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Among the leaders of the Alaska timber industry, longevity is a common virtue. People working in the forest for a decade consider themselves newcomers. But even among the long timers, George Woodbury stands out.
Raised in Indiana, Woodbury studied Forest Management at Purdue University. He started working in the forest in northeastern Minnesota in the 1950s. The area was then dotted with family run logging operations and small sawmills, supplied by a National Forest that was slowly put off limits due to a public slant toward environmental concerns and increased outdoor recreation and away from resource extraction.
Following better opportunities in 1965, Woodbury came to the Ketchikan Pulp Corp.'s Thorne Bay logging camp on Prince of Wales Island. With as many as 500 residents, Thorne Bay was then the largest logging camp in the world. Woodbury's job was as timber engineer--he'd lay a line around the timber to be cut, then design the roads to haul the logs away.
Nearby Ketchikan was booming from the construction of a large pulp mill in town, one of two in the region that had received an unprecedented 50-year timber supply to cut hundreds of millions of board feet annually from the massive Tongass National Forest. But Ketchikan had long been the heart of the Alaska Timber Industry--after World War II, loggers there cut and milled spruce and hemlock and sold lumber out of a retail yard in Anchorage during that city's boom years. It was hard to believe that there was anyone who didn't support the pulp mills and the several thousand year-round, family wage jobs they provided.
But by the 1970s the same pressures that Woodbury had seen close Minnesota forests to logging began to appear in Alaska.
"When it started here, I said 'This thing is going to grow and strangle us,'" Woodbury remembered. "It was hard for other people to see that was going to happen because we had a strong industry and a strong economy it was feeding."
Woodbury was right. Today, the industry is a fraction of its former size--Alaska Forest Association Owen Graham commented, "We've had a 90 percent decline in our industry." He's not exaggerating. Timber employment in Southeast Alaska was pegged at more than 4,000 at the industry's height in the 1980s and is now fewer than 400.
Despite figures like that, people like Woodbury and Graham insist that with a stable timber supply, the industry can regain at least some of its former strength. The instrument they use to advocate for more cutting in the Tongass is the Alaska Forest Association, celebrating its 50th anniversary Oct. 17 to Oct. 19 in Ketchikan. U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was invited as keynote speaker at this year's convention.
Notable is the annual "Red Suspenders" party and auction where AFA members don hickory shirts, high-cut pants and red suspenders to bid on donated items and raise money for scholarships.
A STATEWIDE ORGANIZATION
The Alaska Forest Association, originally the Timber Operators Association and then the Alaska Loggers Association, was formed in 1957, the year after a group of loggers met in Ketchikan to address safety issues and injury compensation -important to workers who fell giant trees miles and miles from the nearest medical facilities. In 1960, the organization broadened its membership to admit as members pulp mills and sawmills that had logging operations. Over the years, AFA provided health insurance, pension benefits and political advocacy to employees of their regular member companies.
AFA's regular membership includes Afognak Corp., Petro Alaska, Columbia Helicopters and the Alaska Timber Insurance Exchange. The long list of Associate Members include Alaska Ship & Drydock, the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank, Spenard Builders Supply and the University of Alaska Office of Land Management
AFA represents timber interests in Southeast Alaska, Afognak Island, the Tanana Valley and Mat-Su. While logging on federal land in Alaska has been reduced or stopped, logging continues on Native corporation land, private land and some state land, especially outside Southeast.
In some areas such as Delta Junction, new timber businesses are cropping up and there is a feeling of optimism, Graham said. And there are some newfangled ideas like turning beetle-killed Southcentral spruce into ethanol.
HEALTH AND PENSION
As timber industry employment declined through the 1990s and the number of enrollees dropped, AFA's insurance companies balked. To the threat of being dropped, AFA countered with a risky response: self-insurance.
"It was a gamble for us, but it paid off," Graham said and noted that contributions and co-pays by the 400 or so families still in the program has not been increased for the last four years.
The pension program has been more problematic. Graham said AFA had considered its defined benefit pension plan well-funded when it was hit with a triple whammy. The federal government changed the funding rules just as AFA experienced a steep decline in membership. At the same time--circa the year 2000, the stock market collapsed.
"We closed the plan in 2003 and are in the process of terminating it, but we want to do it in a way that there is zero financial impact on the government and at the same time pay out 100 percent of the employee benefits," Graham said.
New members participate in a defined contribution plan. About 2,000 people receive benefits from or are vested in the defined benefit system and 300 people make contributions to the new plan.
AN ECONOMIC, SUSTAINABLE FUTURE?
When the pulp mills closed in the 1990s, the Alaska timber industry lost powerful partners in its efforts to secure wood from government sources. Nonetheless, the industry enjoys strong support from Alaska's congressional delegation, Gov. Sarah Palin and regional economic development organizations, such as the Southeast Conference. That organization wrote to the Forest Service in February, urging the agency to provide more than 400 million board feet from the Tongass. AFA states that the market for that much wood is there and the Forest Service promised to supply market needs. AFA draws opposition from a raft of regional environmental organizations, buttressed by national and even international groups who want to hold the harvest to 50 million board feet or less. Tourism has made the Tongass a global resource.
Besides celebrating their 50th anniversary at their October meeting, AFA members also will be discussing the Forest Service's decision on implementing amendments to the Tongass Land Management Plan, which has undergone intense renegotiation in the decade and a half since it was implemented in 1991.
"I don't know how many times they passed legislation and said, 'Now we will have peace in the Tongass," Woodbury said, "and then they came back for another chunk."
The Forest Service decision was expected by press time.
One road to possible future peace in the Tongass can be seen in AFA's sponsorship of the Sustainable Forest Initiative in Alaska. SFI sets up rules and standards that many builders and retailers require from their suppliers in order to ensure their lumber was produced sustainably. While a few Alaska wood products companies are undergoing the lengthy certification process, AFA is helping other firms follow SFI rules anyway to provide their customers with guilt-free wood. It's the kind of partnership that would not have occurred in the past and may mean AFA is still representing loggers 50 years from now.
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