Two Shades of Green

Several years ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority began marketing the forests of the tri-state region around the Cumberland Plateau. By early last year, four companies had applied for TVA permits to operate chip mills along a 12-mile stretch of the Tennessee River.

A growing number of citizens protested, saying the agency was ignoring how timber harvesting would destroy local forests. In a five-part series, reporter Pam Sohn visited chip mills in Mississippi and revealed what happened to saw millers and other family businesses there when the wood ran out. She looked at the proposed Tennessee mills, examining the conflicting goals within TVA as it tries to decide how to both promote and preserve land.

Chattanooga, Tenn. — One measure of the controversy surrounding the cutting of trees within the 42-county, tri-state area may be the letters TVA has already gotten from the public.

“Letters? I’ve got trees — at least two trees worth of letters,” says Paul Schmierbach, director of the TVA Office of Environmental Quality. “Mostly con” —against the chip mills.

And while TVA completes its report on the environmental impact of allowing three chip mills to begin operations on the banks of the Tennessee River and to cut 1.9 million tons of hardwood timber a year within a 75-mile radius of Nickajack Lake, the tenor of the arguments grows louder.

A chip mill is a plant that employs about 10 people to make quarter-sized chips of wood, usually from hardwood tree trunks at least 25 feet long and as large in diameter as 26 inches inside the bark at the largest end. Chip mills usually buy timber from individual landowners and hire independent loggers to clearcut the property. Reforesting is at the option and expense of the landowner.

Paper mills use the chipped wood as fiber to make pulp. As the demand for high-grade, slick paper has increased, paper mills have switched from pine to hardwood to provide more fiber. Hardwood is also less expensive and more available. At least a third of the hardwood chips made at the plants seeking to locate here would be exported to Japan and Korea as raw materials for paper mills there.

But there is not a hearty welcome for this new industry — even from those who usually aggressively promote Chattanooga, say local development officials privately. Instead, some seem to be raising a caution flag against TVA permitting the mills to operate along a 12-mile stretch of the Tennessee River between South Pittsburgh, Tennessee, and Bridgeport, Alabama.

Some elected officials publicly question the chip mill industry’s benefit to the area. The City Commission of South Pittsburgh voted to oppose Boise Cascade, which plans to locate across the river from Parker Towing’s proposed mill. “Two mills would be twice as bad, don’t you think?” says Mayor John Thompson.

Chattanooga Councilman David Crockett has recently asked several local clubs to take a hard look at the chip mills in light of the area’s tourism and recreational needs. ‘Tourism is a big industry here—the second largest in Tennessee. How many people will want to come back to see a Color Cruise if they see big dear-cuts on the ridges and mountain tops?” Crockett asks.

“Beyond that,” he adds, “we have a strategy to become an environmental city and a sport fishing center. How would this square with that?”

TVA holds a crucial ballot. The mills, proposed by Donghae Pulp, Boise Cascade, and Parker Towing, must obtain permits from the agency to build and use barge terminals on the Tennessee River. In addition, Parker Towing needs a permit to locate in an industrial park, Boise Cascade and Donghae are seeking property easements, and Donghae wants TVA to build it a new delivery point for electrical service.

Each mill is expected to cost between $5 million and $10 million to build. At full capacity, Parker and Donghae propose to produce about 600,000 tons of chips yearly and Boise Cascade proposes to produce about 700,000 tons yearly.

TVA has many goals: bringing in new industry with low power rates, providing access to waterway commerce, providing income to individual landowners, improving management of forests and natural resources, and playing watchdog to the environment.

TVA officials admit that chip mills are a sticky issue, complicated by the agency’s inner workings and federal environmental guidelines — so complicated that what’s begun may be impossible to stop, even if TVA rejects the permit applications. But whatever the outcome, the situation is almost certain to set a precedent in how environmental impacts are studied.

 

Selling Forests

TVA’s Office of Natural Resources and Economic Development began marketing the region’s timber, low power rates, and easy, inexpensive river transportation several years ago. Like farmers with a good crop, it promoted the Tennessee Valley, particularly the Cumberland Plateau area, as a hardwood basket from heaven with easy access to water transportation to the Gulf of Mexico.

“TVA’s strategy will be to work through the marketplace to create demand, providing the landowner an incentive for better management without subsidy,” according to Forestry in the Tennessee Valley, a resource management plan prepared by the office in 1984. “TVA will seek opportunities to promote demand for the region’s forest products through both domestic and export markets.”

The marketing worked. In addition to the three chipping firms seeking permits locally, seven or eight more permit applications are contemplated or pending along other stretches of the river.

The onslaught — and in fact the marketing effort itself — caught the rest of TVA by surprise. Not only did the agency not expect so many chippers, it also didn’t expect so many environmental concerns to be raised. Senator Jim Sasser’s office, for instance, reports receiving about 1,100 letters and another 600 or so calls about the issue.

The furor has created a public relations headache for TVA, as well as a maze of legal questions about how the environmental impact statement and permitting process must be handled. Should TVA study environmental impacts, even at a regional level, on private property? Can TVA require that certain conditions be met — even on private property — by loggers and chippers? Can TVA prohibit wood stands to be cut? Could TVA even enforce such conditions if it chose to offer them?

No one knows. And those issues could lead the agency into a courtroom if either the chippers or concerned citizens challenge the outcome of the review or permitting processes.

The federal guidelines for preparing environmental reviews are confusing. They require consideration only of site-specific impacts, such as storm runoff on a proposed chip mill site. But the guidelines allow consideration of secondary impacts — such as the possibility of erosion or endangered species at a logging site on private land — if public concerns are voiced.

TVA initially prepared only what’s known as an environmental assessment — a site-specific look. Public concern that the agency was rushing the permit process, plus efforts by an outspoken U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official, prompted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to urge TVA last spring to expand its impact statement and look at issues such as how clearcutting would affect the habitat of endangered species.

More recently, however, a forestry products association wrote TVA a letter charging the agency with overstepping its bounds in looking at non-site-specific concerns.

TVA says it’s working hard to find a middle ground. “It’s more than a PR nightmare, though obviously it is that,” says Jon Loney, project director of the environmental impact statement. “We’re catching a lot of grief from both sides. For people concerned about the environment, anything short of denial may not be enough. And the forestry people feel like we’re dabbling in their territory — like we stopped preaching and started meddling. But we didn’t have a choice. The applications were made and now decisions are going to have to be made. We want to do what’s right.”

Loney says TVA also sees itself as caught between citizens who might want to sell their timber to the mills and citizens who are concerned about preserving Cumberland Plateau woodlands and environs.

 

Citizen Pressure

Mill opponents like Councilor Crockett say they want to see local government take a position to sway the argument — and possibly TVA’s stance.

The pressure may be working — at least on the chip mills themselves. One of the initial four mills requesting permits withdrew its initial request: Canal Chip Corp. opted to join forces with Parker Towing. The two together submitted another permit request, proposing to cut less wood than initially sought.

TVA insiders say they suspect the chippers realized the permitting process would be longer than first expected, but suspicious chip mill opponents don’t agree. They speculate a deal was made because three chip mills had a better chance than four. Some opponents — particularly those connected to a recently formed network called Tennesseans, Alabamians, and Georgians for Environmental Responsibility (TAGER) — think a shotgun approach, in which many mills are touted but only one is permitted, is a strategy to make concerned citizens feel they won in the end.

Officials with Parker Towing and Donghae say their companies will be here with or without TVA approval. “We still will be at the port, and we don’t believe that the chip mills will be denied,” says Larry Otis with Parker Towing. “TVA does not have the authority to deny this activity. The timber is being bought from private landowners. To put restrictions on a company as to where a private individual can sell his product is getting over into controlling the private ownership of land.”

If TVA should deny barge permits or land easements, Otis says, the companies could still build somewhere else nearby. “And if you check, you’ll find out that if we were to move the chips by rail car or by trucks, there would be no permits required. And that is an option for us to do.”

Would the companies persist in locating here if public protest grows? “We’d have to evaluate that,” says Otis.

“I’m sure that whether we do it or somebody else does it, the wood will be purchased,” Otis adds. “The landowner will be selling the timber, regardless of whether we buy it or another company buys it. It’s being bought and sold today as we speak.”