The BC Council of Forest Industries appointed Linda Coady as president and CEO, succeeding Susan Yurkovich. In other Business news: Roseburg looks at MDF and bioenergy opportunity; Louisiana Pacific wins SFI President’s Award; IKEA scales down Russia operations; and Stora Enso and UPM raise their earning outlooks. Meanwhile on the market front: Canadian housing starts rise 8%; building material costs are up 2%; railroads’ lumber business is down 3%; paperboard and packaging trend higher; and US scrap paper exports fall slightly.
In Forestry/Climate news: researchers publish study on how trees adapt to climate change; ENGOs challenge US Forest Service’s 21-inch rule; and a Tasmanian report says native forest logging is carbon positive.
Finally, wildfire updates from Arizona and France, with a possible monsoon to the rescue.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
CHICAGO — Higher interest rates may not be significantly pulling back inflationary pressure thus far, but they are cooling down lumber prices, returning them to near pre-pandemic norms in an inadvertent sacrifice of Class I railroad carloads. According to rail carload data, so far this year the country’s seven Class I railroads have hauled approximately 7,500 fewer carloads of lumber, a decrease of 3% from a year ago. Lumber prices are currently $528 per thousand board-feet after plummeting 47% from $1,007 per thousand board-feet last month. …Declining demand for lumber has affected most big railroads, notably Canadian National, which has hauled 4,809 fewer carloads year over year. CSX Transportation has handled 1,716 fewer cars; Norfolk Southern is down 1,549 carloads; and BNSF Railway is down 814 railcars. Union Pacific’s lumber carloads are up 1,059 railcars and Canadian Pacific’s forestry business is up 309 carloads, or less than 1%. Kansas City Southern’s lumber carloads are relatively flat.
OTTAWA — Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says the annual pace of housing starts in May was up eight per cent compared with April. The national housing agency says the seasonally adjusted annual rate of housing starts in May rose to 287,257 units compared with 265,734 in April. The increase came as the pace of urban starts rose eight per cent to 264,162 units in May. The annual rate of urban starts of apartments, condos and other types of multi-unit housing projects gained 13 per cent to come in at 201,193 units for the month, while the pace of single-detached urban starts fell four per cent to 62,969 units. Rural starts were estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 23,095 units. The six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rates of housing starts was 254,727 units in May, down from 257,833 in April.
U.S. exports of recovered fiber held relatively steady during the first quarter of 2022, but scrap plastic shipments plunged by more than one-fifth. U.S. companies exported 4.28 million short tons of recovered fiber (excluding recycled pulp) during the first three months of the year, down less than 1% year over year. …In terms of OCC and paper, the trade numbers show India, Mexico and Vietnam are still the top three destinations for U.S. material, although shipments to Mexico have increased substantially. The numbers also reveal that China’s role as a downstream for U.S. material continues to dwindle. In the first quarter of this year, China slipped to No. 10 on the list of top destinations for U.S. fiber, down from No. 9 in the first quarter of 2021.
Families in the fast-growing Latoria community will soon have a new elementary school to meet their needs. The school will be built with an environmentally friendly design, focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions during construction and operation. …The Government of B.C. has approved $39.6 million to build the new south Langford elementary school. The Sooke School District has committed to contribute an additional $1 million. The new school will provide 480 seats and a better place to learn for students in the Latoria neighbourhood. …The school will be built using mass timber, a climate-friendly building practice that will reduce the overall carbon footprint of construction. B.C. is a world leader in the use of mass timber and has prioritized its use in the StrongerBC Economic Plan to align with the government’s goal of helping businesses and people transition to clean energy solutions. 
The National Weather Service says there’s about a 66% chance of a normal or wet monsoon starting in July. That should reduce the fire danger in a dangerous — but so far manageable — fire season. The fires this year started about a month earlier than normal — thanks to a hot winter and a hot dry spring. The five biggest fires have consumed homes and charred about 50,000 acres — but haven’t produced the record-breaking disaster that has overcome New Mexico. …But — peak wildfire risk for the whole season comes in the next few weeks. The wet monsoon storms of mid-July are generally preceded by weeks of dry thunderstorms that deliver lots of lightning strikes but not much rain. And that means fire danger will peak before the rains start. …those early monsoon storms can easily spark major fires — with the hot dry winds from the thunderheads waiting to drive the fires out of control.
…To Jerry Franklin, long-considered one of the foremost authorities on old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, this landscape of mature Douglas-fir and western hemlock is thriving and, most significantly, removing ever-more carbon from the atmosphere. That is not what the Forest Service sees. Too many trees in this corner of the Williamette National Forest are competing for water and sunlight, and some are dying, agency officials say. Now, the service is preparing to auction off these woodlands as early as next year as part of a timber sale, called Flat Country, that targets nearly 4,500 acres. Conservation groups that have analyzed the project say the vast majority of the lumber the agency intends to cut would come from stands of trees ranging in age from 80 to 150 years old. 
It seems like we’ve all been there – stuck behind a logging truck on a two-lane highway for miles, passing other log trucks going the other way. Have you ever caught yourself wondering why logging trucks are driving so far and passing one another when there are mills close by? Well, it’s all about the money – who’s paying the most for a load of timber. According to Rosbro Hendrix, a small contractor who’s been logging for 43 years, the amount that a mill is willing to pay for timber can vary based on the specifications of the wood and your relationship with the buyer. Generally, however, logs coming from afar off can often fetch a higher price. Hendrix has been taking many of his logs to Anthony Timberlands, here in Malvern, but it all depends on the kind of wood he’s got and whoever is paying the most.
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