00:00After 1910, we had lookout towers come in systematically across the landscape.
00:07A person could be in a lookout tower, so you had telephone service to the tops of all these peaks,
00:12and they would spot the fires, and they became really good at systematically putting the fires out.
00:19From 1952 until 1987, we only had one major fire in western Oregon.
00:26For years, the Forest Service successfully kept fire out of the forest,
00:30and with fire controlled, established sustainable timber yields.
00:34At the time, it seemed like a success, but without fire, the fuel loads in the forest kept building.
00:41Then, war started.
00:43Wood products, everything from PT boats to a lot of our planes use wood products,
00:55so there was a significant increase in the amount of cutting.
01:00Before 1940, the National Forest produced about 2% of timber in the U.S.
01:06The rest came from private land.
01:08But the incredible demand from war and the post-war rebuilding quickly exhausted the private supplies.
01:14The Forest Service had to step in.
01:17After World War II, you had the post-World War II housing boom.
01:24And that's when the Forest Service got into the timber business.
01:29After World War II, we were America's breadbasket for lumber, the National Forest work.
01:37Timber's output on Forest Service lands increased around 1 to 3 billion board feet in the 1940s
01:43to over 10 billion by the 60s and 70s.
01:47The American dependency on timber grew as the country expanded,
01:50and the practice of clear-cutting was a growing concern.
01:54In response, a new movement, environmentalism, was about to add another player to the drama in the forest.
02:01You look at big trees like this, and you can see them as potential lumber on the stump,
02:07or you can see this as habitat and home.
02:10And all the other natural resources, the ecosystem services of clean air, clean water, all kinds of things,
02:17that gets eliminated when they just look at, you know, timber.
02:23It was ground zero in the timber wars.
02:31From the 1950s to the 1980s, they were clear-cutting at an accelerating and unsustainable pace.
02:40We were running out of this beautiful forest ecosystem.
02:44Industrialized clear-cutting was a method of cutting down trees by completely stripping an area using heavy machinery.
02:52Yeah, in terms of the practices at the time, it was very efficient to be able to take your machinery,
02:57go in and just take out all the trees.
03:00The demand for more lumber meant a more efficient way to extract it.
03:05We really see the U.S. Forest Service transition from more of a custodial, protective agency
03:13to ramping up their production of lumber to feed that economic boom after World War II.
03:20When we hit the 70s into the early 1980s, timber production off of national forest lands
03:26accounted for between 25 and 30 percent of all domestic lumber consumption.
03:32By the 1980s, the public once again became aware of their disappearing forests.
03:38But this time, the Forest Service that was originally touted as the savior of the forests
03:43was being viewed by some as the very agency leading to their destruction.
03:48The timber wars really flared up in the 1980s. It became, you know, like another culture war.
03:54For many environmentalists, the timber wars started in 1989 in the Willamette National Forest,
04:01prompted by the U.S. Forest Service controversial timber sale known as the North Roaring Devil.
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