Sustainable practices right in our backyard

Builders, timber retailers, and conservationists look at how different organizations harvest and process timber in sustainable ways.

WARM SPRINGS - At an overlook on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, backed by a valley green with Douglas fir and other conifers, Ryan Temple, of Sustainable Northwest, asked the crowd of roughly 30 people what stories would create more of a market for environmentally and community-friendly timber.

The builders, timber retailers, conservationists and others were on a field trip Friday highlighting how different organizations harvest and process timber in sustainable ways. They stopped in Warm Springs to view some of the tribes' 250,000 acres of commercial forestland - all of which has a stamp of approval from the Forest Stewardship Council, an organization that certifies timber as environmentally, socially and economically responsible.

It's a powerful thing for people to know that when they buy the council-certified wood, they are protecting forest recreation opportunities and scenic views like this one, said Cindy O'Neil, of Solaire Homebuilders in Bend.

Other potential customers might be swayed knowing the products are made by companies that promote stability in the timber industry workplace, said Bruce Sullivan, of Earth Advantage, a green building consultant.

Area residents could also perk up when they hear that the Warm Springs timber is sold, among other places, at Bend's Miller Lumber - two local companies, said Cylvia Hayes, of Bend-based 3EStrategies, a sustainable energy advocacy group.

Steve Chavez, with Columbia Forest Products, said that a big part of his job is simply letting people know what green-building options are out there. He plans to give them pictures and reports from the forests and mills where the certified timber comes from to help inform conversations.

And Friday's field trip provided a way for people to get out in the woods and see what sustainable forestry is all about, tour organizers said.

"The intent of these events is really to get a deep immersion in sustainable forestry," said Ian Hanna, with Northwest Natural Resource Group, which has been involved in Forest Stewardship Council certification for a decade.

The certification process itself "gets us a very high standard of performance that has support from a full range of stakeholders," he said.

This certified timber has to meet a set of standards that look at social, economic and environmental principles, said Karen Steer, of Sustainable Northwest, and is something that is gaining steam.

'Growing exponentially'

"It's growing exponentially," she said. The program was slow to take off, but now there's more of a balance between supply and demand, and more organizations participating in the process.

Warm Springs decided in 2003 to certify its timber and its forests with the Forest Stewardship Council.

The forest is managed with input from wildlife biologists and others, and now produces only about half of the amount of timber it used to, said Doug Manion, forest manager with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Clear-cuts are no longer employed, and programs are in place to prevent a net loss of old-growth forest habitat, he said.

"It's probably more of a holistic approach to land management," he said.

With timber mainly harvested on the reservation, the Warm Springs Forest Products Industries mill produces between 5 million and 6 million board feet of certified timber a month, said Janet Corbett, the mill's sales manager.

But the demand specifically for certified timber started off slow.

"We had it, nobody wanted it," she said. Now, the mill has more than 30 council-certified customers out of about 180 and sells about a quarter of its lumber as certified.

On tour

On Friday's tour, participants donned hard hats to tour the mill, watching as logs about 2 feet wide dropped onto a machine that sawed off slices before sending the core down another conveyor belt. Other machines smoothed out boards of all sizes, sorted them and sent them off to the kiln to be dried.

In a storage warehouse, large timbers and boards that will be made into beams were stacked in piles, all marked with a Forest Stewardship Council label.

At a later stop, the group toured the Glaze restoration project area near Black Butte Ranch, where representatives from a conservation group and the U.S. Forest Service described the collaboration that went into planning the project.

"What we want to do is restore this forest so that it would come back to a more natural character," said Tim Lillebo, wildlands advocate for Oregon Wild.

The area had been clear-cut in the 1940s, said Maret Pajutee, of the Sisters Ranger District, and since then young trees have grown in dense, without any of the really big trees that historically made up area ponderosa pine forests.

The project is not certified by the Forest Stewardship Council since the program currently doesn't certify national forests. But Lillebo and Pajutee discussed ways different organizations had worked together to plan a project that would not only create wildlife habitat, but would also produce about a million board feet of timber - enough to build about 90 regular, two-bedroom houses.

Architect and designer Piper Lucas, of Sisters, recently built a house using Forest Stewardship Council-certified timber, and came on the tour because she had an interest in seeing how the certification process plays out on the ground, she said. The new understanding, she said, could be something she relays to her clients.

Twila Jacobsen and Mike Barnes connect builders who want to use council-certified timber with suppliers, and came to see the Warm Springs operation and to meet others in the industry, Jacobsen said.

"The interest is going up for the green products," she said, adding that at the moment, the most popular products are flooring and other things that are visible.

But there's still work to do on both the supply and demand sides, said Blake Ridgway, of Mead Clark, a California lumber company that has 59 certified timber products in stock at all time.

"There's just such a difference right now between where the industry is and where it could be," he said. One thing it would take for certified forest products to reach their potential, he said, is more people telling stories to better market the benefits of the timber.