on the reproducing lands reached cutting size. During that period, production would have fallen to a level measured by the company's competitive purchases of national forest timber. It could not have exceeded 48 million a year. It might have been a great deal less. An extremely severe curtailment of industrial activity and a consequent economic crisis would have been inevitable in Shelton and McCleary.

THE SUSTAINED-YIELD UNIT ACT permitted the Forest Service to join its timber resource with that of the company for unified management. The large reservoir of old-growth timber in national forest ownership thus could be used to bridge the production gap, pending the economic maturity of the company's young stands, and assurance could be given that the company's wood-using facilities in Shelton and McCleary would be maintained at approximately current levels. Within the limits of sustained-yield forest management, comparable stability for these communities could not otherwise be achieved. A combination like that for management purposes would guarantee that good forest practices and sustained yield would be applied to 268,000 acres of forest lands rather than to the 110,000 acres of national forest ownership alone. In consequence of these obvious public benefits, the Simpson Logging Co. and the Forest Service reached a sustained-yield agreement, effective January 1, 1947.

Advantages became apparent almost at once.

In the first year of operation under the agreement, the employment in the Simpson Logging Co. industries grew from 1,350 to 1,800 persons.