Editorial: Timber will have a role in economies

The story likely was of interest to the paper’s readers, but it probably didn’t tell Oregonians anything they don’t know.

But it sometimes is worthwhile to take a look at the broader issues at play here, and the Times story offers an opportunity to do that again.

And it’s particularly timely, considering that the lame-duck session of Congress is poised to take another whack at legislation that could increase the timber harvest on the state’s Oregon & California Railroad lands.

The notion of reinvention is at the heart of the Times story, and that’s another verse in a song we’ve heard many times before: Timber towns around the West need to reinvent themselves to accommodate an era with fewer jobs in the forests. We buy into some of that. But there needs to be a place for timber even in these reinvented Western communities, and it’s awfully easy to forget about that.

As we’re reminded in the story, there was a day — not too long ago, in the late 1980s —when the Willamette National Forest produced more wood than any other national forest in the country.

Then it unraveled. Nationally, we moved toward a sense that these lands needed to be managed for other uses in addition to timber — for watershed and habitat protection, for example. Regionally, the northern spotted owl — which reportedly requires old-growth forest to survive — forced diminished timber harvests in national forests. Today, the timber harvest on federal land in Oregon is about 10 percent what it was 15 years ago.

Other factors have come into play as well: Automation in the timber business, both in harvesting and milling, means that some wood-products jobs never will return, even if logging activities ramp up again.

Other former logging towns around the West have managed to reinvent themselves: Lebanon is perhaps the primary example in the mid-valley. But people forget that it took a quarter-century of planning, vision and focus for that city to pull itself off the mat.

Sweet Home — and many towns throughout the West in similar straits — has promising projects underway to tackle that reinvention.

In Sweet Home, the national forest is at the heart of those projects.

But participants in these efforts need to remember that logging always will have a place in rural economies in the western United States.

To pretend otherwise not only fails to appreciate the histories of these communities, but shows a short-sightedness guaranteed to hobble any effort at reinvention.