It will produce construction lumber, fence posts and other products to sell to West Coast distributors.
Leaders at Tahoe Forest Products envision a facility that processes roughly 40-50 million board feet of lumber per year - a modest operation compared to many other mills around the US. The Carson City operation will start processing logs in early 2023, said Jon Shinn, the CEO. “The forests will suffer such severe losses that we’re no longer protecting the species. “There's just such abundant evidence that if we do nothing, we’re going to lose it all,” said John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at the University of California at Berkeley. But now scientific consensus is shifting towards acceptance - and even encouragement - of a certain amount of logging. And no one wants to see the type of clear-cutting that destroyed old-growth forests for much of the 20th century. The silencing of chainsaws was the sound of victory for environmental activists and forest ecologists, even a few years ago. Multiple factors are behind that trend, including federal protections for endangered species, which restricted logging on public lands. In the Lake Tahoe area, the closest destination is more than 100 miles away, according to Amy Berry, the CEO of the Tahoe Fund, a philanthropy that supports environmental projects. Yet sawmills - the places where loggers take those logs - are few and far between in California. Economic recessions and the consolidation of the industry into larger, high-volume mills have played a role, and timber harvesting has declined. Part of the answer, according to many ecologists and restoration experts, is to ramp up the removal of younger trees from the understory, while simultaneously introducing prescribed fire and trying new planting strategies. While wildfire is part of the natural ecosystem, rising temperatures and worsening drought are leading to explosive blazes that decimate forests. “It’s really rare to see a success like this that will make a real difference in Lake Tahoe overall.”Ī century of fire suppression policies have left forests overgrown with smaller trees. “My jaw dropped when I heard the news,” said Forest Schafer, director of the Natural Resources Division at the California Tahoe Conservancy, a state agency. Many scientists say forest-thinning projects are urgently needed in the face of climate change, and the new mill’s supporters believe it will make a major impact in managing wildfires in a heavily wooded region that was threatened just last year by a massive blaze. It will be the first sawmill of its size to be built in the area in nearly a century, according to project leaders.
Tahoe Forest Products, LLC broke ground last month on a $10 million sawmill in Carson City, Nevada, which sits just across the California border on the eastern side of Lake Tahoe. (Bloomberg) - As California braces for another potentially devastating wildfire season, state officials and some environmental advocates are finding hope for forests in an unexpected place: a new sawmill under construction near Lake Tahoe.
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