 |
New Zealanders Shear Trees Instead of Sheep
Environmentalist Groups Let Weyerhaeuser Cut Timber in Ways That Are Banned in U.S.
By JIM CARLTON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NELSON, New Zealand -- This country is known for its natural beauty, and it has a fiercely protective environmental movement to match. But that didn't stop a forestry planner for a U.S. company from standing on a hill here, looking down over a majestic pine forest and cheerily talking of mowing it down as far as the eye can see.
"All that is going to go, mate," said Garry Tait, waving at a stand of pines on the South Island one afternoon in March. Mr. Tait, who helps oversee tree cutting for Weyerhaeuser Co., then pointed to another forest the next ridge over. "All that, too," he said.
The doomed trees were about to join hundreds of other acres of pines that Weyerhaeuser has recently felled as part of a cutting regimen more intense than anything it does in the U.S. But the harvest has aroused none of the anti-logging passions that the forest-products giant has come to expect back home in the American Northwest.
Loggers' Nirvana
Weyerhaeuser has discovered a loggers' nirvana in New Zealand. Forced to look overseas for new timberlands, it has found a land where pines grow twice as fast as in many places in the U.S. thanks largely to rich soil and a favorable climate. It's also a place where environmentalists have cut a pragmatic deal that lets loggers chop down vast swaths of these pines as long as they stay out of virgin forests. Because Weyerhaeuser cuts nonnative trees growing on once-denuded sheep ranches, "it's a bit like a wheat field, you know," says Guy Salmon, head of a local environmental group called Ecologic.
This is a rare case in which globalization appears to have satisfied just about everyone. Felling and replanting these forests not only shields New Zealand's old-growth trees, it also has turned forestry into a fast-growing part of the nation's economy: Forestry exports hit $2 billion last year, exceeded only by dairy and meat exports. Much of this timber would otherwise have come from North American forests, so it makes U.S. environmentalists happy, too.
New Zealand's reliable wood supply has been compelling enough to draw a host of U.S. companies across the Pacific. International Paper Co., Weyerhaeuser's big U.S. rival, manages almost a million acres here. Rayonier Inc., of Jacksonville, Fla., manages roughly 300,000 acres.
Overseas Advantages
Tree farms also flourish in the U.S., but they don't have the same kind of advantages as those in New Zealand. For one thing, New Zealand has lower labor costs and is closer to expanding markets for wood products in Asia.
Environmentalists in New Zealand also are more accepting of tree farms than are their counterparts in the U.S. That's partly because the New Zealand tree farms are on denuded land where sheep grazed for long periods. In the U.S., by contrast, environmentalists say many tree farms reduce habitat for forest animals. Another factor is that many U.S. tree farms are right next to natural forests, and environmentalists fret that the farmed trees will encroach on the natural ones.
The New Zealand tree farms aren't completely trouble-free. Local environmental groups quibble with the industry over such things as stream-side protections and erosion controls. There's concern that, with so many trees of the same species, a devastating tree bug could wipe many out and threaten indigenous plants. (Government officials say the trees are so well pruned that any diseases likely could be checked.) And the industry is still so new that timber companies face logistical problems such as a dearth of wood-processing plants and a lack of proper logging roads.
Still, the lessons learned in New Zealand are being applied elsewhere. Timber companies are finding that denuded farmland could be suitable for planting tree farms in other deforested places around the world. Weyerhaeuser recently started planting a 300,000-acre tree farm on such land in Uruguay. Other companies are planting forests on barren ground in Chile and South Africa.
Weyerhaeuser's road to New Zealand began with troubles at home. In 1990, environmentalists pressured the U.S. into listing the Northern spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. That listing protected millions of acres of Northwest forests from logging. Meanwhile, the U.S. wasn't producing new tree farms fast enough to make up the difference. That left companies such as Weyerhaeuser, based in Federal Way, Wash., scrambling to find new sources.
Weyerhaeuser formed a department to find new growing areas overseas and deployed a Briton named Conor Boyd to begin scouting the Pacific Rim. Among Mr. Boyd's first stops was the Russian Far East. He quickly found that he hadn't shaken the anti-logging groups. Activists from a California environmental group followed him in 1992 to cities such as Khabarovsk, where he had been talking to officials about logging, and showed locals photographs of the aftermath of Weyerhaeuser clear-cutting -- a logging technique in which almost every tree is felled in one great swath.
Russia's political volatility made matters worse. After three of Weyerhaeuser's local contacts were found shot dead, one stuffed in a car trunk, Mr. Boyd abandoned his Russian probe and turned his full attention to New Zealand. In 1994, he took the 18-hour flight from Seattle to Auckland, journeying by helicopter and in a pickup truck from there to tour a 500,000-acre tree farm beneath the 9,090-foot Mount Ruapehu volcano. "The trees had been very well managed and were really good-looking," recalls Mr. Boyd, who retired last year.
Cutting good-looking trees like these in the U.S. often means facing anti-logging activists first, and Mr. Boyd was wary of their New Zealand counterparts. Before he would commit Weyerhaeuser money, he met local activists at their homes and offices to find out how they might respond to the U.S. company's moving in to cut on tree farms. He was amazed to find they had almost no concerns.
What Mr. Boyd saw was the product of a unique history. New Zealand's islands were once covered with trees. But as much as four-fifths of these forests were denuded, first by the Maoris who canoed here a millennium ago and then by English settlers in the 1800s. Sheep farms went where trees once stood, as wool and meat exports became New Zealand's main sources of wealth. Later, decades of tumbling wool and mutton prices led to abandoned ranchland. Needing jobs for soldiers returning from World War I, New Zealand in the 1920s set them to planting trees on the more marginal sheep spreads.
New Zealand officials, hoping the postwar planting program would reduce erosion on denuded slopes, tried dozens of species. They found that Monterey pines, which often grow bent and scraggly in their native California coast, thrived more than other trees in the rich soil and moist and moderate climate -- growing up to 40 inches in diameter and 40 feet tall in 30 years. "Lo and behold, they grew like triffids," says Jim Anderton, New Zealand's minister of regional development, referring to the man-eating plants from a 1951 science-fiction novel, "The Day of the Triffids."
It wasn't until the 1980s that New Zealanders realized how profitable it could be to harvest those farm-grown Monterey pines, as well as a smaller number of North American Douglas firs, both originally planted largely to stem erosion. By then, New Zealand's environmentalists had already battled the nation's timber industry over the felling of dwindling natural forests, such as the ones depicted in scenes of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy filmed here. In 1991, the environmental groups made a deal with the industry: If the loggers left native forests alone, the environmentalists would drop most objections to cutting on tree farms.
The pragmatic approach taken by New Zealand's environmentalists stems largely from economic necessity. With a population of about four million in a land the size of Oregon, the country by the late 1980s was suffering a downturn in its mainstay industry of meat and dairy exports.
The New Zealand forestry accord -- combined with a government move to sell state-owned tree farms to the private sector -- ushered in a tree-farming boom. Since the mid-1980s, the volume of wood harvested off the nearly five million acres of tree farms has more than doubled, to about 8.5 billion board feet a year. New Zealand began wooing the foreign companies, government officials say, because it needed outside investment to harvest so much wood.
Weyerhaeuser moved into the market in 1997 by paying $200 million for a local company's logging rights and operations on about 200,000 acres. That represents only about 0.5% of the company's approximately 43 million acres in global timber holdings, mostly in the U.S. and Canada, but Weyerhaeuser executives say the New Zealand acreage is likely to grow. A unit of Switzerland's UBS AG also invested in the operation as Weyerhaeuser's minority partner.
Mr. Boyd agreed to abide by terms of the forestry accord. It calls for the company to leave the native forests alone, while also treading lightly around streams and other sensitive areas. In exchange, Weyerhaeuser gets to engage in some practices it couldn't elsewhere.
In the U.S., for example, Weyerhaeuser must leave trees standing in large buffers between clearcuts of a certain maximum size. In New Zealand, it doesn't have to leave any buffers -- a much more economical way to cut trees. The results are a jarring shaved look, but it leaves the hillsides in better shape than the sheep did when the ground was denuded ranchland. Weyerhaeuser then replants the forests to be harvested decades later.
As Weyerhaeuser and other loggers began building a track record of turning forests into wealth, local farmers began throwing their lot in with the foreigners, providing even more land for tree farms. One such farmer was Gary Hewetson, who sold his family's 200-acre sheep farm to another timber company and joined Weyerhaeuser as a truck dispatcher two years ago. He could no longer make any money raising sheep, he explains. Like many farmers here, he had a tough time adjusting after New Zealand dropped its big sheep subsidies in the mid-1980s.
"I must admit I hate to see some good farmland being planted in trees," says the 44-year-old Mr. Hewetson, wiping his brow during a break in a lumberyard. "But it boils down to how much money can you make off your land."
In New Zealand, loggers such as Weyerhaeuser increasingly benefit from timberlands, soon coming into maturity, that other farmers planted decades ago. Tom Rogers, a retired forestry manager who lives in the North Island town of Rotorua, planted 25 acres of Monterey pine (or Radiata, as it is known here) on his family's 40-acre farm two decades ago as a hedge against the future. With many of the trees at or near harvest age, now it's about to pay off. "That is basically a superfund for the family," says Mr. Rogers, who plans to sell the harvesting rights.
With trees like these and many more on national lands nearing maturity, local executives talk of a "Wall of Wood" becoming available over the next few years that could increase New Zealand's wood exports as much as six times the current level by 2025. Other multinationals from Japan, South Korea and elsewhere are moving in, while some companies are experimenting with new trees. California-based Soper-Wheeler Co., for instance, recently announced that it was contracting to grow genetically engineered redwoods here.
So much transformation is remarkable in a land not known for rapid change. "My father's generation and his father's generation spent a lot of time clearing the land," says Andrew Karalus, a farmer's son now working as a Weyerhaeuser forestry manager. "Here we are planting it again."
Write to Jim Carlton at [email protected]
Updated May 29, 2003
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105415782323131300,00.html?mod=todays%5Fus%5Fpageone%5Fhs `'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``
CONTENT COPYRIGHT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. THIS CONTENT IS INTENDED SOLELY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.
`'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``
Back to mongabay.com