Lumberyard Owner Scores Logging Industry

GOOD HART, Mich. —  An occasional bird’s chirp and the crunch of dried leaves underfoot are the only sounds as Tim Flynn trudges across a rugged section of the Mackinaw State Forest.

It’s been more than a century since this area was logged, and the sugar maple, beech and ash trees are tall and sturdy. The ground is littered with rotting hardwoods that died naturally, their trunks covered with moss and pockmarked with cavities that house chipmunks, rabbits and squirrels.

“To a forester, this is a decadent woodland that ought to be harvested,” Flynn says. “I look at it as a reinvestment that should be left alone.”

Words such as “investment” and “working capital” pop up often in Flynn’s passionate arguments for sparing more of Michigan’s forests from the chain saw--a hint that he is no ordinary tree hugger.

An active member of the Sierra Club, he’s also a businessman--a lumber retailer, no less. He is president of Flynn Lumber, a family-owned store in Gladwin that also sells paint, electrical supplies and hardware.

The 42-year-old advocate’s outspoken criticism of the logging industry and government regulators who oversee it has made him a hero to environmentalists.

“He clearly wants to be able to sell wood . . . but in a way that does not harm the ecosystems,” says Anne Woiwode, a forest specialist for the Sierra Club. “He doesn’t lose sight of the fact that in order to get anything out of the forests, they must be healthy, diverse and sustainable.”

Flynn is considerably less popular with the industry.

“We consider him quite the hypocrite,” says Peter Grieves, executive director of the Michigan Assn. of Timbermen. “He sells his lumber, enjoys the good life, has a second home in the woods, but would just as soon most people go away.”

Flynn says he’s not opposed to all logging, or to making a living from forest products. But he contends that forests are being over-harvested to the point of endangering their long-term health.

He acknowledges that if forests were run the way he’d like, the wood supply wouldn’t match current demand.

“And that’s not necessarily bad,” Flynn says. “The market will adjust; people will find ways to do more with less. There are lots better ways to meet our needs--not our wants, but our needs--than just cutting more and more.”

He especially favors increasing “old growth” woodlands, which the state Department of Natural Resources defines as approximating the structure, composition and functions of virgin forests.

They feature large trees, canopy layers, native species, tree snags and dead organic material. They’re havens for endangered species and laboratories where scientists can observe complex ecological processes that don’t take place in younger, heavily managed forests.

As Flynn sees it, setting aside more such woodlands is good economics.

“If I spent all my working capital and went to the banker for a loan, he’d laugh at me. But that’s just what they’re doing in the forest-- cut and run, spend the profits instead of reinvesting them.”

Some in the industry acknowledge the value of old growth but contend there’s already enough. Taking even more land out of circulation makes no sense, they say.

“It makes me a little sad” to cut a stately, aging tree, says veteran logger Clarence McNamara. “But it also makes me sad to see a tree dying that nobody can touch. What a waste.”

Flynn’s response: “When they say it’s wasted, they mean it wasn’t converted to dollar bills. Nature has no concept of waste; everything is used.”

He points out large gaps in a dead beech, probably a few hundred years old--the perfect hideaway for the pine marten. Peeling back a papery layer of bark from a moist, rotting yellow birch, he finds a thriving community of salamanders and tiny snails.

“Dead trees provide twice the habitat of live ones,” he says. “To log this stand would be a crime beyond belief.”

Flynn traces his maverick ways to his parents, longtime believers in conservation. He attended Central Michigan University, studying economics and political science, and did some graduate work at Michigan State University before joining the family business.

When the “timber wars” of the 1980s heated up, with environmentalists and loggers facing off over old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, industry publications urged lumber retailers to learn the issues and make their voices heard.

“So I took ‘em up on that,” Flynn says. “But I didn’t just read what the industry was saying.” He also combed the writings of Sierra Club founder John Muir and conservationist Aldo Leopold.

He recalled playing as a child in the woods around his parents’ cabin near Gaylord and seeing 40-inch stumps of white pines that had been cut during the 19th century logging boom.

“I used to imagine what the forest was like then,” he said. “And then when I got older and started educating myself, I realized nobody was planning on putting it back the way it was.”

About the same time, he says, retailers and contractors were noticing a decline in the quality of wood they were receiving. He concluded it was because trees were being harvested too soon and forest health was suffering.

So he began attending local Sierra Club meetings and became an activist, often butting heads with industry representatives and government officials who he believed were letting loggers get away with too much.

But he also reminded fellow environmentalists that business and jobs have their place in the woods. “He does have a broad perspective,” Woiwode says.

Flynn and his wife spend most weekends at their log house in the Emmet County village of Good Hart. He’s an avid cross-country skier and does a little hunting-- anything that means spending time in the woods.

“Every time I walk through here, I learn something,” Flynn says, stopping to gaze at a red-shouldered hawk nest in a towering beech in state forest land near the cabin.

“There are some places that you just shouldn’t cut, period. Reinvest it, save it for the next generation. It’s true, you can’t go back to where you were, but what’s wrong with trying to get back as close as you can?”