Q and A with Casey Roscoe, Senior Vice President for Public Relations at Seneca
In 2016 you became senior vice president for public relations at Seneca Sawmill Company. How many people do you employ? How many acres of Oregon timberland does Seneca own? What was Aaron Jones' contribution to the founding and ongoing success of Seneca Sawmill?
Although we are still commonly referred to as Seneca Sawmill Company because that is the name of our flagship company, we actually have a family of companies, so we rebranded last year and now just go by Seneca. We have:
- Timberlands -- about 168,000 acres that we manage sustainably. We have 92 percent more timber on that land than we had 25 years ago.
- Sawmills -- some of the most innovative in the country.
- A biomass plant -- we take the scraps from our milling process, as well as some of the slash that would otherwise have been left on a landing after a harvest, and we use it to fuel our biomass plant that creates enough green sustainable energy to power 13,000 homes. It is the cleanest running biomass plant in America. The byproduct from the biomass plant is ash, and since all of the fuel going into the plant is organic, the ash is certified organic, and we market it to farmers here in the Willamette Valley to get tilled back into the soil annually in August and September.
We employ just under 500 people. We consider them part of our Seneca family.
Aaron Jones, my grandpa, was Seneca's founder. He started it in Eugene in 1953 on Seneca Street. A year later after outgrowing that location, he moved to our Highway 99 location where we have been headquartered ever since. That first year the mill produced 18 million board feet (MBF) of lumber. We now have capacity to produce 650 MBF of lumber annually.
Two of his driving forces were efficiency and innovation. He hated seeing a pile of sawdust at the end of the day. He wanted to figure out how to get more lumber and less sawdust out of each log. In that day, saw blades were thicker. The strength of the saw relied on how thick and rigid a saw blade was. He pioneered the effective use of a high-tension band saw in the milling process so that the rigidity of the saw came from the tension in the blade, and he was able to then use a much thinner saw blade. This innovation was then adopted by other sawmills and it revolutionized the milling process.
He created a culture of innovation at Seneca and that culture is still alive and well today.
In April, sisters Becky, Kathy (your mother) and Jody Jones, the owners of Seneca Sawmill, will join together to plant the company's 40 millionth tree. Is this as historic a milestone as it sounds? How long before that tree is ready to harvest?
I'm so excited about the planting of the 40 millionth tree! This is a huge milestone for our family. The youngest members of our family (my kids who are 5 and 8, and my 6-year-old nephew) are going out to the tree farm to plant it with Mom, Becky and Jody. I love the thought of them on the tree farm with their hands in the soil. That soil is the native soil of the Douglas fir, but as I think of the fourth generation of our family planting trees in it, it feels like the native soil of our family as well.
That tree we plant will be harvested in 50 to 55 years.
On the tree farm we plan on a 50 year horizon. Healthy trees are important to us, but so is healthy soil, cool clean water and thriving wildlife. We plan for generations of trees and generations of family.
Please provide some perspective on planting 40 million trees. How many trees are typically planted per acre, and how many total acres of replanted trees does this represent? How much does it cost for your company to plant a single new tree, including labor and materials, and how much of an investment in the future does 40 million trees equal?
If you laid 40 million seedlings end-to-end, they would cross America five and a half times.
It costs about $0.85 per tree to plant. $0.35 is for the seedling and $0.50 is for labor, so the investment to plant 40 million trees may seem like it is $30 million, but it is so much more than that. It is the land itself, and the lifetimes spent caring for it.
Planting a tree is largely an active gift for the future. The time and money spent by one generation will not have a return until the next generation.
Why do you think so many Oregonians lack understanding about how dedicated private landowners are to nurturing and sustaining their own lands? You are the third generation of your family at the company. How do you feel about the land, about the trees themselves, about the company and the people who work for you? What vision do you and the Jones sisters bring to both your company and the timber industry?
Interesting question, and I think the answer to why there is such a lack of understanding is dynamic.
Oregon has passed a tipping point where more than 50 percent of our population did not grow up here. They didn't grow up driving to the coast and back and seeing the trees harvested and growing back. They didn't have an uncle who drove a log truck, or a father who worked in a mill, or a mother who was a forester. They did not grow up hunting with their families, and the knowledge of the land was not passed down to them.
When they come here from places like Texas, Nevada, Connecticut, Florida and New York and see the trees, they are moved. I appreciate that tremendously. After all of these years, I am still moved by being out among the trees. The problems arise when in a well-meaning effort they start trying to affect how we manage the land.
Another part of the answer to the question about the lack of understanding is that the people who live in Oregon are not good mind readers. Not their fault. I'm not a good mind reader either.
Our industry hasn't actively communicated with the public in a long time.
When the spotted owl situations started, the mill owners just couldn't believe it was happening. This little owl that was said to only nest in old growth, but was found nesting in rock crevasses and mail boxes, this little owl that was being taken over naturally by the more dominant barred owl, was the icon for this movement against them.
These men were gob smacked and hurt. They loved the land, the water, the trees and the wildlife. They didn't feel like the science supported the movement against them, and the community wasn't giving them the benefit of the doubt. This was the community they had supported not only by providing good paying jobs for hundreds of households, but also by helping to create hospitals, churches, libraries, sports fields and supporting their kids' little league teams, 4H and outdoor school.
They then felt like those communities they had supported were out at the gates with pitchforks and nooses. They also felt like their voices couldn't be heard through all the mayhem. They felt like the journalists who covered the situation either interviewed them to tuck their quote into the bottom of the article so that they could claim due diligence, or they would use a quote from them out of context so the spirit of what they were trying to say was not how it was portrayed. They felt like everything was written with venom in the ink, and the more they tried to communicate, the more it was misconstrued.
So they stopped communicating.
That was the better part of three decades ago. The world has changed immensely over that period of time, and so has our industry, but when people think of us, their memories are sepia-colored images of sweaty, well-muscled men working in the mills.
The general public has no idea that our mills have laser scanners and scan each log to calculate how to get the highest yield, and wireless technology throughout the mills, and that we now grade lumber using the same photo technology that can be found in a smartphone to take a picture of each piece of lumber and apply a grade. They don't know that we are inspired by technology used in other fields like health care and cartography. They don't know we use every speck of dust from every log.
They also don't know we have more trees in Oregon today than we had 100 years ago.
Oregon is the number one lumber producing state in the nation, and we have more trees today than we had 100 years ago. We are the best at what we do in the world! As an industry, we have not said that loud enough or often enough. Like politics and religion, it feels like our wood products industry in Oregon is not something we talk about unless we are around like-minded people.
We have done a tremendous disservice to the folks who have moved here from other places by not letting them know our practices and our passion for the land. We need to embrace them and bring them into the folds of our communities. I am actively working on exactly this.
When I first began my work at Seneca three years ago, I desperately wanted to take the public out to our tree farm so they could see what we were doing out there. I figured if they saw it, they'd love it. As much as I tried to figure out how to get the masses out to the tree farm, I kept running into roadblocks, and at one point had the idea to bring the tree farm to the masses. I had a virtual reality experience created of our tree farm. It is a three-minute experience and it covers the full circle: the planting of seedlings, 5-year-old trees, 15-year-old trees, 40-year-old trees, thinned versus not thinned, the care we take with streams, the harvest, and planting seedlings again. I really wanted them to understand the full lifecycle and know that no single snapshot in time could define the process.
We now have virtual reality headsets that we take out to all sorts of events, including college sporting events, community events, high school career days, classrooms and business events. We think about 6,000 people have now had our tree farm experience and so far all of the feedback has been positive and has even been punctuated with smiles, high fives, hugs and even a few people who were so excited they asked if they could volunteer to work for us. We're so honored they were so excited by our work.
You once said that one of the biggest problems facing your industry was a lack of understanding: "I feel like the general public has been told that cutting down trees is bad. There are fears that our forestlands will be used haphazardly or simply for profit with no other goals in mind, but nothing could be further from the truth."
Three years into your job, how much success have you had changing the public's perception about this? What strategies have you used to deliver your message?
After three years of talking with folks, I am more excited and hopeful than ever. It is true that many people don't know that we sustainably manage timberland in Oregon, but paired with not knowing the care we take with our land, they also have not considered the opportunity cost of using nonrenewable building materials. The great news is that most people are really excited about the wood products industry once they can understand the bigger picture and learn what we are working on for the future.
There were six billion people on this earth when I was born. By 2025, there will be eight billion. The housing demand to accommodate that population growth is staggering.
I have found that the general public doesn't know where concrete comes from -- that whole mountains have been leveled and streambeds carved out in the pursuit of aggregate.
That there is no such thing as steel in nature, and that ore must be dug out of the earth's crust creating huge divots so big they can be seen from space. Then the ore has to be smelted using coal, then transported.
They are largely unaware that whole sand islands in Indonesia are now gone due to the creation of glass.
Many also don't know that 50 percent of the weight of wood is carbon and that when a tree is harvested, that carbon is "banked" in that lumber and three more trees are planted to replace the one harvested. They go on to grow and capture even more carbon. There is no machine in the world that can do what our industry does.
Lumber is the only primary building material that is renewable, and more than that, it captures carbon.
There are so many exciting advances being made with wood right now.
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) is stronger than steel, lighter than concrete and faster to assemble than any other structural system. Mass Plywood Panels (MPP), an even newer technology created right here in Oregon, offers the same structural advances and uses smaller trees from thinning projects rather than large logs. Structures are starting to pop up all over America made with CLT and other types of Mass Timber.
Windows have now been made of transparent wood at the University of Maryland. The windows are stronger than glass, look more like frosted glass, and have better insulating properties than traditional glass.
Superwood has been formulated in labs, and it is 12 times stronger than natural wood and 10 times tougher. It can be bent and molded and has even been tested by shooting at it and it stopped a bullet. The potential applications to replace non-renewable materials are endless.
Tree resin could replace petroleum products in everything from printer ink to shoe polish. Researchers are reverse engineering how the loblolly pine produces resin to produce greener alternatives for a range of goods now made with oil and gas including cleaning products, adhesives, paint and linoleum.
Before coming to Seneca Sawmill, you were a senior national account executive for the Washington Post Digital Company from 2008 to 2015. Your knowledge of the digital world of advertising and communication has given you insights and connected you to Oregon's millennials. You yourself are also on the cusp of the millennial generation.
What understanding do Oregon's millennials have of the importance of natural resources for a healthy economy?
I worked on the business side of the Washington Post's website for eight years. The fracturing of media with so many choices for consumers means all media platforms are struggling to adapt and survive. News websites get ad dollars with every ad impression they serve. I was there at a time when the Washington Post's income from the printed newspaper was falling and they were looking to the website to make up the difference. That meant they needed more readers on the website, and they needed them to consume more pages. The most efficient way to do that is to serve readers content they like and agree with. To serve consumers articles they like and agree with, they use an algorithm that looks at the consumer's browsing history and serves them more of the same types of articles. This means if someone reads a lot about baseball, they will then have suggested articles offered at the end of an article they are reading that are also about baseball.
This same technology is used throughout the internet as all news websites are trying to gain and keep readers. It was enacted innocently, but what it effectively does is amplify and distort a reader's perception of an issue. For instance, if someone read an opinion piece by a known right-leaning columnist, then that piece would become part of their browsing history and they would be offered more right-leaning opinions and articles on that website. As they read a few more, the right-leaning bent would become an indelible part of algorithms and what they are seeing on the internet. At some point after reading enough right-leaning pieces, they start thinking disparagingly about those who don't agree with them. They can't imagine that any sane person could read everything they have read and come to the opposite conclusion. What they are not considering it that the articles they read were highly curated just for them and were right-leaning in tone and nature. A person holding the opposite opinion read highly curated content that was left-leaning in tone and nature, and they cannot fathom anyone seeing the issue differently than they see it.
To make it worse, most people do not go to a news website's homepage. Most get to news websites through social media. That means that they are clicking on an article that one of their friends posted. They are more likely to click the article if it was posted by a like-minded friend. This only amplifies the feeling of belonging to a tribe where "we all believe this."
I grew up going to libraries where I could explore and choose any book on the shelf. I opened a newspaper and read about a multitude of topics and read many different opinion pieces with different points of view. I am lucky in that my reading choices were simply based on my curiosity, and I didn't have a friend suggesting what I should read next. I didn't have the books that were similar to books I had previously read offered to me, and I didn't feel like I had to hold a certain point of view to be in alignment with people with whom I wanted to associate. Millennials grew up with the internet as their main information source and everything that goes along with it.
The Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia Gorge in 2017 burned 50,000 acres, closing parts of I-84 for weeks and the Historic Columbia River Highway for more than a year, while crippling the air quality in the Portland metro region for days. The Chetco Bar Fire in Southwest Oregon burned 191,000 acres and destroyed the tourist seasons for both Brookings and Ashland's Oregon Shakespearean Festival. The Whitewater Fire in the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness closed many popular hiking trails for the season.
Why have fire seasons gotten so much worse? Why are Oregon's national forests so badly mismanaged, causing ever increasing fire danger, threatening and burning private forest lands adjacent to them? What fires have directly affected your family, your company and your employees? How dangerous and costly has the fire damage been for your company? What specific things does your company do to minimize fire danger on your lands?
During the 2017 wildfire season you are referencing, Oregon lost over 600,000 acres to wildfire. That is more acres than what make up the state of Rhode Island. There are 61,000 private timberland owners in Oregon. Fifty percent of the fires started on private or BLM land, and 50 percent started on U.S. Forest Service land, but of the acres that burned, 96 percent were U.S. Forest Service land. I have heard people blame it on global warming or an act of God, but unless God is mad at the U.S. Forest Service, I'm pretty sure it is due to bad policy.
During the 2018 wildfire season, over 800,000 acres burned in Oregon and the percentages of fire starts and acres burned were similar. It is the policies enacted almost three decades ago coming home to roost. We always knew this was going to happen.
We are seeing movement by the U.S. Forest Service to try to manage the land differently, but we are also still seeing obstructionist groups continuing to sue them when they try. Last year in Washington, a fire was heading toward a community and a fire line was made to protect the community. This meant a bulldozer cleared the land in a line that looks like a dirt road so the fire could be stopped at that line. A group sued the government for creating that fire line saying it destroyed habitat.
We support the U.S. Forest Service in their efforts to manage the land for the health of our people, wildlife and trees.
Looking ahead five years from now, what benchmarks will you use to gauge whether the general public still thinks that "cutting down trees is bad"? How will you know when you've been successful?
My dream would be that:
- The people of our state will know and be proud of the fact that we in Oregon manage our timberlands sustainably.
- They will know that we are number one in lumber production and yet we have more trees today than we had 100 years ago.
- They will support the use of renewable building materials.
- They will support the replacement of nonrenewable materials in other consumer goods with renewable materials.
- Our school children would know that we live in the wood basket of America and the role we play in making sustainable building materials.
