Kirk Siegler:
Well, this is a kind of hard question to answer right now, because, like anything, I kind of hate to compare it to say the onshoring of domestic manufacturing or that push to sort of bring logging back to places like the Pacific Northwest, where I’m talking to you.
This will take years. And, as you say, a lot of these roadless areas are very remote. They’re also hard to reach, expensive to develop. And it’s not, in many cases, politically popular. Looking at the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, this has been subject to controversy for years.
Closer to home, in the Pacific Northwest here, the Frank Church River of No Return and the adjacent — roadless areas adjacent to that wilderness area in Central Idaho, just vast, these are places that aren’t necessarily easily going to be developed. And the timber industry has been pretty, I would say, curtailed, at least in the Pacific Northwest, recently in recent years, really since the ’80s and ’90s.
So it’s very hard to imagine right now just immediately flipping a switch and saying these places are going to be logged, because a lot of the timber companies that are left have really moved to private land for a number of reasons.
