The Wall Street Journal highlights a family’s fight to protect their lumber business
Thirty-one years ago, Kirk Dahlstrom rolled the dice on a bankrupt sawmill in Southeastern Alaska.
Joined by a few family members and a lifelong friend, Kirk moved his wife and children to Prince of Wales Island to chase his American Dream and launch Viking Lumber.
Today, Viking Lumber provides wood to some of the largest and most prominent instrument makers in the world. Its wood is also used by NASA and the United States military in key components of wind tunnels, boats, and helicopter construction.
But on August 15, Kirk’s daughter, Sarah Lehnert, published a plea in The Wall Street Journal urging the U.S. Forest Service to follow the law, honor its agreements, and save Viking Lumber before it’s too late:
In our part of Alaska, the federal government owns approximately 94% of the land and controls access to timber resources. In 2016 the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a management plan that promised the availability of old-growth timber from the Tongass annually on a fixed schedule. The government hasn’t exactly stuck to that schedule. Not only has the Forest Service never met the timber-sale goals outlined in their management plan, in the past four years it offered less than 10% of the annual needs for the industry.
Sarah went on to describe the herculean efforts underway to compel the Forest Service to comply with the law and its constitutional obligations. She noted:
An executive order from President Trump, a memo from Forest Service Acting Associate Chief Chris French, and a lawsuit we filed against the USDA earlier this year haven’t been enough to get the Forest Service to stop starving the industry.
Fortunately, the lawsuit Sarah mentioned—filed by Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of Viking Lumber, Alcan Timber, and the Alaska Forest Association—is still active, and we’re committed to the fight. As Sarah points out, this is about more than just one family, one company, or even one industry:
Our island is home to about 4,000 year-round residents. Hundreds of families rely on the timber industry. When our company—Alaska’s last production sawmill—finishes our currently contracted harvest in September, we will have exhausted all the timber the Forest Service has offered. Our 31-year operation won’t be able to go on. The families who depend on us here will be forced to move. Our sawmill, the leading supplier to musical manufacturing companies in the world, will die.
Learn more about Viking Lumber and the Alaska timber industry’s fight on our case page and read Sarah’s full op-ed in The Wall Street Journal here.
