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When Chuck Keegan graduated with a master's degree in forestry from The University of Montana in 1977, the forest products industry was still the undisputed heavyweight of Missoula's economy.
But in one fistful of years, it was knocked down by a national recession. Only a fraction of the lumber mills that once dominated the region managed to stagger back to their feet by the 1990s, and those that did have been fighting to keep their footing ever since.
For the past 30 years, Keegan has followed the timber industry's struggles and triumphs as an economist with the University of Montana's Bureau of Business and Economic Research. In that time, he has watched the region's forest products industry fulfill his predictions--and reinvent itself in improbable ways.
Now it's time to retire, leaving his position as the Bureau's director of forest industry and manufacturing research.
The Bureau has gone through major transitions in leadership in the past year and a half, said Paul Polzin, who also recently retired as BBER director and was replaced by Patrick Barkey.
"(Keegan's) retirement will create a hole in our organization because he has been the foundation of forest products industry research in this state for at least two decades," said Polzin, who has worked with Keegan since he was hired at the bureau fresh out of college. "His research is absolutely first-rate, is recognized on a national level, and the university has been very lucky to have him."
Even with the loss of so much institutional knowledge, Polzin is confident in the Bureau's ability to continue producing nationally recognized research. Keegan's position will be filled by Todd Morgan, one of five talented research foresters at the Bureau.
"When I first started here, I was the only one," Keegan noted with a grin.
Over the years, as the Bureau's forest industry research department grew, so too did its scope. As its focus expanded beyond Montana to the greater Northwest, Keegan helped flesh out its traditional research areas with pioneering studies of forest management practices related to ecosystem restoration and fire hazard reduction. Gradually, his research within the forest industry led him to pay special attention to the state's manufacturing sector as well.
So far, Keegan has published more than 100 papers, most of which can be found by looking up his full name: Charles E. Keegan III. He's known to forest industry leaders across Montana, however, as "Chuck."
As in, "Chuck probably has those numbers."
For decades, Keegan has been the first person people go to when they need accurate information about the state's forest products industry, said Ellen Engstedt of the Montana Wood Products Association.
"Chuck has been a wonderful resource for not just the timber industry, but the whole wood products industry," Engstedt said. "For the whole manufacturing segment of Montana's economy, Chuck has done just wonderful work as far as forecasting. He's extremely balanced in his approach. He doesn't exaggerate or leave things out."
His reports are required reading for anyone who cares about the role of forest products in the region's economy, she added.
"It's good information to take out not only to the larger public but also the congressional delegation," said Julia Altemus, a resource specialist for the Montana Logging Association in Missoula. "It's hard to argue with numbers."
Altemus added that she has known Keegan for nearly 20 years and expects to see him again at the BBER's next annual seminar, which Keegan has helped organize for years.
"We'll be very sad to see him go, but happy that he gets to retire and do other important things," she said.
After 30 years on the job, Keegan is retiring the way a lot of people who love their jobs "retire." He'll hike a little and fish a little, and continue to do some work.
"I have a couple projects I'll continue to work on," he conceded.
One of those projects, he said, will track changes in log processing efficiency. Another will examine the financial impact of fire activity on the timber industry.
Economic research can be pretty dry for some people, Keegan said, but he, for one, has always found it fascinating. He has always been interested in forests and the outdoors.
He grew up in Washington, D.C., and earned undergraduate degrees in economics and accounting at Georgetown University. He landed a job with a big firm after graduating--and quickly realized he needed a change of career.
Keegan came to The University of Montana to study wildlife, and gradually found his focus shifting to forestry
"I was very interested in forest genetics," he explained.
As his interests broadened, he became captivated by the forest-based sector of Montana's dynamic economy.
The state's forest products industry has changed remarkably since he first began studying it all those years ago. New technology has made it more efficient. New understanding of its effects on the environment has made it more careful. Market volatility has pushed it to produce new products, and to offer them in greater variety.
"One of the biggest changes, looking back over the 30 years, has been the dramatic reduction in harvests from the national forest," Keegan added.
In the 1980s, it became clear Montana's harvest levels would fall for the foreseeable future. Many factors are contributing to that drop, he added, but his personal opinion is the decrease in timber harvests is primarily a result of the increase in litigation and appeals of projects on public land.
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"There are some groups that choose to litigate a lot of land," Keegan said.
Some of these groups, he said, are interested in mitigating the ecological effect of reckless harvesting methods. Others don't want to see any industrial users on public lands at all.
Whatever their reasons, he said, it is relatively easy to affect a harvest project through litigations and appeals, and the impact on the industry has been dramatic.
"The major projection that I and some others have been making since the early 1990s was a general decline in the industry," Keegan said.
That projection, he said, has generally proved accurate. However, he didn't expect the industry to decline as much as it did. And he was flat-out wrong when he predicted that increasing fire activity would cause a major shift in forest management that would substantially increase the supply of timber coming from public lands.
Keegan also remembers a study he and Polzin conducted toward the end of the 1980s. They looked at employment trends within the forest products industry and concluded it would continue to slough off workers.
It did see declining employment numbers in the 1990s, but then it actually grew more labor-intensive, Keegan noted.
"For example, the log home industry grew rapidly in Montana, and it's a very labor-intensive industry," he said.
His long-term observations have led him to conclude the industry has regular labor cycles. In the 1990s, for instance, many mills were concentrating on regaining the market, so they postponed investments in technology. Now, they are catching up on those investments in an effort to gain the competitive edge.
Consequently, Keegan said, the industry may again be headed into a period in which it needs fewer workers.
At the same time, new technology has allowed producers to make use of smaller-diameter trees, which has opened up a whole new market for lumber producers and other wood products companies.
Oriented strandboard, for one, didn't exist 50 years ago, Keegan pointed out. Now, it is widely used for roofs and siding on buildings, and has largely replaced the use of plywood.
"Plywood is a specialty product now, a high-end product," Keegan said.
And that is one of the reasons why Stimson Lumber Co. shut down its plywood plant in Bonner last summer.
Another major shift taking place within the industry, Keegan said, is the ongoing conversion of timber companies to real estate investment trusts. As companies like Plum Creek continue to shift the use of their privately owned lands from timber production to high end housing and gated subdivisions, people may gain a new appreciation for industrial landowners.
"It (private development) may actually turn out to be more of a problem of ecosystems and public access," he said.
Some private landowners in western Montana, such as Stoltze Lumber Co., have been good stewards of the land, Keegan said. They have taken care to protect their resources, and keep them open for public use.
Unfortunately, the industry as a whole has not made much of an effort to advertise its environmental concerns, he added.
"It's been a frustration of mine for quite a while, the issue of wood and the production of wood products not being viewed as environmentally desirable," he said.
"You can produce a lot of timber and protect important resources," Keegan said. "I just think the forest products industry has missed the boat on the message that wood is an environmentally desirable building material."
There has long existed a tension between the forest products industry and environmentalists, and that tension doesn't seem to be going away, Keegan said. Part of it stems from the way loggers leave the land after a harvest, he said, and a lot of it has roots in historically poor harvesting methods.
"Some nasty things were done in the 1950s and 1960s in terms of logging practices," Keegan said.
Those practices, he added, have largely fallen by the wayside as industry leaders adopted more sustainable harvesting methods.
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