Timber and Town: Post-War Federal Forest Policy, Industrial Organization, and Rural Change in Oregon's Illinois Valley

In the recent political furor over disposition of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, focus has been directed at the ecological shortcomings of the federal sustained yield forest management doctrine. This has occurred in part at the expense of evaluation of these policies based on social criteria. Yet the sustained yield paradigm and the post-war compact between private capital and federal forest agencies were justified in part to foster stable rural timber economies. Nowhere has this compact been more significant than in rural Oregon. And yet nowhere are its failings more apparent. The central argument of this paper is that the failure of federal sustained yield policies to sustain rural communities stems from an implicitly naive model of industrial capitalism. By ignoring the inherently destabilizing character of capitalist industry, by further failing to refine the notion of community stability, and by failing to take genuine steps to defend rural society from the upheavals of industrial change, the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have allowed community stability to languish in the dogged pursuit of accelerated cutting rates. This paper explores industrial change in Oregon's forest products sector in the post-war era of federal sustained yield management, looking specifically at southwest Oregon's Illinois Valley.