Ground Zero In Timber Wars Shows Signs Of Peace

"This is all great, the co-gen plant and drying lumber," said Jennifer Phillippi, the third generation of her family to run Rough & Ready, and a member of the Oregon Board of Forestry. "But we still need logs to run the mill. I just hope we figure it out before things get too bad in the forest. It's really not a sustainable model the way it is."

No one is more aware of that than King. For the past decade, forest fires have been getting bigger and hotter and more expensive to put out, and he expects that trend to continue as summers get longer and hotter with global warming. And there are more houses in the woods to worry about. Besides the costs and danger, fires send huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, where they contribute to the greenhouse effect.

To illustrate the challenge, King shows a visitor adjacent stands of trees.

On one side of a logging road is a stand of spindly pine and fir so close together you can't walk through them, covered with scars from insect and fungus damage.

Across the road, where the thinning crew is at work, a young sugar pine shoots out new growth in every direction. Nearby a huge dead Douglas fir is riddled with holes from feeding woodpeckers, and dogwoods bloom.