War on Logging Claims another Casualty

Sierra Pacific Industries is permanently closing its Arcata, California, sawmill, a third-generation family-owned forest products company and one of largest landowners in the United States. First built by Red Emmerson’s father in 1951, it was out on the Samoa Peninsula in Arcata, on the northern California coast.

The main reason for the closing is that the company couldn’t harvest suitably sized logs from the forests—in addition to all the other growing regulatory burdens and the prolonged recession and slow housing market. Sierra Pacific tried to truck in logs from California’s interior and ship them from Washington State and British Columbia, but it proved way too expensive.

Now Canadian firms are shipping in the logs and timber that American firms are prevented from harvesting and producing from our overgrown forests.

This is similar to the situation in Oregon, where 75 percent of sawmills have closed. In Harney and Grant Counties, both sites of protests against federal land policies, all seven sawmills have closed in Harney and the feds are busy closing all the forest roads in Grant—in the middle of the largest Ponderosa Pine forest in America. 

The feds and greens are following the example of Yellowstone National Park forest ecologist Don Despain, who famously shouted, “Burn, baby, burn!” as the 1988 fires swept across the park. Now hundreds of highly paid jobs will disappear. Hardworking, productive families will leave the area. More government bureaucrats will move in to watch the forests burn and rot, making the area even more dependent on the government.