Tag Archives: timber sale

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest forest in the nation, is losing $15 million to $21 million a year on timber sales, according to a new report from Taxpayers for Common Sense. The forest plans to sell 300 million board feet of timber in the next five years, says the report, and will lose money on all of it.

The Tongass National Forest covers more land than the state of West Virginia and is five times larger than the next largest national forest.

Forest Service timber sales dropped by more than 75 percent between 1990 and 2000, and since the agency lost money on much of the timber it sold, that saved taxpayers a lot of cash. However, it didn’t save as much as it should have, because the Forest Service didn’t reduce its timber staff by as much as the drop in sales. Instead, it relabeled them “vegetation managers” and kept most of them on the payroll. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s friend, Andy Stahl–who frequently comments on this blog–recently appealed a timber sale on the Bighorn National Forest. That takes me back to the 1970s and 1980s, when Andy and I appealed timber sales, forest plans, and other national forest and BLM projects almost on a weekly basis. Sometime around 1980, I held the distinction of having appealed more BLM timber sales than anyone, but Andy soon eclipsed me.

Recent aerial photo of timber cut from the Bighorn National Forest in about 1985.

During the 1980s, the Forest Service sold nearly 11 billion board feet of timber each year, but in the 1990s this rapidly declined, partly due to Andy’s activities protecting the spotted owl and–I’d like to think–partly due to Forest Service employees reading my book, Reforming the Forest Service, and deciding they didn’t want to be that kind of an agency any more. (As I describe in this article, this is greatly oversimplified and a lot of other factors were involved, some of them quite surprising).

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