Use it or lose it 

It’s not often that a buyer of logs for a major timber company becomes both a legend among foresters and a favourite of environmentalists – especially when he is responsible for harvesting one of the world's great hardwood forests. It’s not often such a man retires to manage his own patch of forest for future generations. But meet Jim Sitts.

For almost 40 years, Jim was the chief timber manager and log procurer for Columbia Forest Products, North America’s largest maker of hardwood, plywood and veneer in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. And since giving up the job in 2019, he has been tending his own 200-acre forest and negotiated a legal conservation “easement” that will ensure it long outlast him. 

If one man epitomizes a sustainable approach to harvesting the uniquely biodiverse temperate hardwood forests of the Appalachians, one of America’s great ecological treasures, it is Jim. In 2015, he picked up a forest conservationist of the year award from the North Carolina Wildlife Federation.

Speaking to local conservationists in the region, the plaudits come in profusion for both him and his long-time employer. Even the Dogwood Alliance, a North Carolina-based environmental rottweiler known for its attacks on forest companies, gives Columbia Forest Products a green light. Its website boasts a “positive working relationship” with Jim and the company. “They are good. They do a lot for landowners and for forests,” says former Dogwood hound Andrew Goldberg, now of the Rainforest Alliance, which certified the company with the Forest Stewardship Council.   

But now Jim is his own landowner. Driving around the shore of Lake James, a reservoir in the mountains of Western North Carolina, we eventually come to Misty Meadows Farm and Forest where Jim, a lean and fit 75-year-old, meets us in his red pick-up with his daughter Nikki. She trains horses, so a couple of fields are set aside for them. But most of the farm is dense and diverse woodland.

“A lot of people driving through here think it is virgin forest that has always been here,” says Jim. Not so. This area of the Southern Appalachians was largely clear-felled a century ago, and farmers took over. “Except for the really steep places, it was either cultivated or grazed until the 1930s. But then people started moving to cities, and the pastures began to revert to forest through natural regeneration.” 

Misty Meadows was among them. The farm has only had three owners in a hundred years, says Jim. “The widow we bought it from, who is 97 years old and still living just a couple of miles from here let it regrow from pasture.” 

Past the horse meadow, we walk down a forest track by a stream to 40 acres of hillside that he had clearcut a decade ago. It was necessary, he says. “The stand was around a hundred years old. Every time I came here more trees had blown down. They were starting to rot, so it was the right time to cut.” 

But Jim ensured the wood went for high-value products that will last. Red oak for quality furniture; white pine for windows; tulipwood for plywood and veneers made by his old employers; and white oak to make barrel staves for wine and bourbon. “I’ve heard people talk about us murdering the trees, but actually we are giving them a new life, tying up the carbon for another 50 or 100 years in a table or the structure of someone’s home.”

But what really pleases him is the regeneration now well under way of the patch he cut. In less than a decade, the regrowth is twenty feet tall, with several thousand new trees on every acre.  Clambering into the undergrowth, he beams at the rapid progress.

“I think of myself as a steward of the land. It’s important for us to manage the land. Not just to sit back and watch the trees grow, but to harvest them and have natural regeneration.”

Some conservationists say he should leave the old trees. “There’s nothing wrong with having some old-growth forest,” says Jim. “We need some. But people shouldn’t be afraid to cut. It’s not deforestation when you get this wonderful regeneration. It’s just part of the harvest cycle. Cutting creates clear spaces in the forest, where light can enter and stimulate undergrowth, which provides food for wildlife.” He regularly sees white-tailed deer, wild turkey, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, raccoons and even bears on his land. “Not much grows underneath dense stands, so there is much less wildlife.”

Jim’s aim now is to ensure the future of his forest. “Nikki and I, and my wife before she died, were afraid that if this wasn’t protected then someday it would be developed like some others round here.” So he has negotiated an “easement” on it. This is a binding agreement between the owner of a parcel of land and a local conservation trust – in his case the Foothills Conservancy of North Carolina. The working forest easement ensures sustainable harvesting to secure legal protection for the forest for future generations. A promise to keep the forest is now a condition for any future purchasers of the land.

And he believes that the future of the forests of the Southern Appalachians can be similarly rosy.  “We have more hardwood forests and more timber growing today than we’ve had at any time in our modern history,” he says. “These forests are probably the most sustainable hardwood forests in the world, with over a hundred different trees species.” 

Much of that, he says, is down to the mostly small private individuals like him who own 70% of the timber land in the Appalachians. Their stewardship since the bad old days of rampant clear-cutting has been remarkable, he says. 

Of course, little of the forest is virgin. Perhaps only 3% of these forests have never been logged, says Josh Kelly, field biologist for MountainTrue, a local NGO that supports community-based forest conservation. 

He took us to one such stand. Striding up a hillside at Balsam Gap off the highway west of Asheville, he stopped beside a sugar maple, one of several here that he says may be 300 years old. Such places, he says, are “among the most intact areas of temperate hardwood forest on the planet.” 

But even Josh, a keen defender of the state’s wild forests, buys into Jim’s use-it-or-lose-it philosophy.  “To people that tell me we shouldn’t cut any trees, I say: well that’s a nice idea, but not very practical,” he says. “There is a place for people to harvest trees and for that to be beneficial for the land.” 

And he believes that to thrive, forests must be part of landscapes that people value for their utility as well as their beauty. “People who cut trees from the forest to make things, who hunt animals to feed themselves and their families, who fish and gather herbs, or who use the forests for recreation, have a relationship with the forests and can teach us all how to relate to them.”

“When you look at forest conservation in North America, all of the biggest conservation victories have involved the timber industry. They are the key to the forest’s survival.”

Amen to that, says Jim.