A new report by a conservation nonprofit is warning that Wisconsin’s declining forest products industry could damage forest health.
The report, “Wisconsin Forests at Risk: Engaging Wisconsinites in Another Century of Forest Conservation,” highlights the numerous threats the state’s woodlands are facing, from declining loggers and mills to changing weather patterns and invasive species.
According to Ron Eckstein, chair of public lands and forestry for Wisconsin’s Green Fire and a contributor to the report, the industry that includes loggers and paper mills helps maintain a healthy forest because they prune trees to enable the overall canopy to thrive.
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On WPR’s “Wisconsin Today,” Eckstein compared modern forestry work to how before European colonization Native Americans would use controlled burns to manage the woodlands.
“Most forests in the state are held by private landowners, and they don’t have the wherewithal by themselves to thin the forests and do all that work,” he said. “They require the logger and the forest products industry to do that for them, to keep forests healthy and regenerate forests and allow them to grow into older age classes.”
The forest products industry has been struggling in recent years. Wisconsin remains the top paper-producing state in the country, but jobs in the industry have declined by 73 percent since 2001 to nearly 7,000 employees in 2024, according to the Wisconsin Council on Forestry.
And a 2021 survey found that nearly one-third of logging companies expect to go out of business in the next five years.
Eckstein said the state has very few alternatives for maintaining forest health should the industry continue to decline.
“We really do need the forest products industry,” he said. “Individual landowners, the county forest system, state forests and the national forest system certainly don’t have the staff or funding to do this on their own.”
But the state’s forests face a number of challenges in the coming years, not just a declining forestry industry. The invasive emerald ash borer now covers every county in Wisconsin. The species is expected to eventually kill 99 percent of the state’s ash trees.
Plus, a warming climate means whitetail deer are increasing in population and overbrowsing young trees, which reduces species diversity in the forest and weakens the forest’s productivity.
To help keep the forestry industry healthy and maintain the state’s woodlands, the Council on Forestry is recommending the next state budget include new funding to help paper mills upgrade and sell to new markets.
Eckstein also called for further research at the state’s universities to look into ways to prevent future pests, pathogens and invasive species and to help combat the effects of climate change. He called Green Fire’s report a “call to action” for policymakers and community leaders to address headwinds impacting the forests.
He warned that although the woods may appear healthy and beautiful to the untrained eye, people like himself who have spent a lifetime studying the biology of the woods can’t help but see the rising threats facing the state’s woodlands.
“A normal person may be driving through the forests of Wisconsin in their car, they drive along and they see beautiful trees as a kind of a green blur as they’re going along at 50 to 60 miles an hour,” he said. “I drive to Madison and I see a beautiful oak forest with a complete understory of buckthorn shrubs. There’s no way those oaks can reproduce with that under there. And there’s no way that a landowner can control that buckthorn without some help.”
“What it takes is foresters, wildlife biologists, to, whenever possible, get the best possible information out to all kinds of landowners to make sure our forests stay as healthy as they possibly can be in the face of these headwinds,” he added.
