Comstock's magazine 0619 - June 2019 | Page 62

n forestry TRYING TO BUILD A RESTORATION ECONOMY On a windy March afternoon, head sawyer Robert Newton sits in a con- trol room inside one of two sawmills at Sierra Pacific Industries in Lincoln, loading logs into a “head rig” ma- chine where a computer takes over. It scans the logs, sending them into a series of saws to be broken down into sections, before moving into anoth- er computer-run sawing center. “You have the operators manning the ma- chines, but the computer is making the [cut] decision, and the operator is overseeing the decisions,” explains Mark Luster, the community rela- tions manager for Sierra Pacific. Mike Mitzel has come down from Sierra Pacific’s headquarters in An- derson. He has worked in the timber industry for 44 years, 27 of those with Sierra Pacific; he’s now the North- Robert Newton works inside a control room at a Sierra Pacific sawmill in Lincoln. The company owns 10 sawmills in California. 62 comstocksmag.com | June 2019 ern Sierra area manager, overseeing 658,000 of the company’s 1.7 million acres in California. He grew up in Paradise, and houses he once lived in burned down during the Camp Fire. “It’s just a catastrophic loss,” Mitzel says. His first job in the woods was in Stirling City, a tiny community near Paradise. Founded in 1969, Sierra Pacific is a third-generation family company that owns land, 10 sawmills, five bio- mass facilities, two millwork plants and a wood window manufacturing plant, and employs about 3,400 peo- ple in California (it also operates in Washington and Wisconsin). At its height in 1955, California’s timber industry operated more than 700 sawmills. Then in the 1990s, these companies faced off with envi- ronmentalists over the clear-cutting of old-growth forests and the plight of the spotted owl — a turbulent time known as the timber wars. “You may recall people chaining themselves to trees in the redwood country,” says Rich Gordon, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association, a Sacramento-based trade group for timber companies and private forest- land owners. “Someone named Julia ‘Butterfly’ [Hill] lived in a tree for two years. Folks were actually murdered. My predecessor, a guy by the name of Gil Murray, opened a package in the office at the time for the Forestry Association. It was a bomb from the Unabomber.” It was a tense time, leading law- makers to adopt strict forest prac- tice regulations. “I always like to point out if you buy lumber from California, you’re buying the most environmentally friendly lumber in the world,” Gordon says. Large mul- tinational and publicly traded com- panies refused to abide by the rules,