Ground Zero In Timber Wars Shows Signs Of Peace

"If what you are doing isn't working and we keep doing it, it is a definition of insanity," said Joel King, ranger for the Wild Rivers Ranger District. "So I needed to do something different.

"The way the Forest Service looks at it, we are doing forest restoration, and if wood products come out of that, why not?" It seems inevitable, he said, that the approach here will spread.

The folks at the Rough & Ready Lumber Co. mill in O'Brien, the last mill in the Illinois Valley, haven't been able to buy a log from the national forest that surrounds them since 1997, depending instead on logs from private lands. Neither have they been able to buy trimmings from thinning projects to fuel a co-generation plant they built a couple years ago to power lumber drying kilns and produce renewable electricity.

To tap into California markets demanding lumber that qualifies for green building codes, Rough & Ready this year had its pine production stream certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, the model embraced by environmentalists, rather than a competing one created by the timber industry. With demand for energy-efficient homes growing, the mill is kiln-drying more of its Douglas fir lumber. That means fewer mold problems in tightly built houses, and less weight to haul in trucks. A co-generation plant fueled by milling scraps and forest thinnings powers the drying kiln, and produces electricity that goes back into the grid.