Timber: Coal's Noisy Little Brother

During this year's regular legislative session the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy caused to be entered the Logging Sediment and Control Act. Currently, the use of Best Management Practices (BMPs) in cutting and skidding trees to the truck loading point is largely voluntary. Enforcement of BMPs is theoretically possible, but in actual practice their use is almost totally voluntary. The Logging Sediment and Control Act, if passed and implemented, would more effectively require timber harvesting operators to practice good stewardship.

But before the ink was dry on this bill, the lobbying arm of the timber industry – the West Virginia Forestry Association, or its members /supporters, was making lots of calls to legislators saying this modest bill would, if passed and implemented, halt all timbering in the state of West Virginia.

Does this sound familiar? That's the same refrain we hear from the coal industry any time there is a proposal to require any regulation of coal mining other than that to which the industry is willing to consent. And that's damn little.

Now, this new legislation didn't threaten to shut down anything. The evidence of that is that many timber operators already comply with what the proposed legislation requires – and they are doing quite well, apparently. The target of the new legislation is the whatever percentage of "rip and run" timber operators who leave timber extraction sites a mess, enabling soil to be eroded from hills and hillsides down into streams, clogging the streams and playing havoc with fish reproduction, recreational fishing, contributing to flooding, and ruining the esthetics of streams like the Elk River and many of its tributaries from Pocahontas County to Charleston.

For decades the coal industry cried foul over regulatory enforcement. The threat always has been that enforcement of regulations would lead to shut down of the industry. Coal is a heavily regulated industry. And occasionally actual enforcement of those regulations occurs.

But despite that, and despite the doomsday predictions by the industry, coal production has flourished. The coal industry has prospered handsomely, even when the general economy of the state and the nation were at the lowest points.

Timber is now crying the same Chicken Little message. Legislators should look at the responsible operations (undoubtedly the timber industry will show off any they can find), and then insist that all timber operations institute those best practices.

Timber, the wannabe brother of coal, should not be allowed to hold the whole state hostage over its resistance to just a little bit of environmental toilet training.