Alabama Forest Cut Short

The Mobile Press-Register, Mobile, Alabama, Published October 27, 1996

Mobile, Alabama—Little trees, lesser trees, junk trees—they may be the forest of Alabama future, because the great, tall forest of Alabama’s past is gone, its progeny cut hard, cut young and cut short.

King Cotton has given way to King Pulp, with profound implications for the economy and the land, and the people that the economy and the land sustain.

Something like a gold rush has been under way in Alabama the past few years. Demand for wood has gone up, prices have gone up and the trees have been coming down at a record pace.

“Used to be we’d sit outside our plant door and count the coal trucks going by,” said Lawson Murphy, president of Murphy Furniture Manufacturing Co. in Jasper. “Now we count logging trucks.”

The problem is not that Alabama is about to be stripped bare of trees. Forest-related industry—Alabama’s largest manufacturing employer—plants back with a vengeance. Even if they didn’t, nature endowed Alabama with abundant rain and a long growing season. Trees grow like crazy here.

The problem is that Alabama is stripping its forest of its extraordinary potential. This forest isn’t close to what it could be. It isn’t as sheltering, isn’t as beautiful, isn’t the economic engine that such a vigorous land promises.

Once, Alabama had a magnificent forest. Early European visitors recorded their astonishment at the age, size and beauty of the trees. A regionwide “cut-and-get-out” period occurred from 1880 to 1920. All Southern states are, to some degree, recovering. Forest industry deserves credit for helping make the region green again.

But in Alabama, more than any Southern state, industry has rushed that recovery. A monumental impatience attends forestry in this state. The prevailing practice is to cut, plant and cut again as soon as possible—all in the interest of cashing in.

Alabama might have made pulp and paper one part of a diversified forest economy. Instead, Alabama bet the farm.

Paper companies own or lease a huge chunk of Alabama forest land, about 4 million acres, 19 percent. Their influence extends beyond what they own because they buy trees—pines and hardwoods— from landowners. They also give free forestry advice and free seedlings.

To feed their mills, paper companies require pulpwood. That’s about any kind of wood: young wood, immature wood, wood that hasn’t yet aged to strength and high value. Pine trees are cut for pulpwood long before they’re old enough to make good lumber.

Any forest is going to produce some pulpwood. We should be glad—newspapers especially—because we all use paper products. But Alabama shoulders a huge, disproportionate share of the pulpwood demand.

No other state produces as much pulpwood as Alabama, where oaks and other hardwoods have been chopped and chipped by the millions, right along with pines.

Alabama’s forest emphasizes quantity—fiber—over quality, and the forest looks like it. It has been greatly altered in composition.

A pulpwood emphasis, with rotations held to as short a period as possible, as few as 15 years, necessarily reduces the overall age of the stands. Youth is a fine thing in a racehorse, but in a forest it presents problems.

It’s not just the plants and animals that depend on stable, mature forest for their survival, and it isn’t the stable, mature forest that produce the best lumber.

Paper companies, eager for fiber, favor trees that grow fast. That means the trees found commonly in Alabama’s forest are no longer those that made Alabama famous—the hard, straight longleaf pine; the weather-proof cypress; the red oak that laid the floors of the post-World War II housing boom.

These days, the dominant species in Alabama are the loblolly pine and the sweetgum.

Loblolly historically has had a small place in Alabama forest land. Now, it’s all over the place. Susceptible to pine beetle attacks, not as good for lumber as the longleaf, loblolly is preferred by paper companies because it is easy to grow and grows fast.

At least loblolly, if allowed to age 30 years or so, can make commercially viable lumber. Sweetgum, which rushes in to take advantage of fresh clearcuts and sells only as chips, can’t.

Higher value trees struggle to find a place in today’s Alabama. When they do, they don’t survive long. Trees that within a few years could be cut for top-dollar lumber are sometimes pulled out along with everything else when loggers clearcut a stand for pulp chips.

“You see some 12- to 14-inch-diameter cherrybark oaks going to the chipper,” said Glover Allgood of McShan Lumber Co. in Pickens County, west of Tuscaloosa. “That’s what hurts.”

A good, big cherrybark oak would fetch the landowner $400 or more for its potential as fine lumber. But a slim, young hardwood cut and mashed for pulp is worth only about $4.50.

“The way they’re cutting the pulpwood, 10 years from now you won’t have any hardwood logs,” said Jamie Gibbs, co-owner of a small sawmill in the northeast Alabama town of Brilliant. “It’s getting more scarce every day.”

Sixteen pulp and paper mills operate in Alabama, more than in any other state but Wisconsin. Another two dozen or more wood chip mills serve them and a rapidly expanding export market.

Alabama gave the paper companies financial incentives to come here, and they continue to enjoy a sweet deal in taxes. Champion International Corp., for example, pays less in state and local taxes on its northwest Alabama mill—the world’s largest white paper mill—than it does on its smaller mills across the Florida line in Pensacola.

Moreover, Alabama politicians lobbied hard to get the federal government to build the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. Paid for by taxpayers, maintained by taxpayers, it has reduced paper companies’ transportation costs and made possible the export chip business, the freighter full of chips leaving the Port of Mobile, bound for Japanese paper plants.

One could argue that Alabama did what it had to do in courting so many pulp and paper mills. A poor state needs jobs. Forestry constitutes the backbone of Alabama’s rural economy, now that textiles and agriculture have declined.

But for all its accommodations to pulp and paper, Alabama underachieves compared to other Southern states in forestry related employment and earnings.

Yet, some 66,000 people have jobs related directly or indirectly to the Alabama forest. But on a per-forest-acre-basis, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi do better in employment because they are stronger in either furniture manufacturing, sawmilling or even paper-making. A cruel irony is that Alabama’s pulp and paper mills specialize in unfinished products that don’t require as many employees as those that make boxes and envelopes.

There’s scant evidence that Alabama political leaders recognized this trend and are planning a course of action, or that they are concerned about the health of the woodlands. In the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast, reconciling forest health and forest economics is a top item on the political agenda. Here, it doesn’t even make the list.

The sad thing is, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

There’s a question as to whether Alabama will even be able to compete in the pulp market in the future. The same multinational paper companies that are so heavily represented in Alabama have invested in Southeast Asia and Central and South America, where labor is cheaper, the growing seasons are longer and pulpwood can be produced in half the time it takes here.

Meanwhile, the market for quality sawtimber has soared and promises to keep going up. But Alabama rides pulp’s back, and nobody seems to be questioning—at least out loud—the wisdom of that strategy.

Maybe a pulpwood state is all Alabama could ever hope to be. Maybe, though, Alabama could do better.

Exactly who calls the shots in Alabama forestry is a long-standing and emotionally charged issue. Some say it’s the paper companies. Others point to the vast number of individual owners.

What’s not disputed is that Alabama is overwhelmingly a private property state. Just 5 percent of its forest land is publicly owned, the smallest percentage of any Southern state.

When it comes to private timberland, Alabama has about 20.7 million acres. The majority is owned by individuals. A 1993 survey by the U.S. Forest Service found more than 450,000 different owners of forest land in Alabama.

It’s the number of owners in that group —and their reputation for independence—that makes them a powerful but unwieldy force, said Charles Raper, a forestry professor at Auburn University. “You can’t steer that ship,” he said.

But Raper’s Auburn forestry colleague, John Bliss, points out that most of those individuals actually own little land. In fact, the 1993 Forest Service survey showed that about 400,000 of them owned fewer than 50 acres. In Alabama and across the South, the number of individuals who own between 100 and 1,000 acres actually declined 14 percent from 1978 to 1993, said Thomas Birch, who helped conduct the Forest Service survey.

Meanwhile, corporate ownership has increased, a trend that’s likely to continue, in part because of the estate tax.

When individuals hand down timberland, the federal government taxes their estate both on the value of the land and the standing timber. Higher timber prices have meant higher estate taxes. To pay the taxes, heirs often end up selling the property to a paper company.

Birch points out that in Alabama about 4 million acres of forest land belong to individuals age 65 or older. “That’s a quarter of your forest right there,” Birch said. “What happens to the land is really important to the future of forestry in Alabama.”

Already, corporations own 34 percent of Alabama’s private forest land. That’s 8 percent higher than the average corporate ownership among Southern states.

Paper companies lead the way. Most of those that own mills in the state are, as might be expected, major timberland owners. But other paper companies—Weyerhauser Co. and Georgia Pacific—also own thousands of acres of Alabama trees to help feed their mills in neighboring states. Of the paper companies that own timberland in Alabama only one, Tuscaloosa’s Gulf States, is based in the state.

The two paper companies with mills in Mobile are Alabama’s biggest corporate timberland owners. Kimberly-Clark Corp., based in Dallas, owns 669,000 acres more land than the four National Forests in the state combined. The company has an additional 53,000 acres in long-term leases. International Paper Co., based in Purchase, N.Y., owns 432,000 acres and leases another 139,000.

Champion International Corp. (Stamford, Conn.), MacMillan Bloedel (Vancouver, British Columbia) and Gulf States own or lease more than 400,000 acres each.

Some paper companies grow a percentage of their trees on longer rotations for sawtimber. But in the main, paper companies are committed to producing the maximum amount of pulpwood in the shortest period of time. They clearcut their pine plantations after about 20 years, then replant, using fertilizer for growth and herbicides to suppress competing hardwoods.

They extend their influence through their assistance programs to private landowners. From Champion, for example, private landowners can get free forestry advice, free help with accounting and free tree seedlings.

In exchange, the company wants to be notified when landowner is ready to sell the timber. But the landowner is under no obligation to sell to Champion, said Marshall Murphy, company spokesman.

Advice from paper companies tends to be weighted toward growing pulpwood, the product they need for their mills, said Lee Laechelt, executive vice president of Alabama Forest Owner’s Association.

Laechelt, through his newsletter, tries to alert his members to the high prices they can get it they postpone selling their timber until it reaches sawlog age.

“You’re not going to hear that in a speech from a paper company forester,” he said.