Timber industry takes another hit

It is almost unbelievable, but the timber industry is nearly extinct in Lincoln County, the heart of Montana's wood products industry for the last century.

When Eureka's Owens & Hurst mill closes in May, all that will remain is the relatively small and peripheral Ksanka mill at Fortine run by the Plum Creek Timber Co., and a specialty mill in Troy.

So who's to blame? Environmentalists conveniently shrug off their role in the steep decline in federal timber sales across the region over the last 15 years as being nothing more than enforcers of federal laws and Forest Service regulations. They say it is the Forest Service that allowed the Kootenai National Forest to be overworked for years, a trend that led to declining annual timber sales on the Kootenai.

Environmentalists have worked for years through various means to achieve exactly what has transpired - a drastically reduced timber program.

It is true enough that international competition - particularly from Canadian softwood producers - made things difficult for operations like Owens & Hurst. But the Eureka mill had to have logs on deck to even think about competing. And compete it did. The Owens & Hurst mill invested in its ability to process small-diameter, dead or burned wood that most mills would never accept, and it made products and found markets for them. It managed to compete even with a heavy reliance on burned timber that was hauled hundreds of miles from forest fires in Canada.

What sealed the closure decision at Owens & Hurst, as well as at the Stimson mill in Libby, was not the past, however. Both outfits had weathered the past but no longer had confidence in the future.

They predicted that some environmental groups will continue to tie the U.S. Forest Service in knots over forest plans, endangered species, old growth and other issues. Lawsuits, in other words, will continue regardless of what the majority of citizens in Lincoln County would like to see - a stable wood products industry based on sustainable and predictable management of national forest lands.

And that's a problem for the wood products industry in a county where more than two-thirds of the land base is national forest lands.

From the bustling, binging hay days of logging in the 1980s to the disappearance of an entire industrial sector in a matter of less than 20 years: It's a sad turn of events, because the Kootenai is a dynamic, ever-changing forest that will continue to grow timber in huge volumes.

But the skilled work force and the mills that have been managing the forest and processing timber in Lincoln County may never come back. And that would be a shame.