428: Mike Albrecht—Got Wood?

Hello, friends.

It's me again, joined by the ever-popular and omnipresent Chuck Klaus Meyer.

Ever popular, is that right?

You're just making shit up, aren't you?

I'm just saying things, you know.

Just making salads.

I wanted to say nice things in the preamble because it occurs to me that I may have been mildly disparaging during the actual episode that's about to unfold.

But it was said with love.

It's just sitting here, face-to-face, or really whatever, somewhat oblique, you have two laptops open, you have a brand new switcher, you have a dedicated GoPro pointing at you, and you've got a whole separate monitor.

Yeah.

And we had a guest sitting next to you the whole time.

There was a lot going on.

And amusing, if I'm being candid.

I don't know how amusing you'll find it, folks, at home, but I certainly enjoyed watching Chuck out of the corner of my eye try and make sense of this podcast, which is

a really good one.

I'm just going to say, my guest is Mike Albrecht.

I'm so glad you found him.

Was it Will Swaim who picked us up?

Yeah, Will Swaim.

Basically, we had on Ed Ring and, you know, to talk about the wild fire management fires.

Exactly, right after the fires.

And he came from Will because he's also at the California Policy Center.

And he said, you know, if you want a good follow-up, you should talk to this guy because he is the president of the American Lawgers Council.

And I wound up talking to him for the better part of 45 minutes.

I told you, you might as well have just recorded it and called that the podcast because you really did talk to the guy at length.

But I see how you got sucked in.

He's a wealth of information.

He's just warm and funny and real and really on the cusp of something that, look, this is a big deal, guys.

I'll just spoiler alert.

We're calling the episode God Wood

because it amuses me.

But there are so many things that I learned about our relationship with timber.

Part of this is forest management, part of this is fire prevention, but mostly this is a conversation about our dysfunctional relationship with a precious resource.

And if you start finding parallels in our energy policy,

well, then you're just like us because I'm sitting here thinking, my God, how can we be the largest, we have more wood in this country.

We have more forest in this country per capita than any place in the world, and yet we're the world's largest importer of wood.

Yes.

Yes.

We're the largest importer of lumber, I think,

is what we are.

And we're the largest creator of lumber in the world.

Right.

And one-third of the nation is forest.

It's forest land.

Yeah.

I mean, there are no new revelations in the energy space, but the fact that all of them translate into the lumber and timber space is super interesting.

Your relationship and your reliance on wood and lumber is more keen than you think.

This guy is the tip of the spear, as Chuck said.

He's the president of the American Loggers Council, and he's joined by his wife, who is also delightful.

Vicki is super sweet, and we throw a mic near her because she is the first lady logger of the year.

Yes, right.

And he's so proud of her, and you'll see why.

These guys are on a mission.

It's an important mission.

It rhymes with a lot of what we try and do at Microworks.

But just super happy to give him a platform and really hopeful that some of the swamp creatures are listening because there's a big,

I think it's the FFA, the Forest First, what's the law?

What's the thing that's pending?

Ah, it's a big bill coming up in front.

You know, but it doesn't matter.

He mentions it.

Yeah, because we're about to talk about it.

The name of the bill doesn't matter, but its import and its intent is really critical.

The question is, got wood?

The answer is provided by Mike Albrecht right after this.

This episode is brought to you by Prize Picks.

Look, as the producer of this show, I make decisions every day, from which guest to have on next to when I should start looking for a new producing job.

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So Mike Albrecht, you're here with your lovely wife, Vicki, who has taken a position next to the lovely Chuck, who continues to impersonate a producer as I sit here impersonating a host.

It's all coming together.

You good, Vicki?

Yeah.

You happy?

Yep.

Fantastic.

Is she telling the truth, Mike?

She is, yeah.

She's very truthful.

Is she?

Oh, yeah.

Is that what most attracted you to your wife?

Her honesty or her good looks or her just her personality?

What was it?

The first time I saw her, she got out of her van and she had on a tool belt and she's carrying a tool bucket and she had a 50-foot cord, electrical cord kind of slung over it.

And I said, that is going to be my wife.

Wait a minute.

So she's wearing nothing but a tool belt.

No, it hasn't been.

Electrical cord?

This is unbelievable.

This is amazing.

Vicki.

That's all I saw.

I'm so glad you guys made the time to come down and talk.

Full disclosure, I don't have a specific agenda.

I'm just overwhelmed with a new level of certainty having just kind of gone through these fires.

I've been talking about forest management and water management and land management with various experts for a long time, and it's all been very...

what is it, sort of ethereal or academic or abstract.

And then all of a sudden, there's this event.

And I suspect you can talk about the RIM fire and you can talk about the Palisades fire.

And you can talk.

I mean, you've had a front row seat to so much of this.

But as the newly elected president, or have you been in this role for a while?

This is my second year, yeah, last year.

So you're in charge of the

American Loggers Council.

Where does that rank in the pantheon of acronyms in charge?

Well, the American Loggers Council represents the nation, if you will, nation's loggers.

So every state, actually 45 states have state organizations that represent logging.

All those states together combined are the American Loggers Council.

So we're looking at about 10,000 companies and about 50 or 60,000 loggers that

do the heavy lifting every day to get products to America.

I won't lie to you.

I'm looking at your notes.

There's a yellow legal pad with a lot of

really handsome, well, I mean, your penmanship is terrific.

You seem very organized.

Can we start maybe with myths and misperceptions and, you know, the beliefs, mistaken beliefs that people hold about our timber industry in general that have led to this

miasma of misunderstanding?

Yeah.

When people think of loggers, what I would like them to think of is ranchers, miners.

farmers.

Those folks take God's given natural resources that we're blessed with and turn them into products that we use.

That's what loggers do.

We're the same as those folks, only we're working with timber.

So our job is to take timber resources and turn them into something that America wants and needs.

And that is usually lumber or certainly wood energy, which we can talk about.

But if I can digress a minute, I'll just tell you, loggers started out, not very well understood, I'll tell you that.

When our country was formed, Mike, loggers were some of the first people that went to work.

And in fact,

back in the early 1800s, Banger, Maine was not the leading lumber shipping exporter in America.

It was a leading lumber exporter in the world.

So, and this is a colonist, man, they went to work.

They said, we can make something out of these woods.

And they started logging.

They said the canopy went from Banger all the way down to like Sarasota.

The whole East Coast was essentially a forest.

Right.

You know, I wonder sometimes if people hear that and think, my God, look, we took it all.

People have no sense of how much is left.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, and I'll speak to that.

So loggers, pretty soon,

five presidents bought up 1.5 billion acres over about 100 years.

Lincoln, Pierce, Polk, Adams, different presidents.

They bought 1.5 billion acres in the Louisiana Purchase to Alaska.

And this is interesting, right, for 3.5 cents an acre.

That's what America was purchased for that kind of price from Spain and Russia and Mexico and different countries.

And so one of the first things a government said is, go west, folks.

They wanted to move, in fact, 11 million people west, and they couldn't get over the Allegheny Mountains.

They finally said, yeah, get over there and get going.

Well, loggers went out ahead of them.

In the 1800s, the Department of Interior managed 80% of America.

So their first rule as a government agency was you will not cut timber on public land.

This is back in the 1800s.

So loggers are going, okay, well, there's no boundaries, there's no roads, there's no fences.

We just, we got to cut timber somewhere, we got to build the Transcontinental Railroad.

And it got off to a very chaotic start.

And loggers started getting arrested.

They were viewed as thieves and bad people.

Well, what

that's that's a terrific place to start.

We need to go west.

You can't go west.

There's no roads.

There's no railroad.

There's no path.

So the loggers go in first and catch hell for it.

Yeah.

And you guys have been catching hell ever since.

Yeah.

It's taken a while to

redeem ourselves, I guess, or change that image.

But

now

we're essential to America.

I guess really our image is most tarnished by big environmental groups anymore.

That's who we are

disliked by.

And most of the public doesn't understand us, Mike.

But loggers, they get up in the morning between one and four in the morning, and they go to work in the woods, and they do good, honest, hard work, come home at night,

support the soccer teams, all the different things in the community.

They're just great, honest people, just like ranchers and miners, and the ones I mentioned.

And

we're really proud of what we do.

So

maybe it's PR.

Maybe it's how much of your job is involved with

crafting an image or perpetuating an image, debunking these perceptions that we're talking about?

Because I think on the one hand, most rational people wouldn't disagree with anything you've said.

It's just that we've been presented, I say we, the 330 million people who depend on your industry, frankly, for so much.

I mean, ever since Joyce Kilmer, right?

I think that I've never seen a poem as lovely as a tree.

We like trees.

I love trees.

People fight over the

trees here, trees there.

Take the tree, don't take the tree.

It gets very emotional, you know.

So that's kind of what I want to dig into.

Like, well, what do you do to balance?

What we do, part of that is we take people out and tour.

We've got to get people out of the cities and out of our schools actually to come out to the woods and see what we do.

And it's very interesting when we do that, Mike.

We take kids from all over the state and

we'll have a tour and we've got machines that cut down trees that are really neat.

They can grab a tree and cut it down and pick it up and lay it down very safely, very good for the environment.

I've seen those.

They're mind-boggling.

Yeah, they're called feller bunchers.

So they can cut trees and they put them in bunches.

And so we'll do some of that and the kids are watching.

And this does, I don't, whether it's third graders up through high school, they'll watch this and then we'll shut the machine off and I'll say, okay, how many of you kids thought thought when the saw went through the tree the tree felt that

over half whether they're third graders or high school will raise their hand yeah I think the tree felt that I'll say okay well how many of you think when your mom or dad mow the lawn the grass feels the lawn more never has a kid raised and so we are still dealing with

an entertainment industry and school teachers that don't know, they don't know to teach biology to kids.

We've got a generation that's come up and think trees are

not only beautiful, but they have something spiritual or different about them.

And so cutting a tree makes a logger not real popular.

It's a kind of anthropomorphism, right?

Yeah.

Projecting a human quality onto a non-human thing.

Chuck, see if you can find a feller buncher there on Google in action.

It is worth looking at.

I remember the first time that I saw one.

I think it might have been on a show that I don't want the credit or the blame for, but Axemen

was a thing, you know.

And I remember the first season that aired, people were

taking a position almost that

the chainsaw had, once upon a time, really presented an unfair advantage.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Chuck's working it out.

I told you, Vicki, feel free to jump in if it gets awkward over there.

I could use the helps, yeah, for sure.

That looks like dirty stuff going on there, Chuck.

I don't think we can put that up there.

Nobody's looking at that now.

I am now.

The Tiger Cat LX830D Feller Buncher in Oregon.

I want to see that.

I don't know about the girl taking a shower.

All right.

This is YouTube.

What can I tell you?

I know.

It's a bold new world.

Oh, my God.

Did that just say it gets men rock hard?

I believe that.

Honestly, this is a G-ray.

This is the last time you're ever going to ask me to pull anything up on the internet.

This is a lot of people who are going to be able to do it.

I'm just blushing so hard right now.

She's like, I probably should have just taken the sofa.

I probably should be.

I didn't have to sit next to him.

All right, look, here you go.

Yeah, we don't need any audio.

I just want to, I just want to

try not to get any audio.

There we go.

Look at this thing.

Yeah, so that's what kids think when they see that happening.

They're going, ouch.

About half of them are.

Yeah.

That's a great machine.

So you see my point, though, right?

I mean, people think that back in the 1800s, okay, the lumberjacks went into the woods with their double-sided blades and their feathers and their wedges and they started taking trees.

And okay, okay, right.

And then come the chainsaws and then comes this thing.

And I guess, you know, if

there's some parallel, I think, not justified necessarily, but in the way of thinking with maybe, you know, dragnet fishing, like it's just like, wait a second, you're taking too many, it's too easy to get too many fish, and now you've overfished the fishery.

And people are thinking, wow, you know, it's too easy to take too many trees, and now you've denuded the forests.

What people don't know, Mike, is the enormity and the blessing of the forest we have.

So, America has one-third of the country is covered in forest, 800 million acres.

That's worth repeating.

Just say it again, because

people might have been zoning out.

Yeah, I'll say, okay, so one-third of the United States of America is covered in forests.

800 million acres, our country is covered in forest.

And we manage that extremely well with really sophisticated equipment that's very easy on the ground, good for the environment.

But in spite of everything we're doing correctly, America is now the number one importer, and I'm going to say that again, number one importer of lumber in the world.

So folks, that means we, compared to India, China, any other country you want to, we buy and purchase and bring in more wood than any other country in the world, even though we have this vast resource that we could be using and exporting wood.

That's really one of the goals of the American Loggers Council is to talk to Congress and say, folks, why are we importing lumber into this country?

Why aren't we exporting lumber, using our resources wisely, and instead we're seeing so many

millions of acres burn up every year.

What are the financial realities of doing that?

Like, what's the dollars attached to this industry and what could it be worth?

Like I liken it to energy independence.

Why would we import natural gas or oil when we're sitting on a mother load of it?

I think the knee-jerk answer is, well, because we don't want to take it.

We don't want to wreck our land.

We'll let you wreck yours or some such argument, right?

Yeah, and that is such a

backward, that's really a false argument if you're looking at the global environment because nobody, no other country manages their forest like America.

Nobody manages their forest with the rules that we have in America and still get the things done that we do in America.

So

we keep track as an industry of

how much is grown and harvested every year.

And then we do it kind of in five-year increments, taking a look at what's going on.

In the last 75 years, we've always grown more timber in our forests than it harvested.

In our national forests I'm speaking of here specifically.

I'm sorry but again when you look at the feller bunchers

en masse full steam ahead that claim still holds up we still grow more than we take?

Yes in fact right now

our forests are burning and rotting twice as fast as they're growing.

And we are not able to go out and salvage the products that we need to salvage because of tremendous environmental pressures from groups like the Sierra Club who do not want us into the forest cutting down burned dead trees.

And

if I were to point to one of our biggest problems, that would be it, our inability to get in and use the dead and dying wood.

Mike, if we just cut one-third more of our growth and one-third of our dead and dying timber,

we would be wood independent.

We could start to export products.

But our industry, I'll just talk about California for a minute, but it's a good example for the nation.

California in the 1990s had about 150 sawmills.

We were doing a lot of milling.

We have 27 now.

So we've reduced our capacity from then.

California now imports 80% of our wood products.

So America is the leading importer of lumber in the world.

California imports 80% of its wood products, and we see our forests rotting and dying, our national forests, our public land, at rates we've never seen before.

It's scandalous.

Yeah, it is.

It's taken

personally, I've been on this bandwagon for quite a while with Congress.

They are now talking about it in Congress.

Like, some of them are going, wow, we are the leading importer of lumber, really?

And they're starting to do some things about it, but it's taken years to get that, just that simple message.

Why aren't we not lumber and wood independent just like we're trying to get to be energy independent?

We can do it.

We've got

what it save us.

That's the number I'm still flailing about for.

It must be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

This episode is brought to you by Prize Picks.

Look, as the producer of this show, I make decisions every day, from which guest to have on next to when I should start looking for a new producing job.

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Our industry is a three to four hundred billion dollar industry.

We import about twenty five percent of our lumber right now, a lot of it from Canada.

So we're talking hundreds of billions we could

make for American jobs, build new sawmills.

So

I'm optimistic, Mike, that the change is coming.

And some of it is driven by the catastrophes we've seen.

And the Palisades fired, although not burning in a forest,

really

energized Congress.

Congressman Westerman out of Arkansas has put together a bill called the Fix Our Forest Act, which is a good title because it's broken.

Let's fix it.

Yeah.

And he tried to get it passed in Congress last year, and nobody on the Democratic side, sorry, folks, I'm not trying to make this part of the simple, that's just a fact.

Nobody on the Democratic side voted for it.

He reintroduced it about a month ago after the Palisades fire.

64 Democrats instantly jumped on it, passed Congress instantly.

Nancy Pelosi voted for it,

because they've seen the horror of catastrophic fires up close.

I do love to say I told you so from time to time, especially to the listeners of this podcast.

But I've often said that in conversations like this, things simply have to go splat.

Yeah.

Unfortunately.

A splat is never pretty.

Sometimes it's downright catastrophic.

Was the Palisades a splat?

Was Al Tadena a splat?

Is that the kind of, I mean, literally, people need to be slapped upside the head to see it.

What was so frustrating to foresters and loggers is we've been slapped up in Northern California 10 times in the last 15 years.

The Dixie fire, a million acres.

And

that was old growth, too.

Yeah, that was of

nice forest up there.

Prior to that, the one that really got attention for a while was called the Paradise Fire, the campfire.

That fire, this was horrible.

I don't want to minimize this at all.

It's horrible down here.

But that fire, folks, burned 18,000 homes.

It killed 35 people

and burned 150,000 acres.

This was just six or seven years ago.

Yeah, and we've had a fire.

I went in Malibu.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

So this one got the headlines.

And

I think, okay, wow, the Fix Our Forest Act suddenly got through Congress, just like that.

Who was it?

Rahm Emmanuel said, don't let any crisis go to waste.

And I guess here we go.

Well, look, I mean, it's just another version of people are looking around and waiting for the splat.

You know, sometimes maybe it's $8, $9 a gallon.

We can always find

a corollary for all of this, but man, it's a steep price to pay.

Do you think the Dixie fire was preventable?

Would it have been preventable had the forest been better managed?

So these horrific fires share three things.

High wind,

drought, and low humidity.

You can look at every big fire we've ever had.

They share those three things.

If we were to thin out trees on our landscape,

The chances of them moving from a ground fire to a crown fire are definitely reduced.

Explain

so people understand.

And I will.

Let me just say before I explain that,

when you have 100 mile an hour wind,

there's nothing you can do.

So there's no sense in blaming anybody or forest management.

But under normal conditions, kind of normal wind conditions, you can hold fires down.

Okay, so how do you do that?

If you thin out our forests,

What you're really looking at is, okay, we've got this very thick overgrown forest, and we have ground fuel.

We have intermediate fuels that go up to the crown.

So, what we do is we thin out the ground fuel in the intermediate fuel.

We call it a fuel ladder.

It's like each one's a rung on a ladder climbing up.

If we can take out that first couple rungs, a lot of times fire will then just stay on the ground.

It won't carry to the crowns of the trees and destroy the forest.

So, that's our goal when we're logging: to try to thin the forest out, break that fuel ladder down, fuel ladder, so folks are known, L-A-D-D-E-R,

and then have fires stay on the ground.

Often then we can follow a thinning project with prescribed fire and actually burn some of the fuel out in a prescriptive manner under good conditions and really make the fire the forest fire safe.

So

that's what we're about.

And in the meantime, doing all that thinning makes products we need.

We can make wood energy out of it, biomass.

We're making electrical energy, Mike, in our hometown out of wood chips.

We can power our whole town on this power plant we've got, burning wood chips to make electricity.

How do you do that?

Do you have a video of that?

Well, I would love to see Chuck look for some of that video.

It's called

Ultra Power.

Find that if you can.

It's a wood-fired power plant.

Vicki's like, oh, God.

Don't make him do this.

No, I'm super interested in this because I've done shows around biochar.

Yeah.

And I'm just continually beset by these examples of that.

I don't even know if I can call it recycling.

You're using your own product to basically power your own product to make more of the product that you need to power the product that you want.

It's been around for several decades.

It's an exciting business.

We're very much pushing, or American Log Arts Council pushes biomass energy.

It's simple, Mike, because power plants share this common thing.

They got to heat water to steam with something, and then the steam runs a turbine generator set.

That's what spins spins and make things happen.

You can use coal, you can use electrical, you can use not electrical, but natural gas, nuclear.

In this case, we just use wood to heat the water to steam to power the plant.

So it shares a commonality with those plants, but we're using wood that has no other real market.

These are the small trees that don't make lumber.

So it's a tremendous

natural resource that instead of burning it up in a wildfire, if we thin it out ahead of time, we can make a product and make the forest safer.

Store it, make the product.

Right?

Yeah.

Incredible.

Okay, so do people understand that?

Is this biochar a thing that the average person no, the biochar is making, and that's another good thing.

You can make biochar, which is an additive to agricultural ground, which

actually is, you're making a charcoal product that you can put into the ground.

It'll help it retain moisture.

But that's kind of a minor industry right now, a growing industry.

But

mainly we make lumber and we make different types of pulp and paper products and we make biomass products to make energy.

And biomass is becoming something more important for even liquid fuels.

They're starting to look at ways to power aircraft.

I'm not sure I'd get in,

I don't know if I'd be the first one in an aircraft being

powered by woodburning.

Yeah, by

actually

a fuel that can chemicals that come out of the wood, mainly methane.

Point being, wood is a tremendous resource that we're finding so many more uses for, but basically we need it for lumber.

This is what my prop is right here.

Okay, I'm going to bring this in.

Bring in the prop.

Here's the prop.

So, how much lumber do we use every year?

This is a board foot.

We use about 60 billion of these every year in America to build homes.

Why do they call it a board foot?

It looks longer than a foot.

Yeah, I know it.

Well, this one's actually two feet long and six inches wide, but it's 144 square inches, if it's 12 by 12 or however you want to configure it.

So actually this is a board foot even though it's two feet long.

To give folks an example, how much is 60 billion of these?

If you start stacking these end-to-end to the moon, which is 240,000 miles away, if I remember right, I think that's right.

60 billion of these go back and forth to the moon about 40 times.

If you can get wrap your head around that.

That's how much lumber we use in America every year.

Most of which is imported.

Well, actually, we do make most of it domestically, but we import about 25% of what we need, and that's ridiculous.

We don't need to import anything.

We should be making our own.

This one shares an interesting sticker on it.

It says made in New Zealand.

I got this at Lowe's in Sonora.

This board came from New Zealand.

I cannot explain to you how this board can be cut and milled and shipped to America cheaper than we can do it ourselves.

Don't ask me that question because it's maddening and I don't know the answer to it.

But those are the kind of things we got to look at and go, why is that happening?

Why are we not doing this ourselves?

Being as fair as you can,

what would the head of the Sierra Club say if here's you were sitting here and the accusation was, look, you're affirmatively keeping us from going into forests to clean them out.

You're affirmatively saying

no to all of the things that have been demonstrably shown to improve the environment, which assumably, purportedly, is your stated goal anyway.

Where's the disconnect?

Yeah.

If the head of the Sierra Club was sitting here, they'd be sitting here in this wooden chair with this wooden table in front of them, talking into this microphone powered by electricity that's probably very possibly powered by biomass energy, by wood.

You would expose the hypocrisy of the Sierra Club, which their take on this whole thing is we should not be harvesting anything in our national forests, period.

And so I would think that would be an interesting guest to have on sometime, but I can't speak for them other than their policies are against what we do.

I get the policy.

I just don't get the argument.

Yeah.

I'm missing the part where they're saying the best thing for the forest is to leave it alone.

Are there any facts to support that that you're aware of?

No, in fact, the opposite is the reality is leaving the forest alone is bad for that whole environment.

We've left our forests alone and our national forests now for decades, and they're burning and rotting.

We've shut things down.

I mean, the parallels between how much we've reduced our timber harvest through forest management, good logging, and how much is now burning up.

It's an inverse.

We've shut it down.

to use it and now the rotting and burning has climbed dramatically.

And it's as clear as the nose on a person's face.

And

honestly, Mike, I put environmental groups into three categories.

The first category would be environmentalists that really care about things, but they're willing to talk to you and think about it.

And when they see a tour, they go, you know what, maybe we're wrong about this.

The second group are kind of like, I just call them cave people, citizens against virtually everything.

That's kind of where they are.

They're just, that's how they are.

And then the third group.

I'm opposed.

Yeah, I'm just opposed.

Yeah.

And then the third group are really the the deep, extreme, and it's an industry.

It's an environmental industry.

I'm going to ramble on here too much, maybe, but I got it to how big it is now, Mike.

So environmental groups have to register in America to be a 501c3 to get their nonprofit status.

There are 30,471 environmental groups registered in the United States of America.

They have 138,000, not members, employees.

They have an annual income of over $28 billion.

They have a war chest of about $80 billion.

I shouldn't say a war chest, I'll say a balance sheet, because we're not at war with a lot of these people.

We can work with some of them, but we're up against.

They're at war with you.

Yeah, they're an extreme group.

Why some of them want to stop things?

I really think they want to see,

they want to see a lot of the world depopulated, but I'm not going to get into that kind of

Malthusian, right?

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people,

I mean, even with all the headlines around population collapse, I mean, it really looks to be a very serious thing, but you still hear guys from

some big egg heads all the way to Bill Maher who are just saying, look, the resources aren't here to support the people we have.

And here we are.

I'm still trying to get my head around the earlier claim that a third of our country is forest.

Yeah.

And I'm reminded of like the blind guy and the elephant, right?

He doesn't know what he's touching, and he just assumes that the whole of the thing is whether it's the tail or the trunk or the tusk right and i think you know i flew across the country yesterday at a window seat i didn't see any forest flew across the whole country what i saw was vast wasteland right yeah you know and i get it that's you know that's where the flight paths are but most people who stay in their lane and in the flight path they don't see the forest.

And if we can't see it, if we can't touch it, then it just becomes unreal to us.

It's just worth belaboring a third of the country with this forest.

It's incredible.

Right.

And it's managed by really good people that we call loggers.

And that's what we're about.

And, you know, one of the things I think, Mike, that folks need to know is loggers are.

Trained, they're certified.

They're licensed.

They have to take tests to even become a logger.

In California, you have to have 3,000 hours of experience before you can even get a licensed timber operator's certificate.

So,

you know, one guy, I had an interesting talk one time.

He said, loggers are just those knuckle-draggers that walk around and they, you know, like cavemen.

That image is gone, I think, or it should be gone.

We are professional people, really proud of what we do.

It's gone in the church that you attend.

It's gone into the choir you preach to.

Yeah.

But I tell you, man, this is a great transition because we could talk about the macro for hours, but it's the micro, it's the individual loggers that I really want to pick your brain on because I do think those guys are still subject to the same sorts of stereotypes that have been around since Paul Bunyan.

I think farmers are still subject to, you know, Billy Bob and the overalls clear in the South 40, eight hayseeds.

Mechanics are still relegated to...

knuckle-dragon grease monkeys and so forth.

These are very powerful images.

In fact, I remember the Future Farmers of America telling me right before I addressed 30,000 of their members back in 2008 that we're now officially referred to as the FFA

because the word farmer itself had become an impediment to their ability to recruit.

So, yeah, I'm always fascinated by these images and by these stereotypes and the impact they have, not just on your industry, but on our country.

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Yeah, it's to kind kind of further your example.

So, even up till, I don't know, actually, most of my career, we're loggers.

We're proud of that word.

It has a connotation that folks, I don't know where it comes from, maybe all our history, but for a while they've tried to change what we do.

Let's call it timber harvesting.

Let's call it forest thinning.

Let's call it vegetation management.

Let's call it post-traumatic stress disorder.

Not shell shock.

Yeah.

Forest health workers.

No, we're loggers.

And that's what the American Loggers Council is all about is trying to educate folks on what we do, why we do it.

And we're making tremendous progress.

In fact,

what's coming, Mike, is wood is now being viewed by the world as the premier building product.

You may have heard of mass timber or cross-laminated timber.

We're seeing around the world skyscrapers being built out of wood.

And

where?

30, 40, Denver, Colorado to Denmark, all over the world.

It's something worth maybe doing a show on sometime.

It's called Mass Timber or Cross-Laminated Timber.

God help me, Chuck, but can we find a wooden skyscraper?

Probably not.

Probably not.

But there's some beautiful examples.

There's some beautiful examples of wooden structures being built all over the world.

So one of the leading architects in the world was saying, and I'll get this sort of right, but he said something to the effect of the 17th century was the century of rock.

The 18th century was the century of steel.

The 19th century was a century of brick.

The 20th century was a century of concrete.

The 21st century is a century of wood.

We're going to go back.

We're headed in the right direction.

Is that?

Yeah, there you go.

That's wood.

Even though that's been painted, it looks like that's a good job, Chuck.

That looks good.

Chuck, we're going to keep you around for another week.

Chuck, man, I feel so good.

Look at that.

that.

Vicky, you got to be proud to be sitting next to a guy that's so close to being a producer.

That's amazing.

This is what's going to bring us around is when the world starts to see how important wooden structures and how beautiful they are and how they can replace other types of building materials.

And hey, folks, wood is a renewable resource.

All this other stuff we dig up, and I'm not against any of them, the cement and all.

Don't get me wrong.

I mean, it literally grows on trees.

Am I right?

Easy, Spark.

Vicky, please, can you do something?

Well, can I just ask the screamingly obvious question about the risk a wooden structure might pose, especially in its high-risiness?

I mean,

does the cross lamination, is that some sort of fire retardant?

So there's a couple things.

Will they fall over, you know, in an earthquake?

So to build this stuff, you got to pass all these tests.

So

wooden structures, high-rise, they put them on shaker platforms and shake them.

And they hold together better than

concrete, brick, steel, they kind of compete with steel.

Fire-wise, they're absolutely, they're not fireproof by any means, but it's like holding a match up against a log.

It won't start on fire.

And so these wooden beams are just solid superstructures that You know, if a fire got going in somebody's bedroom and that got going, maybe it would.

But no, they've passed all the fire tests and they're extremely safe from a structural integrity and from fire.

As safe as brick?

Yeah, safer than brick when it comes to earthquake.

I'll give it to you, brick won't burn.

But I'm going to Google up sometime.

Has a cross-laminated timber skyscraper burned yet?

I haven't heard of one.

Has a cross-laminated timbered

mass-timbered skyscraper burned yet?

Yeah.

I mean,

look, again, that's just one of those things that creates enough cognitive dissonance in the average person's brain pan that they, all they can do is stare at you like a cow looking at a new gate.

You know, it's like, so you're telling me the wooden, I live up in San Francisco, God help me.

And, you know, that was a wooden town once upon a time.

And after that earthquake, that thing went up like flash paper.

Yeah.

And that's seared into my sort of, you know, imaginary reptilian reptna.

God, you know, it wouldn't have been that bad if everything had been brick.

You know, these beams are often two feet by two feet.

I mean, they're just huge.

They're the strength of steel, and they,

I guess I'm not prepared to convince you that it isn't.

No, I'm just trying to be, look, I mean, I know what people would think.

Am I right?

You and I are in such violent agreement, it would be boring.

I'd sit here and just nod my head and go, yeah.

But I mean, look, first of all, you're telling me this country is a third forest.

Yeah.

Secondly, you're telling me that the future of building materials is is wood.

Yep.

Okay.

Yep.

I can't wait to hear number three.

Well, and the number three is

still the problem: we're the leading importer of wood in the world.

That's the one that doesn't resonate in there.

And

that's what the American Loggers Council is working hard on.

So you're back to, yeah, loggers,

how are we viewed by people?

I just want, I'm sorry, I just got to hop in real quick.

Yeah.

We're the leading importer of wood, but we basically use 75%

as a country.

So even though we're only importing 25% of all the wood we use, we are the overall, in the aggregate, the leading importer of wood.

California, on the other hand, is importing 80%

of

its timber products.

And California, by way of comparison, state by state, who has more wood than California?

Maybe Alaska.

Okay.

Yeah.

Maybe Alaska.

Well, they don't really count though.

Yeah, well they're way up there.

What's going on in Alaska?

Yeah, yeah.

Russia wants that back, I'm sure.

So on ChatGPT, it says here that as of February 2025, there have been no reports of cross-laminated timber CLT skyscrapers burning.

In fact, CLT has been extensively tested and is recognized for its fire-resistant properties.

When exposed to fire, CLT forms a protective charred layer that insulates the inner wood, allowing the structure to maintain its integrity for extended periods.

This charring process enables CLT buildings to withstand fire effectively, often outperforming traditional materials like steel in certain fire scenarios.

Okay.

No, that's interesting.

And the charring is interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is interesting.

So that, yeah, there you go.

It forms a protective layer that, oh, now it won't burn.

So you use fire to char the wood so it won't burn.

Yeah, that's what I meant to say, Chuck, all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

That's good.

Yeah.

I'll tell you what's unfortunate.

CLT, also the airport designation for Charlotte, which leads me to the next question.

Wooden planes?

Are they coming?

That's how we started, right?

I did.

Was it that?

Back to the future.

Wasn't the Spruce Goose basically a wooden plane?

It did not do well.

No.

Yeah.

It was a wooden plane, but

it didn't spruce very well.

Well, anyway.

Or goose.

When you force rhymes like that into technology, the Spruce Goose, you're attempting fate.

Let me speak real quick, Chuck, to another excuse me, Mike, to another problem that we have with these forest fires, and that's the smoke, which you saw from the top of the building looking across huge, huge volumes of smoke.

So

there's smoke and there's the watershed effects, and I want to hit them both real quick.

How bad is this smoke problem?

When it's we're breathing, it's horrible.

Drifting smoke, they call it.

Yeah, so a UCLA study was just came out and it looked at the fires in California, the 2020 fires, which was a bad year.

Here was their conclusion.

I'll read one sentence.

Wildfire emissions in 2020 essentially negated 18 years of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, all our electric cars, all this stuff we've been doing to ourselves, and I'm not in a bad way, but you know, we're trying to improve, that one wildfire season negated, it offset 18 years of all of that.

So smoke is worse than just a noxious thing.

We don't like breathing it.

This thing really wipes out our greenhouse greenhouse gas advances that we make.

So, really, something for folks to be aware of: that another reason burning up our forests is really, really bad.

Watershed.

Our forests supply about 75%

of the water in California.

When I say supply, it sheds the water, it comes out of the mountains, 75% of California's water.

And we're often short on water.

If we were to thin our forests and take out what, it's a good example, if you look at a bunch of a drinking cup

with straws in it,

each one of those trees is like a straw taking water out of the ground.

It's called evapotranspiration.

An average-sized pine tree, Mike, takes about 200 gallons,

not per week, per day out of the ground.

200 gallons a day.

So that much water, and so when you've got millions of trees more than you need, we're losing millions of

millions of gallons a day.

A day, yeah.

Just being like a straw sucked right out of the ground.

So if we could thin some of those trees out, make them into products, reduce the fire danger, we also will improve our water supply.

and get rid of the smoke problem.

I mean, it's such a win-win-win.

So yeah, if you have the Sierra Club guys sitting here and go, why aren't we doing this?

I don't know the answer to that.

But we ask politicians why we're not doing this, and we're making some good traction now.

We go back to Washington, D.C.

every year, the American Loggers Council.

We used to meet with staffers.

We love meeting with the staff.

Now we meet with the Speaker of the House.

We meet with the Speaker of the Senate, the head of the Senate.

We meet with the head people.

They're like, hey, we want to hear from you guys.

What do we need to do different?

Fix our Forest Act is coming.

It's a new day coming, Mike, and I'm...

optimistic about the future, even though it's been a tough go.

Well, we've been watching a lot of splats happen here and there.

Before I really ask you about the daily life of a logger and ask you to make a case for a man or woman who might want to enter that industry and before we talk about some of the recruiting challenges they're in,

I'm still stuck a little bit on

the anthropomorphism.

that you alluded to earlier, you know, when half of the kids in all of those surveys indicate that they believe the tree felt pain when it was being cut.

You know, I don't know that you outgrow that.

I think from what I've seen, that's a belief structure that metastasizes, like most beliefs do, and it gets, you know, firmly held.

And you see it in, you know, Gaia and Mother Earth and so many examples.

Wizard of Oz.

Yeah, and so suddenly,

I mean,

I'll catch all sorts of hell for saying it, but if somehow the species doesn't see itself at the very top of the food chain and as the proximate cause of all the environmental trouble in the world, then that's when people start to push.

They're like, no, no, it is up to us.

We are in charge.

As if,

as if we were in charge of Pangea or Tambora or Krakatoa or the last earthquake or the next earthquake.

I just marvel when I think about how quickly the earth will revert to whatever justifying means for the earth.

It'll shrug and we'll be gone.

Well, you know,

when you talk about we're in charge, we can only be in charge of what we can really be in charge of.

Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, Krakatoa, those are acts of God.

We can start a forest fire and we can put out a forest fire.

That is what's different about fires.

And we can be in charge of that dynamic.

When a fire starts in a a hundred mile an hour wind, no, I'm not talking about that.

But we can do a lot as a society to prevent forest fires, like Smokey the Bear said.

And that's where we need to go.

And we need to do it in spades.

We need to get serious about it.

And the crisis that we've seen is driving it.

And it's fine.

Yeah, maybe we've been slapped finally the time that

we're going to get it.

Maybe.

But, you know, back to kids and teaching and stuff and how do they get this idea.

and Vicki can tell this story better than me but we used we we often have the teachers come and we'll teach Forest Institute for teachers and we'll teach the teachers and one time we had that and this lady came up to Vicki later and she's in tears almost she and Vicki goes what's the matter she says I've been teaching these kids wrong my whole life about everything you do and about trees and so she said man I'm going to start teaching the truth okay well we need to do a lot more

that's a peripatia That's a peripatetic moment in the narrative when the protagonist realizes everything

he or she thought she knew

is wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a very, very hard thing to get your head around.

But would you give Vicki your mic for a sec?

Because I want to hear from her in a moment after I make this next salient and unforgettable point.

It's really just repeating what you said.

We have to focus on the things we can do, but we also have to be very realistic about the things we can't control.

And when you call Krakatoa an act of God,

that's a tough sell today.

In the same way, you don't want to make this political.

I don't want to make it religious.

But

what would have happened back when Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein?

You know, that was that famous summer.

Was it Krakatoa or was it Tambora?

I don't remember which one.

Tambora, right?

So giant volcano, huge cloud.

Talk about the impact of smoke.

Yeah.

Goes around the world, basically, blocks out the sun.

Right.

Wound up changing migratory patterns for humans in this country.

Indiana wouldn't be where it is, but for the changing patterns of migration as a result of this volcano.

It plunged the world into this preternatural gloom and darkness.

It screwed up the farming cycles, the seasons.

Poor Mary Shelley's right in Frankenstein, locked up in Switzerland in some crazy hotel.

My question is: what would we do today?

In the wake of that, would the next 30,000-plus environmental agency to emerge be the agency committed to somehow putting an end to volcanoes?

That is so great you mentioned that because I think of that same thing, only I think of it in terms of the Dust Bowl.

What would we do today if that occurred?

And I remember reading,

interesting,

in religion for a minute.

So I remember reading about it, and some pastors saw this first black.

They thought it was the apocalypse.

They thought it was the end of the world.

That went on for four or five years.

People didn't sweep things off, they shoveled their houses out.

What would happen if that happened today?

Who would we blame?

How would we view something like that?

Same

example.

We would look for a cause.

We'd look for a cause because we would fundamentally believe that because we're at the absolute top of the food chain, it must be within our control.

So, we either caused it or it's incumbent upon us to prevent it.

Right?

So

that.

But you can't prevent Krackatoa and you can't produce,

but forest management, you can prevent a lot of things.

And you can't cure all the ails, you can't stop every fire, but you can certainly make things safer.

People can do things with forest management around fire that you can't do on any of these other things we're talking about, earthquakes or those are going to happen.

And that's what makes forest management, firefighting, and all that that an interrelated, very important thing for people to get.

And by

thinning and preventing, we're making products.

For goodness sakes, you know, it's like, how simple can this possibly get?

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It's complicated because it's neither fish nor fowl, right?

It's not Krakatoa,

but

because it's going to happen to your point when the winds are blowing and the humidity is low and there's drought.

Yeah, there's not much you can do.

But during all these other times, there are things you can do.

So you can mitigate it.

You can't mitigate a volcano.

You can't mitigate an earthquake.

That's why the fire is so vexing because it feels like we ought to be able to do more to stop it.

And surely we can.

We can.

But we can't necessarily eliminate them.

And so we have to, I don't know,

there's a humility in this, right?

Yeah.

He used you the elephant thing a little while ago.

Yeah, it's like eating an elephant.

You got to get started.

And we are well started at it.

We are doing great things.

Hey, man, I don't want to make any trouble for you, but you start talking about eating elephants.

You have any idea the mail you're going to get?

I'm sure that's on the naughty list.

Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, we're not going to eat any.

PETA's going to get me.

Yeah.

Dude, they got a file on me.

Thick as a brick.

We'll come back to you in a second, but your beautiful wife, the lady logger of the year.

Yeah.

Say something smart, Vicki, about education.

And what's a nice girl like you doing out there with a bunch of feller bunchers?

And tell everybody the first thing you said about logging when you met me.

Oh, well, Mike loves this story because when I first met him, one of the things I said was that I really, really did not like logging trucks.

No, she said hated.

That's a form of intense dislike.

Sure.

And the reason behind that was because I was a single mom at the time.

and would drive to town on a little two-lane road and logging trucks would pass me.

I'd be going 55, and they would pass me on these windy roads.

And the ones that were doing it, it was pretty unsafe.

They'd throw up gravel and break my windshield, and I didn't have the money to pay for it.

And so, people know we're talking about these impossibly long flatbeds with these giant trees, a dozen of them,

chained.

You do look at that and go, Boy, I don't want to be behind it when that chain snaps.

Well,

most logging trucks drive really well and have great drivers.

I just happened to get behind a couple of wild ones.

So that's where my impression came from that I didn't like logging trucks.

And then you learned he was a logger.

What you guys are dating at this point?

Or about to date or what?

Well, we actually, we met at Thanksgiving and he proposed January 4th.

So we didn't have the same thing.

Same thing.

However many weeks later.

That's borderline.

So logging didn't really play into it, except that

I didn't really want to meet someone from out of state.

I was living in Oregon at the time, although I'm a native Californian.

And

so Mike's sister asked if I wanted to meet him.

And I said, well, if he's from California, no, not really.

And she lied.

Well, just because I wasn't going to move.

And she lied.

And she said,

well, actually,

he has a logging company, and I think he's planning on moving his company to Oregon.

Oregon.

And there was zero truth in that.

That's the big lie.

That's what got us together.

But there was purpose behind that because we've been married now for 26 years.

Oh,

logging.

A love story.

So you meet on Thanksgiving

and December goes by and then you're halfway into January and you propose.

Over the phone from California.

Over the phone, because nothing says romance like that.

Yeah, exactly honey trust me I'm down on one knee and I'm and I'm holding this amazing ring for you well here's how the conversation went so I so we're talking I said Vicki

will you marry me

and there's this long pause and so I go

well do you need more time to think about it and she goes no

and I go

well no you won't marry me or no you don't need more time to think about it

and she said

and I said and I laughed, and I said, no, I don't need more time to think about it.

And yes, I'll marry.

What in the world did he do in six weeks?

I mean, was this just good timing all around?

What kind of game does this logger have?

People want to join.

You know, I was not looking to get married.

I had two young boys, and

truly,

God brought us together.

I could tell a 15-minute story, which I won't,

that just every single step of the way, that's what it was.

So it just felt like something bigger than you.

Yeah.

Well, what I realized probably about 10 years later is the reason that Mike's sister intuitively knew that we should be together is because we are so much alike.

And I think that we tuned into that.

pretty instantly.

Yeah, so from I hate logging trucks to Lady Logger of the Year, I knew.

See, I knew what what was going on.

What did she do to get Lady Logger of the Year?

How does this

happen?

And has there ever been a Lady Logger Year?

No, she's the first one.

And the president of our association said, we're going to start doing this, and Vicki's going to be the one.

And actually, what she does, she works behind the scenes.

She does all sorts of work for our associations.

That's how she got to be Lady Logger of the Year.

We put on the national convention in Sonora, California,

last October, and she pretty well put that whole thing together.

She believes in what we do and she believes in the people, loves the logging community and all the things you've written about, all the different jobs and all the, I don't know if you've ever written about loggers, but they would be right in your wheelhouse.

You would love us too.

We're just great, honest, hardworking people and that's Vicki saw that and she's part of it, but she's always behind the scenes doing things.

She never had to do a, she never won the axe throw or anything like that.

She was just always hard, hard work

supporting our industry.

And that's how that got her that recognition, and it was well deserved.

With his double-bladed axe and his hob-nailed boots, he goes where the timber's tall.

Hey, Paul, Paul Bunyan.

Wow.

Okay, so I'll start to land the plane somewhat

around work.

You know, what kind of people today,

who are you looking for in your industry?

What kind of person who really doesn't know

much about your industry ought to consider it and why?

That's a really good question because the industry is rapidly changing right now, Mike, in terms of the equipment we use and the technology that we employ.

And kids really are into technology and joysticks and different things.

So, the reason to get into logging not is to because you like joysticks and stuff, but or electronics, but it's not setting chokers and chainsaws.

It's a

job I think that kids can be attracted to because it uses a lot of technology for sure.

But it still takes kids that get up in the morning and want to get to work at two or three in the morning and work hard and make a good living.

And there's a lot of those kids out there.

There's a lot of kids that are in college right now.

They come out of college with debt and they're like really don't know what to do.

So what we're trying to do right now is to get into high schools and show young people that there's an honest, good living out there doing logging.

And probably in 15 years, Mike, 20 years, that feller buncher you just saw, you'll be able to operate it right here from LA in Sonora.

We're working with a company right now that is teleoperating equipment.

There's a machine called a skidder that drags the logs after the feller buncher puts it down.

He's operated that skidder from a thousand miles away with teleoperating electronics with cameras on the machine and sensors and GPS.

So the Tesla type stuff on the highway is coming to the logging industry.

That's not the reason to get in it necessarily, but I think it attracts the young folks to go, this is kind of cool.

Same thing with farming.

The miracle of modern agriculture has been hidden from view.

from a whole generation.

There's so much big science.

There's so much incredible tech in all of it.

Right.

But what happened to you?

What was it about the industry that got you and how did you start working in it?

Oh, that's so we're going to go back about 55 years for that.

At about 15 years old, a lot of young guys at logging that age back then were start firewood cutting.

And so we started a firewood business.

And Mark and Wayne and I started this firewood business together.

And we cut trees and made firewood and did all sorts of great things and and

we weren't driving yet we were just kind of stacking it up but as soon as one day we were working and had

ropes and stuff and dragging stuff up and we thought okay let's figure out how to yard this stuff up a hill so our pastor was a logger too he came up well put a block and tackle in the tree rope okay and we started dragging stuff up and so we had a truck pulling stuff up and we were all working together and we'd load and unload firewood and we started a business, and it was really great.

And

the difference in our little business was Mark was blind and

was blind from birth.

He would be a great person for you to write about in your book.

He's the kind of guy that you would write and

Mark was a logger.

Mike was a logger, and he was blind.

He could load and unload the truck with firewood.

This was back when they were kids.

He didn't go into logging as a profession.

And we could teach him how to drive the truck, to pull logs, and say, hey, Mark, stop and go and back up.

And it just was a great way for us to get started because it.

Vicky, am I hearing this right?

You just told me the blind guy is driving the truck?

Yeah.

That's what I heard.

Well, let me tell you what we used to, as soon as we got our driver's license, what I did with Mark, the blind guy, he had a Model A his dad got.

So we got in the model and I said, hey, Mark, let's go take that out on the highway.

So I said, you get behind the wheel.

I'll sit in the passenger side and I'll steer.

And off we went out onto the highway because Mark knew how to drive.

He knew how to shift and do all that stuff because he'd practiced around on his ranch.

And so Mark was a it taught me that handicapped is only in the eyes of us beholders.

Mark wasn't handicapped.

He knew what to do.

But anyway, that's how I got started in logging.

I went from that to

actually went to school, got my forestry degree.

I'm a registered forester also.

Duke, right?

Duke, yeah.

And we got a kick-ass basketball team.

You know that.

That's what we're.

And then we went.

We touched on a wooden floor.

Yeah, we touched on it.

We're playing on a wooden floor, yeah.

Now I'm president of the American Loggers Council, and it's been a great ride all in between.

What's the YSS all about?

Oh, that's a reason that we've got in our little community.

It's a group, a consensus group, a collaborative group, where we get these environmentalists that I say want to work with us.

We all get together and we say, okay, we had the rim fire.

We don't want that anymore.

What are we going to do?

And so, yeah, we got together and we're going to thin the forest.

We're going to get things replanted.

We're going to, no litigation.

We said, nobody show up here to sue it because we're against that.

And we salvaged 300 million board feet after the rim fire because we kept any litigants out because we all got along.

So it's a local group of folks that get together and make things happen.

Do you think that's what's going to?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Things locally are where you can make things happen.

If you wait for Washington, if we wait for Sacramento and all their bureaucrats, we're going to wait a long time.

But if we can get together locally, we can make things happen.

So in Tuolumne County, which is in kind of the center of the Sierras, we're building our seventh wood processing facility in that county.

We've got two sawmills still, we've got two biomass plants, we got a wood shavings plant.

We're building things because our community gets it and we get together.

I'm going to digress if I can take a little more time of how this can work the other way.

And when an environmental, a big extreme group gets in the way, there was a project called Tucuya Ridge down on the Los Padres National Forest, Santa Antawin Country, and they said this little community of about 3,000 called Mount Piño said, we want to build a fuel break around our community.

We want to clear it so we don't burn up.

We've got about 3,800 homes here.

We want to be safe.

How big is a fuel break, by the way, so people understand?

Yeah, it is wide.

Yeah, and by the way, usually they're shaded, so it's not just a clear cut.

You thin it out pretty aggressively.

In this case, I think this was a 300-foot fuel brake, which is going to work in most things, not a hundred mile-an-hour wind.

You can't, okay.

So

the Mount Peñas community group got together, says, we want to do this.

The Forest Service said, yep, let's do it.

The Kern County Fire Department supported him.

They put it out for scoping, it's called, so everybody could weigh in on it.

Let's move it forward.

Gets ready to go.

In comes the Center for Biological Diversity out of Tucson, Arizona and says, no, no, no, you're not going to do that because you're going to endanger the Condor

and it's in a roadless area.

Really?

Okay, we'll go to court.

Two years later, this district court says, yep, you're good to go.

No, Center for Biological Diversity, we're going to take it to the Ninth Circuit.

They sued again.

Took six years to get this fuel brake built.

Luckily, there wasn't a fire.

I don't know what would have happened, but it would have burned the place down is what would have happened.

That's an example of how it doesn't work.

When an extreme group that doesn't live in the community comes and says, we don't like that for whatever reason.

I'll tell you what, it's not good for the condor.

Yeah,

it's a windmill.

Yeah.

Have you seen that?

Have you seen these, the condors and the kites?

Big birds just flying

straight into them all of the time.

Yeah, there's lots of documented bird kills.

The spotted owl is probably known more than the condor.

After lots of studying, really took a lot of studying, they figured out the scientists, what's killing the spotted owl is wildfire, killing their nest,

and the barred owl, which is a bigger owl that actually kills the spotted owl, eats their eggs.

It's not logging.

It's the lack of logging that's killing these animals off because our forests are burning up.

So these are all the kind of things the American Loggers Council and others try to get up to Congress.

We're going in another month, and we bring these facts to people.

They go, you know what?

We're starting to hear you here.

And Westerman heard us, and he's now got the Fix Our Forest Act.

And I'll tell you, listeners, it's through the House.

We got to get the Senate to pass it.

It's at the Senate doorstep right now.

Fix Our Forest Act.

Fix Our Forest Act.

HR.

Got to schedule a vote.

The Senate, they have a few committees.

And so

we just need to call our senator.

We've got two senators here.

Say, folks, this is a good thing.

Push it through.

I know that you've obviously got a clear and present bias, but

do you liken this and the importance of this topic to energy independence?

Oh, what a great comparison.

Okay, I'll just, we don't want to talk politics, I know, but the Trump, I don't care either.

It was the Trump administration that said, look, we can be energy independent, and he got us there in about four years.

We started the Keystone Pipeline and did things that said made sense.

We have more energy in this country than any other country.

Same thing with wood products.

Yes, we just need the administration to go, this is really important.

We can be wood independent.

I don't want to be wood independent.

I want to export wood, Mike.

I want us to export our wood and our technology.

I'll tell you this is an interesting fact.

Half the wood in the world is still used for heating and cooking.

You know, you've seen it in National Geographic, these ladies that carry wood on their back for five miles because they've denuded Cambodia or Ethiopia or wherever.

We need to be helping those countries with wood products and technology on how to get things going.

They've got to get through their own industrial or right?

I mean, they're burning dung and wood.

They've got to get to coal and oil and then gas.

And then maybe we can talk about hydro or solar or wind or fusion.

We're fission.

Yeah.

But we need to be able to show up to those countries and say, hey, folks, we've got wood for sale.

We've got pellets, wood, biomass, whatever.

But no, we're importing it because we are shutting our industry down.

And that's, we're making a big push on that, and it's working.

But it's going to take a while.

It's like turning the aircraft carrier.

Vicki, did he forget anything?

Are you sitting there going, gosh, if only you would have mentioned blah, blah, blah?

That's a good question because she usually is your last chance.

I'm about to look into this bag of swag you brought me and unwrap the trees.

You know, I got a question though.

Oh, gosh.

I'm sorry, but dear.

My question is, you know, I know that you said, like, it all grows on trees, right?

This wood grows on trees.

The biomass can help us with energy.

We can build more with wood.

And I've seen cross-cutting, like in Washington State.

I've driven past a section where they take out like an acre here and it's like a checkerboard.

It's like, how long does it take from the time you clear that piece of a checkerboard till it grows high enough, big enough, that you can clear it again?

Yeah, that's a great question.

It takes a little longer in the west than it does in the south.

So in the southern United States, you can have a new crop of trees ready for harvest in about 25 to 30 years.

It grows quicker.

Here, it's about 50 years.

In the meantime, you can do some intermediate cutting, thinning it out, getting some products as you thin that, and then it's ready to harvest, say, in 50 or 60 years.

And it has to be replanted.

We don't cut anything and not replant it.

That's a law, but it's, of course, we want to because that's our business.

That's our livelihood.

But does that get the answer?

Yeah, yeah, that answers my question.

Well, it's a slightly different analogy than the energy one.

It's more like fisheries.

You know, you can overfish.

And if you don't take care, to not do that, if you don't let fish and game do what they do, well, then you're just shooting your own feet off yeah so obviously it's right you guys are motivated i would think yeah by the same self-preservation what'd you bring me my favorite things in the front and it's a challenge coin right right in the very if you turn it around in the front pouch it's

way in the front

yeah you get it

can i say something while you're working with zippers i can't stop it okay

i i want to say that we've got some good things going with the forest service too even though you know forest service has been we've had some problems over the last couple decades The American Loggers Council just signed a memorandum of understanding with the Forest Service that's promoting our timber industry, new markets, and logging.

That's a big deal,

it's a big deal.

And it's exciting, and it's showing, I think, where the future is.

People are getting it.

Nice.

So that's the whatever that is.

That's a lapel pin, and that's your challenge coin down there.

That's a lapel pin?

Yeah, yeah.

How big a lapel do you think I've got?

Well, that's what we, yeah.

We really want you to see what's going on.

We want to be noticed, yeah.

That's great.

American loggers, great.

While you're looking through that, Vicki's got a question now.

Go ahead, Vicki.

Well, actually, just a statement that

if we were really wisely managing our forests and getting our timber off of our forests, one thing I think that's important for people to realize is that doesn't cost the Treasury our government money.

That will bring in a lot of money to the Treasury,

as well as making the industry healthier and providing jobs.

Well, that's a great point.

I was just at CPAC.

I was just in the belly of the beast in D.C.

and I saw Elon on stage with a giant chainsaw.

The metaphor is not lost.

You know, this is not the time to ask the taxpayers to step up to do a thing or the feds.

Whatever you're on about, it has to be self-funding.

It has to be self-perpetuating, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Feels like it anyway.

And I'm so glad you mentioned that because that's a really good point.

This can make money as we're doing the work.

That's the greatest bag of swag I've ever got on the podcast.

This is like, I got this plane cards.

Yeah, yeah.

Chicken Ranch?

Plant cards?

Yeah, yeah.

You want to explain that?

Well, that's what we had our convention at the Chicken Ranch Casino in Sonora.

Sonora, California.

Yeah.

Oh, that's a really good book.

Why would anyone cut a tree down, right?

Yeah.

Like that.

But it answers the question in a very positive way when it's over.

Yeah, it starts out like

Chuck, there's one for you, too.

No, I got a box.

I got a bag as well.

Well, that's right.

You already interviewed him for the podcast.

This is great, huh?

Good, good.

This stuff all comes in handy.

Nuts, good.

Yeah, these are the best ones there.

All right.

Final thoughts.

Why is chopping wood so satisfying?

What is it?

I've thought a lot about it and read a lot of poetry about it, got my own thoughts, but I'm just wondering.

Yeah.

I think because you see instant results, you see something made quickly.

And that's why I think it's satisfying.

That's what Einstein said.

People love cutting wood because they like to see instant results.

Yeah.

And Henry Ford said,

oh, that makes me feel really good because I

made that myself.

I was Einstein.

Yeah, I didn't even know it.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not quite there, but I think your husband had a brain the size of a redwood.

It was amazing.

Yes, he is.

Anyway, sorry.

Ford said, oh, chop your own wood.

It'll warm you twice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There you go.

I'll leave the listener with this.

My earliest memories are of block and tackle and feathers and wedges and watching

for a while watching and then accompanying my dad and my pop back into the woods behind our...

our little house.

They were about 50 acres.

We didn't own it.

It was the States, but nobody could develop it.

And our house was heated by wood stoves.

And watching those two men go back there and pick a tree and then fell it, they played it like it was a game show, right?

It's like here,

the thrill they got from watching it fall where they wanted it.

Right.

And then the chainsaws and then the cutting and then back to the wood pile and then the splitting.

And then

it was just

something primal and practical.

And there's some artistry about it.

Oh, my God.

Such a right way to, you know, go with the grain and how to.

It gets in your blood.

I can see how it happens.

Well, it's in.

And so in in the American Loggers Council, it's in the blood of about 60,000 of us.

And I think the timber industry is going to grow, and we're going to have more loggers.

We're getting younger loggers in, and we've been through some tough stuff, but better times ahead.

You watch.

Let's get together in 10 years, and we'll talk about mass timber.

All right.

I do have one

poor Chuck.

I note that I'm sorry we're over.

I'll be all right.

Go ahead.

Is there

a school, an academy, a learning type of situation that people enroll in in order to get into your industry?

If so, what and where?

Very good.

They're just starting up.

So Shasta College in California has logging equipment and they're working with Sierra Pacific Industries.

Sierra Pacific's giving them 30,000 acres.

They have the equipment, state-of-the-art stuff, filler bunchers.

And they said, kids, come on, get into our program.

It's a school-certified program.

Not a four-year school.

No, it's a weeks, a few weeks, or say a couple months of training.

What's a cost?

I don't even know if there is a cost, to tell you the truth.

No, there's no, there isn't a cost, but it's Hilo is the name of the program.

Heavy, yeah, heavy equipment logging operation.

Well, it's a junior college.

I don't know if there's a college.

It's very inexpensive.

Well, Google it, guys.

Hilo, if this sounds like it's interesting.

Shasta College.

Shasta College.

And, you know, my foundation is all about work ethic scholarships for vocations that don't require a four-year degree.

This is such an important space, and I'll make sure that it's indicated on our we're currently in the midst of an enrollment period now.

So I mean

I'm happy to do what I can to call some attention to

this.

I mean where's the need right now in terms of manpower and labor?

How many loggers could be hired if they showed up?

ready to work and good to go.

I don't know the number for sure, but everybody coming out of that school gets placed instantly.

Let me put it that way.

Jobs are waiting for these folks.

It's not just logging.

It can be sawmilling, like at the sawmills, they're looking for people.

I know our local sawmills, the guys that hold for pizza signs and say they had for log, we need people.

They were holding signs up on the corner, like, we'll pay $25 an hour, apply here.

It's interesting.

There's a lot of need in the timber industry, not only in logging, but all the way through power plants, sawmills.

It's a great, we can get into it.

Let's do it.

It's everywhere.

It's our submarine base.

It's our automotive industry.

Every major industry that I know of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is just staring recruiting right in the face and pulling out the stops.

Yeah.

I'll tell you this, man.

If there's peanuts and ball caps and notepads and books and everything else in the way of inducements,

you're in it.

Okay.

Thank you so much for making the time, Vicki.

Congratulations, you lady logger of the year.

Thank you both for coming by.

Good luck.

Our pleasure.

Thank you, Mike.

Really, really fun.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Thanks.

If you like what you heard,

well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty freaking please,

please.

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