Worries increase over timbering in Appalachians

By Ken Ward Jr.
SUNDAY GAZETTE-MAIL

West Virginia isn't alone in facing an onslaught of chip board plants and pulp mills that could gobble up valuable hardwood forests. Most surrounding states are already home to or are targeted for similar operations.

"That whole area of the Appalachian Mountains is being rediscovered," said Leon Pantenburg, a press spokesman for Idaho-based Trus-Joist MacMillan.

Trus-Joist, a joint venture of U.S. and Canadian companies, has in the last two years opened strand lumber plants in Buckhannon and in Hazard, Ky.

"The feeding frenzy in the Pacific Northwest is at an end," said Andy Mahler, an organizer with the Indiana-based environmental group Heartwood. "The industry has turned itself to the Southeast."

In Alabama, pulp and paper mills have already turned once-diverse forests into pine tree plantations. In many other southern states, trees are cut faster than replacements can grow back. Some experts fear a timber shortage.

Chip mills, pulp mills and chip board factories are moving steadily across the region, through the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia.

The citizen group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth drew a map of the region that shows circles for the cutting zones of existing and proposed mills. It shows 10 overlapping circles that stretch from Louisville to eastern West Virginia.

"These circles of chip mills and paper mills are coming and they're coming fast," said Albert Fritsch of Appalachian Science in the Public Interest, a Livingston, Ky.-based environmental group. "We're all going to get hit hard."

But in Kentucky, state economic developers refused to provide tax credits to a chip board mill because of environmental concerns.

J.M. Huber Corp. of New Jersey wanted millions of dollars in tax breaks to build a chip board mill in Pulaski County, about 50 miles southwest of Lexington.

Gene Strong, Kentucky's economic development secretary, said the state turned down the deal. State developers and foresters agreed with environmentalists who warned the mill would eat up too much wood.

"The decision for the state was about whether you give incentives to a company to come into the state that might cause an environmental problem," Strong said. "We chose not to do that. You have to look at those things. This was an issue about the sustain ability of our forest resources."

Bill Martin, Kentucky's natural resources director, said states in the region don't have the information they need to make decisions about new wood products plants.

The U.S. Forest Service surveys timber supply and demand in each state only once every 10 years, Martin said. Even then, he said, the inventory only considers forests as tree farms. It does not look at other possible uses, such as wildlife habitat and re creation.

Martin believes the inventories should consider more factors or at least be done more often. "How can you make a decision about use of a resource when you don't know how much of the resource you have?"