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The problem with industrial forestry, whether it be the old industrial firms or the new TIMOs, is that it is financially driven. A financial rotation is practiced which provides maximum return to investors. I'm sure the Campbell Group is an excellent manager of capital who happens to direct that capital toward the enterprise of industrial forestry and land development opportunity.

Financial return forestry is a highly constrained management regime requiring the shortest possible rotation (relative to site productivity) with a corresponding pressure to lower costs. Industrial owners with high site lands (i.e. Clatsop County) practice a 45 year rotation across their fully regulated forest estate. Which means average stand age is 22.5 years! This, in an area whose ecology has a historic range of variability for stand replacement disturbance of over 300 years. The large wood biomass of the historic forest is replaced by a depauperate plantation landscape. Aquatic systems suffer with the loss of the large wood forest. As the stream recruitment of large wood suffers under financial return forestry, stream habitat health declines. Today, stream health by any measure is catastrophically poor across Clatsop County industrial forests. Poor aquatic conditions in turn then become a glass ceiling for salmon abundance.  All of what I say has been well explored in the scientific literature and was reported on by the Independent Multidisciplinary Science Team (IMST) formed by Governor Kitzhaber as part of the Oregon Plan.

The Campbell Group will likely do no worse or better as the current industrial owner. The colonization of coastal forestland by eastern capital seeking return continues. The facts of the matter about financial forestry were not addressed in the program.  Many of those facts are available on the Coast Range Association's website. They're report Forests That Work explains financial forestry:
See: http://coastrange.org/ftw_frame.htm
The economics of financial forestry is clearly explained in a CRA report here: http://coastrange.org/FRNpaper2.htm

posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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