Tall order? Not really

'Sustainable logging' sounds like an oxymoron, but business owners set out to make it possible.

Peter Hayes explains his ideas on forestry during a tour of Hyla Woods organized by Sustainable Northwest. He’s found that a more diverse forest proves healthier and supports more wildlife, unlike, say, a plantation limited to Douglas fir

'Sustainable logging' sounds like an oxymoron, but business owners set out to make it possible.

Increasingly, consumers are asking where their apples and tomatoes were grown. They’re questioning how coffee production affects the environment, and asking about the working conditions in the factories that make their clothes.

We should be asking the same questions, Peter Hayes says, when we buy wood. Hayes and his family – three generations of them – operate Hyla Woods, a small, privately owned timber company. Hyla Woods consists of three forests in the northern Oregon Coast Range.

Hayes runs his hand over a beautifully patterned countertop made of bigleaf maple, harvested from his land and installed in his home.

A traditional logging operation, he says, would have tossed the tree in a gully to rot, or burned it to get it out of the way. And that’s only if it hadn’t been killed with herbicides long before reaching maturity.

But Hayes and his team do not practice traditional logging.

Hayes believes that timber harvest and forest conservation can go hand in hand. It’s a counterintuitive concept here in the Northwest, where years of bitter conflict about forest management generally are seen as a boxing match: environmentalists versus the timber industry.

“What we’re trying to do is supersimple,” Hayes says. “We’re trying to find a way to grow forests that are both ecologically complex and economically viable. And the world tells you that that’s not possible.”

Certainly, the methods used at Hyla Woods to grow and harvest trees cost more up front.

Instead of clear-cutting, it thins the forest or cuts out small patches, keeping harvest rates below growth rates, and encouraging the growth of diverse tree species, which tends to engender animal diversity.

Hyla Woods is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international nonprofit that gives its seal of approval to woods that are deemed sustainable.

In addition, Hyla Woods conducts its own monitoring: For one project, it teamed up with Pacific University and the Audubon Society to count different species of birds on the land.

They came up with 52 this year, compared with nine on an adjoining all-Douglas fir plantation.

Consumer education helps

Members of Hayes’ family have been involved in timber since the mid-1800s, when his great-great-grandfather bought land and operated a sawmill in Willapa Bay, Wash.

Hayes spent most of his career as an educator in Seattle, and moved back to his hometown of Portland four years ago to help manage the family’s 780 acres of forestland. “In the world of big forestry it’s micro, it’s boutique, a home-brew kind of thing,” Hayes says.

So, like a microbrewer, Hayes and his family are focusing on quality and variety. The exploding markets for locally grown, organic, artisan and fair-trade food and drink are a sign of hope for Hayes and others like him.

They know that some consumers are willing to pay more for coffee, cheese and tomatoes with a certain pedigree. Is the same true for wood?

“Wood has historically been in this category of ‘it came from somewhere else,’ ” Hayes says, but he thinks people are hungry for more products whose origins are not shrouded in mystery.

Certification has its issues

The Forest Stewardship Council generally is recognized as the most stringent of a range of wood products certification systems. The council’s symbol, a green tree with an arrow on it, can be found stamped on lumber at Home Depot, Lowe’s and the local chain Parr Lumber.

Twenty-three million acres of forestland in the United States are council certified. Half a million of the acres are in Oregon.

“There’s been very consistent and rapid growth in the system over the last few years,” says Katie Miller, communications director of the council.

With this expansion has come growing pains. The Forest Stewardship Council recently has come under fire internationally.

The problem, reported by The Wall Street Journal, is that one company can sell council-certified products while devastating forestland in other parts of its operations. The council now plans to tighten its rules.

A newer certifying body, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, uses a green stamp of approval that looks a lot like the Forest Stewardship Council’s. The initiative has been criticized for its origins as an offshoot of the American Forest and Paper Association, although now it is an independent nonprofit.

Unlike the Forest Stewardship Council, the initiative’s certification is not accepted by the U.S. Green Building Council, the organization that oversees Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certifications for green building.

“The whole politics of certification have been pretty complicated and pretty intense,” Hayes says.

Hyla Woods is part of a cooperative of like-minded Forest Stewardship Council-certified forest owners that sell under the umbrella of Northwest Sustainable Timber Growers.

He compares the situation to vendors at local farmers markets who meet or exceed organic standards but choose not to go through the certification paperwork. The reason is simple – their customers know them, and trust their methods.

Seeing forest and the trees

Like organic foods, sustainable timber is still a small, if rapidly expanding, niche.

Indeed, when you look at the vast scope of Oregon’s forests, Hyla Woods is a tiny drop in the bucket. Just under half of the land in Oregon is forestland – and 60 percent of it is owned by the federal government.

Private, corporate forestland – that is, commercial forest – accounts for 20 percent of the state’s forest, or about 6 million acres.

Gary Hartshorn, president and chief executive officer of the World Forestry Center, says that as a whole, Oregon’s timber industry has made strides toward sustainability in the past 20 years.

“Sustainable forestry is a very hot topic – one of the most important paradigms in forestry,” Hartshorn says.

“I think everyone’s committed to sustaining their forests,” he says, but there’s a continuum as far as what steps forest owners are willing to take – and how much money they’re willing to risk.

He adds: “One of the really impressive, visionary aspects of Peter (Hayes) is that he’s willing to try new ways to improve progress towards sustainability, but also to improve the bottom line.”

The idea behind Hyla Woods, Hayes says, is to move beyond a teeter-totter model of conservation, where, as forest complexity goes up, profitability goes down.

He talks about the concept of “double quality,” where consumers are looking for a product that’s of high quality in and of itself, and also represents a greater social value.

Consumers, Hayes says, are asking, “Did my choice to buy this thing result in the place it came from maintaining its qualities or improving its qualities?”

But the value that sustainable growing practices add to wood isn’t just an intangible, feel-good value, Hayes says. Wood grown more naturally – and more slowly – often is stronger than wood grown for maximum speed and yield.

Over time, he says, “the average quality of wood has continued to go downhill because people are working to get the tree to grow as rapidly as possible.”

That’s why, he says, “if people buy wood from us, it’s not because they want to save the world. It’s because they want really good wood.”

The question remains whether enough of those customers exist to subsidize Hyla Woods and similar operations.

“So far, the jury’s way out,” Hayes concedes.

It’s true that consumer interest in sustainable wood is growing rapidly. So observes Ryan Temple, director of the Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities Partnership, a program of the nonprofit Sustainable Northwest.

Temple says he sees two sides of the market, suppliers and consumers, that are still struggling to make connections.

At the same time, sustainably grown wood is moving into the mainstream. “Traditional players are starting to pay attention to it,” Temple says.

He adds, more cautiously, “The numbers that are really impressive are the growth numbers, rather than the actual numbers.”

Buyers act on land use

To stand in the forest of Mount Richmond, part of Hyla Woods, is to feel surrounded by nature. But this forest, which has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council since 1997, has been logged in the past, and will continue to be a source of wood products in the future.

It’s also home to trees up to 200 years old, including cedar, maple, oak, alder and the dominant Douglas fir.

City dwellers tend to think of forests as either trees or timber, as either a human-less Eden or a bunch of stumps. The truth is, there’s a lot of in-between, and once a forest has been altered, it usually requires continuing management to remain healthy.

“The idea that you’ll leave it alone and it will take care of itself – it won’t,” Hayes says.

People call him a land manager, he says, but he believes that end-users are the real land managers. When consumers vote with their pocketbooks, he explains, it is a form of land-use action: “The choices you make when you buy your wood send a signal all the way through the system,” he says.