What the LP-SYP does not show is the phenomenal further reduction in average age of the remaining trees after excessive harvests. The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors was made well aware of this fact earlier when LP's then-Western Division Manager Joe Wheeler disclosed LP's age-class distribution on their Mendocino holdings to the Board. But inventory liquidation and its consequences - younger and lower quality forest products - continue even today under LP's new "sustained" yield plan which in fact is a sustained liquidation plan (SLP). In my estimation, further reduction in average tree age in the Noyo Unit will decrease from 36 to 22 years, and in the Albion Unit from 50 to 23 years before it starts to rise in 30 to 40 years.
What LP plans to do in the Albion River Unit - the watershed with the highest stocking level - is to reduce inventory to the liquidation level of all other ownership areas. The monetary value derived from the anticipated inventory depletion in this one unit alone amounts to more than $100 million and dwarfs the $5 million expense of producing the SYP. This explains clearly why LP will continue to decrease our forest's productive capacity, continue to impoverish Mendocino County and why it has no desire to follow a sustained yield policy, much less a policy of maximum productivity as stated to be their goal in their SYP.
Inventory and harvests are erratic from decade to decade especially in the first 1-3 decades. Albion Unit harvests fluctuate between 14.52 mbf/acre in one decade followed by 4.99 mbf/acre in the next. For the Noyo River Unit the values are 5.32/2.24 mbf/acre. Such detrimental forest practices are the result of the forestland owner's decision to maximize short-term profit, maximize cash flow or maximize net present value. What those owners neglect to consider is the long-term productive capacity and the overall health of the forest as well as the impoverishment of the local community resulting from inventory depletion and forest productivity reduction. More generally, what they neglect is consideration of long-term species survival, own own included.
Another very undesirable effect of the LP-SYP is the fact that LP plans to convert natural species distribution in 8 of 17 of their watershed units from redwood dominance to other conifer dominance. Two examples are the North Fork Big River Unit where a 67% redwood dominance is converted to just 30% of redwoods at decade 12 and the Three Log Creek Unit where an 81% redwood dominance is reduced to 47%. Since redwood inventory has been reduced by our past actions to just 15-20% of original stocking, great efforts should be made to maintain or enhance present redwood dominance in the existing redwood habitat region and not to reduce it as the LP-SYP does.
At no place in LP's SYP is there any mention that softwood inventory depletion is the major cause of hardwood release and eventual hardwood dominance. The best policy to reverse hardwood dominance is to reverse the process that caused the problem by increasing softwood inventory as fast as possible. This process can be further accelerated by cutting of excessive hardwoods and leaving them as a fast decomposing nutrient source in the nutrient-depeleted forest. This certainly is the wisest long-term economical path to follow. However, LP has chosen to remove further substantial biomass (hardwoods) from the forest, is using the counterproductive route of additional softwood inventory reduction and plans to use the same alternative silvicultural prescriptions that brought about the hardwood problem in the past two decades.
There is no further inventory reduciton under the County rules. Both inventory and harvests increase steadily. While the initial harvests are lower, total harvests are about the same. Inventory is higher especially in the initial 2-3 decades. Average tree age increases steadily as does the forest's overall health. Productive forest capacity is continuously increasing as fast as the 2POI harvest rate allows. There are no erratic changes whatsoever in harvest volumes, inventory, employment or tax revenue because owners must follow sound forest practices that guarantee perpetual maximum benefits to themselves as well as to the community.
The LP-SYP is based on a decision most likely made by LP's recently deposed CEO Harry Merlo. He lost his empire because LP was indicted by a federal grand jury on 56 counts of criminal conduct (cf. Business Week, Oct. 2, 1995). Merlo had earlier stated: "We have designed LP so that we do not need a big tree," and, "We need everything that is out there. We log to infinity because we need it all. It's ours. It's out there and we need it all, now." This is exactly what LP has done to our forest and this SYP is attempting to seek governmental and public approval for the last phase of inventory depletion to occur in the near future.
If we, the citizens of Mendocino County, allow this last final forest liquidation and further destruction of our major resource to occur, we certainly deserve it. After analyzing LP's sustained yield plan, I want to make us victims and some of LP's Board members aware of the consequences of Harry Merlo's blueprint. My hope is that we, together, can still prevent the final phase of depletion of Mendocino County's redwood forest and, yes, further threat to our cherished rural lifestyle as well.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited