Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Ms. Stacey. Thank you. I would like to speak in favor of as much wilderness as possible, and also protecting as much land that is not quite worthy of being called wilderness from exploitation until such time as the lumber companies can be a little less hard on the land they do harvest. My principal reason is that I think that there's a tendency to overestimate future demands. This is what got WHOOPS in trouble, that's what got Tosco and Exxon in trouble with shale; it has got the lumber companies in trouble when they overbid a few years ago on timber sales; and it's what got the paper industry currently in awful trouble here. In my business, we consume about 150 tons of newsprint a year. What's going on is a glut in a price war. 169 The documents I have submitted include a couple of articles on the effort of eastern mills—papermills to raise their prices to $500 a ton; the ultimate result which was the western mills undercut them in price, discounted, and the current price is 5 percent less than it was at the beginning of the year, $445 a ton. And as far as consumption goes, one of the sheets that I submitted shows what's happened to the price of newsprint in the last 10 years. Namely, it has gone up very steeply until this year. Meanwhile, utilization has slowed in the early 1970's and leveled off flat in the 1980's. But let me assure you that advertising is way up. It's more profitable than ever. There's more advertising in newspapers than ever, and advertisers are very clever in their use. They're just like motorists who get more miles per gallon. We now get more advertising per square inch than would have been believed possible in the early 1970's. And I believe the lessons of over—of high prices, high postal rates, repeated shortages have not been lost on the users, and we must assume that the timber industry can be very far off in their estimate of what they need, at least for paper products.