In the early 1980s, Crown Zellerbach began leasing bottom lands along the lower Columbia River stretching from Woodland to Astoria. The company needed a fast-growing tree to pulp at its Wauna pulp mill to replace dwindling supplies of wood chips. It turned to hybrid popular which could be harvested every seven to 10 years like a crop. Today, that mill is owned by Georgia-Pacific and poplar remains part of the mill's wood supply.
With Crown Zellerbach's success, Boise Cascade and Potlatch Corp. began planting hybrid popular in eastern Washington and Oregon along the Columbia River and used the river's plentiful water and wells to give the young trees a drink. What once was desert and dryland now is a lush working forest.
GreenWood, a private equity fund, purchased 35,000 acres of Potlatch's poplar forests and is financing the construction of a $35 million sawmill at Boardman, OR. That mill, when completed in October, will cut poplar into wood for window, door and picture frames, pallets, door cores and veneer for plywood. Poplar, which is a white hardwood, will compete with Ponderosa and Lodgepole pines, both softwoods as a construction material.
The new mill is a shot in the arm for eastern Oregon's sagging economy. In a story in Sunday's (June 29) The Oregonian, Grant (OR) County Commissioner Mark Webb said the upper Columbia and lower Snake rivers run through essentially treeless country and depend on irrigation from the rivers. "Meanwhile, active national forest management is made more difficult by environmental lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits, forestering overstocked forests, tree diseases and wildfires."
Baker County Commissioner Fred Warner told the Portland daily, "It's ironic, isn't it? If there was what I consider a good national forest management plan, I think there are plenty of logs available to run at least one mill in Baker County." That forested county once supported seven.
Poplar grows 15 times faster than westside Douglas Fir and can be harvested every 12 to 15 years. It is also 20% lighter than pine and is breathing life into an industry which has been hit hard by the recent housing market collapse and dwindling timber supplies.
Poplar plantations are also a good way to reduce greenhouse gases because trees absorb carbon dioxide and convert it to life-giving oxygen. Letting forests burn doesn't make sense. It put tons of carbon and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causes respiratory problems like the ones people in northern California are now experiencing, wastes wood people which can use for millions of daily products, and costs taxpayers billions to fight wildfires and restore lands to prevent erosion which clogs streams for salmon, steelhead and trout.
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)
