Timber and the Green Chainsaw Economy

Stand in the right spot in western Washington and look up. The Douglas firs rise two hundred, two hundred fifty feet, columns so massive and so close together that the canopy closes out the sky. On a gray November morning the forest floor is dark at midday.

The trees that built this state were not metaphor. They were product. From the eighteen fifties onward, the great export industry of the Pacific Northwest was timber, and for generations the forest seemed inexhaustible. The old-growth Douglas fir, western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and western hemlock that blanketed the western slopes of the Cascades represented the largest concentration of standing timber in the continental United States. The big mills at Port Gamble, Port Ludlow, and eventually Everett ran on steam, cut day and night, and shipped lumber by schooner to San Francisco, China, and Australia.

The work was brutal and dangerous. Fallers worked alone in the rain with long crosscut saws before the chainsaw arrived in the nineteen forties, undercutting enormous trunks and stepping back as the forest giants came down. Donkey engines dragged logs to the water. Log drives sent them down rivers in thundering, tangled masses that could crush a man in seconds.

By the twentieth century the industry had concentrated into a handful of large companies. Weyerhaeuser established its headquarters in Tacoma in nineteen hundred, having purchased nine hundred thousand acres of Northern Pacific land grant timber in a single transaction. The company that built the Pacific Northwest landscape, and scarred much of it.

By the nineteen eighties, the old growth was nearly gone, the spotted owl controversy had arrived, and small mill towns across the state were beginning the slow process of figuring out what comes after timber. That question has not been fully answered anywhere in Washington.