A log the width of a queen–size bed approaches the saw, and a seven–foot blade carves its round red body into multiple rectangular boards. The process takes less than five minutes. Outside, across a cement lot where the deep, sweet scent of pine rides the rays of early morning light, hundreds of equally massive logs lie stacked in piles, awaiting their turns.

“Many of these trees are at least 150 years old,” says Robbie Robinson, president of western Oregon’s Starfire Lumber Company. As he strolls past the pile of logs, he points out a sixty–inch log with a dark brown scar that snakes through the interior of its base. “However that tree was damaged we’ll never know; it happened way before your or my time.”

Ten years ago, the Northwest was peppered with mills that, like Starfire, turned old, large trees into beams and boards. Times have changed. Starfire is one of only eight sawmills in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana that process large–diameter timber. And although the milling of big timber is now a niche market, processing big trees is not as lucrative as it once was. Robinson recalls that just over a decade ago Starfire’s mill ran twenty–four hours a day, five days a week and employed more than 150 people. Now the mill runs one shift with sixty–five people. The big logs that Robinson depends on no longer roll off federal forestland. Up to 90 percent of his logs came from public land, he says, but “that has just dwindled down to almost nothing.” In recent years, he has purchased logs from as far away as Mexico.

“As time goes on I’ve had to move farther afield just to find logs to mill. I can get us out another five years, but after that, I just can’t see what happens,” Robinson says as he walks through the twenty–year–old mill. “When I first got into this business, I would never ever have visualized that we would be at the point we are at today.”

The Northwest was the flash point for the debate over harvesting old growth that culminated more than a decade ago with a ruling by U.S. District Judge William Dwyer that banned new timber sales on 24 million federally owned acres in Washington, Oregon and northern California. The injunction and related economic events drastically reduced timber harvest in the region.

The federal policy that emerged to quell the ensuing controversy, the Northwest Forest Plan, restricted logging on federal land in order to protect owl habitat. The plan provided money for job retraining, anticipating that the restrictions on logging would reduce the work force. But no one suspected that the market for big trees would decline. Surprise.

Although some old growth remains in the Northwest, most forest products companies aren’t bothering to cut it. The timber industry has changed. Just a little over a decade after the big fight, ancient and large trees are no longer economically or politically worth cutting. Even Boise Cascade Corporation, last year’s “dinosaur of the logging industry” according to environmental activists, retooled its image, shortening its name to Boise (after closing the last mill in Cascade, Idaho) and announcing in September that it will stop harvesting old growth in the United States by 2004.

“In the late ’80s, no one believed it was possible to stop the timber flow of big trees,” says Richard Haynes, an economist with the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, Oregon. “If you had said that a federal judge in Portland would make a ruling that would limit harvest on federal lands, people would have looked at you like you were a crazy from Eugene who’d spent a lot of time with your head in a bag of green stuff.”

Twenty miles up the road from Starfire, the Seneca Sawmill Company in Eugene is a vision of modernity. The air isn’t thick with sawdust; there are fewer people; and the logs, averaging eighteen inches in diameter, are matchsticks compared to the massive tree trunks on Starfire’s lot. Precision saws, laser scanners and computer automation have cut the mill’s work force to half of what was needed a decade ago to meet production quotas. The machinery is formatted to saw logs harvested almost exclusively from private tree farms that offer forty– to sixty–year–old timber.

“Retooling was critical to remain competitive,” says Rick Re, general manager of Seneca. “If we didn’t change, we’d pretty much be out of business.” Re attributes the new technology to a complex set of factors. Aside from Dwyer’s injunction and the ensuing policy changes that limited the cut, the global market has shifted dramatically in the past decade. In the early 1990s, Japan’s economy went into a fierce tailspin, eliminating a major purchaser of Northwest lumber and logs. Simultaneously, in the absence of U.S. old growth, New Zealand, Chile and parts of the Pacific Rim and Asia started to develop competitive timber resources, driving down prices for U.S. lumber and pushing mills to extract more value from each log.

“The changes on the federal lands exacerbated the situation, but those markets were going to change anyway,” says Haynes.

As the timber industry struggled to remain competitive through the 1990s, the Northwest economy boomed, thanks to the explosion of high–tech industries. With the influx of new residents came a societal shift, and an entirely different economy of old growth emerged: gold lies not in boards but in recreation–enticing forests and healthy watersheds.

Although substitutes for forest products such as glue–laminated boards are relatively inexpensive, economist Ed Whitelaw says building human–made water filtration systems is far more expensive than letting the forest foster healthy watersheds.

“We don’t have substitutes for forests as forests,” says Whitelaw, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon and the president of ECONorthwest, an economic consulting firm. “The environmental amenities are a valuable part of what attracts people to the Northwest.”

The attractive environment is a playing card that companies count on, says Whitelaw. High–tech employers in the region are able to pay employees up to 15 percent below the national average because, Whitelaw says, “with access to the ocean and the forests they know people would rather be here than Jersey City.”

The economic surge was also good for former loggers and sawmill workers, says Haynes, because many were able to find work in construction and the service sector.

Yet some say such studies are dismissive of the fact that rural logging communities have fallen on hard times. Grant Gibbs has been logging for more than thirty years, but as he speaks about the changing industry, his chain saw is nowhere in sight: he’s picking apples on his farm near Leavenworth, Washington. Gibbs says that if he depended solely on logging income, he wouldn’t make it.

“Our ability to log has really diminished. I’m struggling to work eight months a year,” says Gibbs. “Logging used to subsidize the farm. It was how I bought my first tractor, but that’s pretty much a memory at this point. Now the farm subsidizes my logging operation.”

Gibbs is one of the few loggers left in the area. He is able to hang on because his logging company, which he runs with his son Woody, harvests trees selectively and on a small scale. Gibbs estimates that of 150 loggers who once worked in the area, only twenty are still in the logging business. Those who stay in logging must compete for limited jobs at dismal wages. Bill Pickell, head of the Washington Contract Loggers Association, says most loggers work for twenty–five–year–old wages.

“It’s a slow suicide,” he says. “They’re bleeding themselves to death.”

Loggers may be offered a reprieve by the Bush administration. In spring 2003, the Forest Service announced, as part of a settlement agreement with an Oregon–based community trade organization, that the agency would consider overhauling portions of the Northwest Forest Plan to allow more logging of mature and old–growth forest. Although the final draft is not finished, it’s likely that the environmental impact statement will recommend that the agency reduce or eliminate the prelogging requirement for endangered species surveys in order to “balance environmental protection and production of commodities,” as required in the Northwest Forest Plan. The proposed action would nearly double the cut on federal lands and attempt to meet the plan’s harvest projection. “We’re trying to fulfill our promise of what we said we would do,” says Rex Holloway, a spokesman for the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Region. “Part of the hope is to keep and create jobs in rural economies.”

Critics say this makes no sense.

“There is no longer any economic justification for logging old growth on federal lands,” says Doug Heiken of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. “The entire industry is logging almost entirely young trees on private lands and you just can’t make the jobs–versus–owls argument anymore. With all the ways these mills have changed to cut these younger logs, it’s really technology versus us all.”

Even if the agreement created a few new jobs, pundits say this new policy won’t fly because it’s not what the majority of the public wants. Surveys consistently show that more than 70 percent of U.S. citizens want old growth left in the forests.

“The bottom line is that this issue has nothing to do with science or technology; it’s purely a social issue and the public doesn’t want to cut old growth,” says Chris Wood, senior policy adviser to former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. “If the administration continues to push this agenda, it’ll be like the late 1980s all over again, but it’ll be twice as bad. There will be lawsuits and protests and gridlock and turmoil and the Forest Service will lose its credibility. This is a toxic issue and it’s not worth it.”

That kind of political and legal wrangling does nothing to help loggers like Gibbs or mills like Starfire. As Robinson explains, “The biggest problem in this business is instability. We need to know where our raw materials are coming from so we can plan accordingly.” For now, it appears likely that mills like Starfire will continue to exploit their niche and hold their breath as they watch the changing economics of logging in the Northwest spell their ultimate demise.