NY Times - Town That Thrived on Logging Is Looking for a Second Growth

SWEET HOME, Ore. — The great forest just east of town beckoned to Dan Rice when he was a young man, as it had to his father and grandfather before him, both proud loggers in a time that now survives mostly in black-and-white photos and in the talk of old men. He and his brothers kept the family log-trucking business going, he said, hauling to mills now mostly automated, partly in obligation to the legacy. His wife, Cindy, by contrast, fixed her gaze on consequences, and the pattern of poverty and desperation that was left behind as mill and timber jobs blinked out. He holds fast to things that echo from the community’s founding in the 1850s, when the first Rices arrived from Tennessee; she directs the Sweet Home Emergency Ministries food bank, a vivid marker of need going forward. A half-century ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the tenets of the Great Society into law, Sweet Home, in a little valley in west-central Oregon, would have been among the last places that a do-gooder would worry about. Now, as in too many places around the country, the old jobs are long gone, the food bank has a more secure future than remaining industrial jobs, and the town is full of people looking for second or third acts without much of a script to guide them. Older residents still remember what Sweet Home once looked like at 3 a.m., when loggers would gather on downtown street corners to pick and choose, like haughty freelance knights, what work crew they might join for that day in the woods or, as locals call it, “the brush.” Employers competed for the best, and they paid wages that could support a family. At the peak of logging activities in the late 1980s, the Willamette National Forest, which explodes into a titanic sea of trees about 15 miles outside town, produced more wood than any other national forest in the country. Then it all unraveled, or perhaps, depending on one’s point of view, it was all saved. Maybe both, foresters and residents said. The timber harvest on federal land in Oregon, including in the Willamette forest, is about one-tenth today what it was back then, as federal policies shifted and environmental groups sharpened their legal tactics to block timber contracts. The northern spotted owl — threatened and needing old-growth stands of trees to survive, scientists said — became the symbol of an era that swept away old patterns of work and life. Automation in milling and harvesting has reduced labor needs for the private lands where logging has continued...more