Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 7, 1994 TAG: 9409070058
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: COPPER HILL LENGTH: Long
Jason Rutledge hates being called a radical environmentalist or an anachronism because he drags timber out of the forest with an ancient breed of draft horses.
``If I'm out of place and time, I'm in the future,'' Rutledge said as he gave his two Suffolks, Jeb and Reb, a rest between pulls on a one-ton hickory log in the Jefferson National Forest.
Some economic-development promoters in Southwest Virginia agree.
Emory & Henry College is coordinating a study they hope will show that horse loggers, wood crafters, furniture makers and others in the wood trades can work together to form a viable niche industry.
Rutledge has an earth-sheltered house heated by solar energy in Floyd County and once was on the cover of Mother Earth News because of his environmentally sensitive logging methods. But he's pragmatic about the balance between conservation and capitalism.
``I still deal with a lot of radical environmentalists who say, `Don't cut any trees at all''' Rutledge said. ``I tell them we are all inhabitants of the planet, and human needs have to be addressed. I call myself an environmental actualist.''
He cuts down only one mature tree every 20 feet or so - oaks and poplars, as well as less valuable hickory and black gum - to sustain the forest's yield and promote diversity. He harnesses his horses to a buggy with wheels and a mechanical arch to prevent the front of the log from eroding soil and to lighten the load. He uses a portable sawmill and a solar-powered kiln and doesn't have to build roads to get the timber out, as conventional loggers do.
A flier for Rutledge's logging company - basically himself, an apprentice and his horses - offers public land managers and private landowners ``the option of generating income from your woodlands without destroying the way it looks.''
Rutledge said the big disadvantage of his operation is that horses can remove, at best, one-fifth of the timber that a mechanized logger can.
``It's not easy, it's not get-rich-quick, but it's fun,'' he said.
One of Rutledge's 12 Suffolks recently had a colt, a big deal because only about 50 Suffolks, the second-oldest registered horse breed in the world, are born a year.
``You've never found a baby tractor in the barn in the morning,'' he said. ``We're working to develop a modern place in the world for draft horses.''
Ironically, draft horses were used to remove logs when the forests were stripped at the turn of the century with no thought of the environmental consequences.
Nearly all of the forested land between the Clinch and Powell rivers in Southwest Virginia was denuded by logging companies, primarily from outside Virginia, during the three decades before the Depression.
``Logging towns would spring up; and as soon as that area was cut, the mills were pulled out, and the towns faded away,'' said Paul Kuczko, director of the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth who wrote a state grant that funded Rutledge's apprenticeship program.
The federal government bought 500,000 acres and formed the Jefferson National Forest to prevent soil erosion and flooding, while allowing some logging when the trees began to mature.
Federal regulations in the 1990s have nearly eliminated the use of clear-cutting in public forests, a method by which all trees in a given area are cut down. The regulations also make it increasingly difficult for conventional loggers to meet environmental standards.
Rutledge said the rising value of hardwood timber during the last three years has made low-production logging operations such as his economically feasible.
The Jefferson National Forest has been selling timber to Rutledge, along with two other horse loggers he trained, along hiking trails and other areas designated ``visually sensitive'' in the far southwest district.
``It doesn't create a lot of disturbance, and the horses are able to pull an amazing amount of weight,'' said Raoul Gagne, the district ranger.
When the Forest Service asked for public input on the use of horses for logging, ``there was a lot of support,'' Gagne said.
The far southwest district has been selling an increasing amount of timber to loggers using cables with pulleys and will soon offer its first sale to loggers using a helicopter to remove trees.
But the horse loggers will remain a small niche in the market for the next few years, at least. They're expected to remove less than 200,000 board feet of timber annually compared with about 8 million board feet by the conventional loggers, Gagne said.
There are about 150 members of the North American Horse and Mule Loggers Association. More than 20 operate in the Southeast.
``There are not enough of us, but the interest in horse logging is growing,'' Rutledge said. ``I have a waiting list for classes.''
One of his former apprentices, Bill Larg of Coeburn, now has a waiting list of private landowners who want their woods harvested with horses in the single-selection method.
Edward Davis, an assistant professor of geography at Emory & Henry, is surveying people who make cabinets, furniture and crafts in the region, along with private owners of small woodlands, to see if they could form a viable industry.
Horse loggers, he said, could remove high-quality trees from the national forest and privately owned woodlands without causing erosion and threatening the wells and springs that supply drinking water.
The wood would be dried and cut with portable kilns and sawmills rather than having the logs shipped out of state and brought back in as finished lumber.
A videotape would be made of the process, so a person who buys a set of kitchen cabinets, for example, would be able to see how the raw material was removed from the forest, milled, dried and crafted by Southwest Virginians.
``People around here feel they have had so many resources pulled out of here, and few have benefited,'' Davis said of the boom-and-bust cycles of logging and coal mining. ``We want to create jobs for the long term in a way that preserves the beauty of the mountains.''
by CNB