Trump Wants to Revive the Timber Industry—but Shot Himself in the Foot
Trump’s tariffs and executive orders seem to assume that foreign competition and lack of lands to log are the primary things hampering U.S. timber production. But when I talked to experts familiar with the industry’s history, they painted a more complicated picture. There are some potential upsides to boosting domestic timber production—even on the environmental front. But the U.S. timber industry’s struggles aren’t as simple as the president seems to think, and some of his policies could even hurt the industry he claims to be helping.
Access to prime logging land “ really not the main factor holding things back,” said Michael Snyder, the former commissioner of Vermont Forests, Parks, and Recreation, who now consults on forestry and forest policy with Greenfire Enterprises. “Sure, increased supply of raw material … would seem on the surface to be helpful, but [it’s] not if you don’t have a workforce—that includes loggers, truckers in particular; if you don’t have receiving primary processing facilities, basic sawmills, secondary manufacturing facilities, retailers, and all of those elements of any value chain in the forest economy, which are all in distress right now pretty much everywhere.” Sawmills closing has been a problem for decades, and might not be an easy trend to reverse. “In Vermont, we’ve lost 158 mills since 2000, and I think last year Oregon lost seven major mills,” said Snyder.*
“There’s not one single factor that led to the decrease in both jobs as well as harvests,” said University of Oregon historian Steven Beda, who focuses on the history of the U.S. timber industry. Environmental backlash in the 1980s definitely had an effect in terms of limiting access to federal lands, he said. But also, the broader economic problems of the 1970s hit the industry hard, and over time traditional logging states like Oregon, Washington, and Idaho began to “pivot” from natural resource extraction “towards more of a high-tech economy,” said Beda, “so there’s less of an incentive for politicians to support the timber industry. Then you also have capital flight—a lot of the timber companies realizing that they can be more profitable operating in the South,” in part because of lower rates of unionization there. Both international competition and regional competition, he said, have played a role in reducing the size of the Northwest timber industry, which is the one Trump primarily seems to be targeting with his executive orders, since that’s where most of the federal forest land is located.