North America - Northwest Coast. Timber Industry

Timber became the dominant coastal industry beginning in the 1850s, and no industry so strongly shaped the regions identity. By 1851 five water-powered mills operated along the Willamette River in Oregon City. Entrepreneurs from California and Maine established mills in bays along Puget Sound beginning in 1853, when Andrew Jackson Pope and F. C. Talbot funded construction of a steam-powered sawmill at Port Gamble.

They came to cut timber to sell to markets in San Francisco. Mills also opened in the 1850s in Coos Bay, Oregon, and Gray's Harbor, Washington. The oceangoing lumber trade grew through the remainder of the nineteenth century and served markets around the Pacific Rim. The impact of logging remained focused on sites along the coastlines and rivers and in the proximity of settlements. This early commercial logging affected the environment of only a tiny fraction of the region.

The industrialization of the logging industry at the turn of the century vastly increased its environmental and social effects. The arrival of the transcontinental railroad was the galvanizing moment in the industrial transformation of the region. Direct railroad connections with eastern North America reached Portland, Oregon, in 1883; Tacoma, Washington, in 1887; Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1887; Seattle, Washington, in 1893; and Prince Rupert, British Columbia, in 1914.

These connections opened the natural resources of the region to the demands of growing markets throughout North America. These connections also attracted vast sums of capital investments to the timber industry. In 1900 the Minnesota lumber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser bought 364,218 hectares of land in western Washington from the Northern Pacific Railroad on his way to creating the largest private timber holdings in the United States.

Weyerhaeuser's example, the reduced shipping rates on railroads after 1900, and government policies to attract outside capital spurred additional investments to land and technology. In British Columbia, where public ownership of natural resources was maintained under the Crown lands, the province by 1911 had leased timber rights on 4.4 million hectares of public land, mostly to large U.S.-based corporations.

Small-gauge logging railroads allowed access to timber away from the shorelines and river banks and helped to boost the volume of wood brought out of the forests. Steam technology, replacing animal and water power, also improved the output of both logging and milling operations. It also vastly increased the frequency of fires in these forests.

Improved technology and heated competition in the timber industry led to the rapid deforestation of the most productive lower-elevation forests in the central and southern portions of the Northwest Coast by the 1930s. Concerns over the environmental impact of commercial forestry led conservationists in the United States to push for government retention of much of the upland forests as forest reserves beginning in 1891. These reserves in 1905 became part of the national forest system, which was to be managed under scientific principles of modern forestry. British Columbia sought to establish professional management and regulations over timber harvests on its Crown lands with the Forest Act of 1912.

Permanent public ownership of timber lands did not solve the problems of overcutting and depletion of the region's native forests and timber supply. By World War II the timber industry in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska began to harvest more timber from public national forest Lands than from its own private holdings because the industry had depleted most of the private forests by 1940. Cutting accelerated rapidly on these public lands and continued through the 1980s until a diminishing supply of large trees and lawsuits by environmentalists decreased the sale of old-growth timber from public lands in the Northwest.

Increased logging after World War II spawned a concern for conservation that grew within the region to become an influential environmental movement. From organized efforts to preserve wilderness by local Sierra Club chapters in Oregon and Washington in the 1950s to the founding of Greenpeace in Vancouver in 1970 (to oppose nuclear testing in the Pacific), the regional environmental movement challenged the image of the Northwest Coast as a land of inexhaustible natural resources.

The remaining old-growth forests symbolized for a new generation the last stand in a fight against corporate power and environmental destruction. In Oregon, Washington, and northern California this political battle over logging on public lands focused on protection of the northern spotted owl, an old growth- dependent raptor, which was listed as a threatened species in 1990.

Clayoquot Sound came to symbolize the same fight in British Columbia in 1993 when the provincial government granted Canadian timber giant MacMillan-Bloedel permission to clear-cut up to 70 percent of the 350,000 hectares of forest there. More than eight hundred protesters were arrested that summer in Clayoquot Sound in demonstrations that brought international attention to the remaining forests of the coast.