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.
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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,