Enmity between Indiana’s forest preservation movement and timber industry is ending. We are talking to each other, with the help of Purdue University and the IDNR Division of Forestry. Purdue forestry graduate researcher Dawn Winterhalter is even proposing green marketing for the timber industry.

Many people thought the forest preservation agenda was to end all logging in Indiana. They thought that once we ended logging on the National Forest, we would turn to the State forests, and eventually try to stop cutting on private land. It was an understandable suspicion. Some environmentalists no doubt thought so too. But Protect Our Woods has consistently supported timber management on private lands for both economic and biological reasons.

Beginning in 1985, as an uprising of landowners in Orange and Crawford Counties against 50 miles of off-road vehicle trails proposed on the Hoosier National Forest, we quickly realized that none of us like clear scutting and road building on the Hoosier either. Our research convinced us that ending timber sales on public lands would not damage industry, in light of growing hardwood sawtimber inventories, up 54% in Indiana since 1967 and up 47% in the Eastern US since 1970. We called for an end to public timber sales.

With more than 85% of timberland in private ownership in both Indiana and the Eastern United States, it seemed clear that reduced public harvests would increase demand for abundant private timber. Money going to the Federal bureaucracy would flow into local landowners’ pockets. Moreover, taking public trees off the market could only increase the price private owners would get for their trees. Recent high prices for timber seem to confirm our analysis.

We have successfully promoted this analysis with Indiana publics and with the National Forest movement nationwide. (Removing public timber from the Indiana market might damage the competitiveness of Indiana’s primary wood industry unless the same change was made throughout the hardwood regions.) In a 1990 professional poll of Indiana’s 9^th Congressional District, 69% opposed timber harvest on the Hoosier National Forest. Our economic analysis has become standard in the National Forest movement. And National Woodlands Magazine has recognized that reduced public timber sales provide an opportunity for non-industrial private forest owners.

Timber buyers may not like to see the price of stumpage go up. But there are long term advantages for the wood industry. Higher prices make owning and managing timberland more profitable. Profitably managed timberland is less likely to be converted to other uses. Industrial efficiency will increase. And wages tend to correspond to the values of materials and products. Large public forest preserves also provide biological support for Indiana’s timber.

We don’t really understand how forest ecosystems work. Native forest preserves are the laboratories necessary to study them. We are beginning to realize that large public forest preserves are important reservoirs of native species to sustain ecosystems on private timberlands. The neo-tropical migrant birds are the best known example. Seventy percent of our forest birds, they are major insect predators. Each spring, at budburst in the forest canopy, billions of caterpillars hatch and begin to feed on the young leaves. Left alone, they would defoliate the forest. But at just that moment, the neo-tropical migrant birds show up, starved from their long migration. We have all seen the damage caused by gypsy moths—insects without predators—and the high economic and environmental costs of control.

Forests are by nature very large ecosystems. Species with the largest territorial requirements have long been extirpated from Indiana’s forests—elk, bison, gray work, black bear, cougar, passenger pigeon. We are now seeing a 3% annual decline in populations of birds that breed in forests of the eastern US and winter in the tropics. Many of them, warblers and thrushes, tanagers and vireos, cuckoos and flycatchers, need large undisturbed areas of overmature forest for successful nesting. Seven thousand acres may be required for a full complement of forest interior breeding birds. The larger, public ownerships provide breeding habitat that is not available on the smaller, fragmented private forests that also depend on these insect eaters.

But the public forests are not big enough. Once 87% forest, now only 19%, Indiana is the least forested state east of the Mississippi except for Illinois, a natural prairie state. We do not believe that Indiana’s forest ecosystem can survive in a few isolated nature preserves, surrounded by increasing commercial and residential development and recreational demand.

The forests of southern Indiana recovered as erosion and the industrial revolution moved people off farms into cities. But now the cities are sprawling into the countryside, with the help of massive government subsidies to rural development, highways, and water projects, subsidies aimed at reversing the depopulation of the countryside. The remaining forests of the Eastern US are all within an hour’s drive or large human populations. And people are moving into the forests, fragmenting them into ever smaller stands that are less usable by both wildlife and the timber industry. Southern Indiana’s forested counties are surrounded by sprawling metropolitan areas. Already people live in Orange County and work in Evansville, Louisville, and Bloomington.

Alarmed by this trend, Senator Richard Lugar and others in Congress have passed Forest Legacy legislation to buy development rights in heavily forested areas. But Forest Legacy depends on public funding that is drying up. It is more realistic to save our forest base by not spending taxpayers’ money on massive subsidies to suburban sprawl. Our goal should be compact livable cities and towns surrounded by a working rural landscape of farms and timberlands, with core preserves of native ecosystems. We have begun this sstruggle. But environmentalists alone will fail. Our only chance to save wild and rural Indiana is landowners, timber industry, farmers trying to save their farms, city people fighting capital flight and urban decay, conservationists, and environmentalists working together.

The campaign to save our forests is also the timber industry’s primary opportunity for green marketing. Advertising hype won’t work. This is real. It’s good economics and good science. People love forests and they love wood. Let’s get together and get to work.