Defining Wildfire Economics
By: Jim Petersen of Evergreen Magazine
Date: July, 2026
Source: NWAsolution.org
Bob Zybach and I have been friends and co-conspirators since 1994. That was the you year I put him on the cover of Evergreen Magazine. There he was - pony tail and John Lennon glasses looking nothing like what he was or what he would become in the years ahead.
He had been a very successful reforestation contractor in western Oregon. He had decided to enroll at Oregon State University in hopes of earning a degree in Forestry with an emphasis on the history of tribal forest management in western Oregon. OSU offered no such degree so he settled for a PhD in Environmental Science awarded in 2003.
My 1994 interview with Bob gave many in the Clinton Administration a lot of heartburn. He had critiqued a draft of the Forest Service’s Northwest Forest Plan and concluded that they were wrong in their insistence that no information existed to refute their claim that that Pacific Northwest had once been a vast sea of old growth.
Having spent years replanting old clearcuts in the Oregon Coast Range, Bob thought otherwise. Everywhere he looked there were burnt stumps and standing dead trees - clear evidence of a long history of wildfire, some caused by lightning but more purposefully started by Indians who have lived in the coast range for thousands of years.
The L-shaped kitchen, dining and living area in the small house he had rented near the OSU campus was stacked high with boxes filled with documents he accumulated in pursuit of his master’s degree.
“Where’d you get all this stuff,” I asked.
“Oh, that’s easy,” he replied. “I have a library card.”
His off hand comment enraged the Clinton Administration and a cadre of scientists who had worked on the plan. Fortunately, Bob had science advisors who were helping him, none more powerful that the late Robert Buckman, an internationally renowned PhD forest scientist and former Director of the Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment Station.
Because Buckman agreed with Bob’s assessment, I asked him about the Clinton Administration’s unhappiness about being publicly challenged by a lowly OSU student. One of their own – PhD botanist Jerry Franklin had publicly claimed that old growth forests offered unmatched biological diversity and “species richness.”
Without mentioning Frankin by name Buckman said, "I will argue that there is as much or more biological diversity in an early seral forest as there is in an old growth forest.”
About the same time, PhD forest geneticist Bill Libby, University of California Berkeley, chimed in with an unceremonious comment concerning the connection between spotted owls, old growth forests and plantation forestry.
“Plantation forestry saves more endangered species in a month than most American conservationists save in their lifetimes,” Libby wrote. “As federal logging in the Pacific Northwest has slowed to a virtual standstill, species extinction in tropical forests has accelerated at a thunderous rate. Is saving the spotted owl or the marbled murrelet worth the loss of 8,000 to 10,000 species in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia or Madagascar? Not in my opinion!”
The exclamation point is his, not ours.
All of this and much more is the reason why Bob Zybach and I have been friends and co-conspirators for more than 30 years. So I was not surprised by last week’s email from him.
“Jim, do you have any old Evergreen essays concerning the economics of wildfire that I can republish on the National Wildfire Alliance website?”
After searching decades of essays I replied. “No Bob, I don’t but I’ll be happy to do some digging and write something for you.” I then sent the 2022 paper by Jude Baham and three associates titled "The Economics of Wildfire in the United States." https://www.nwasolution.org/s/July-Bayham_et_al_2022.pdf
“Please find something else then,” he answered. “My interest is in strengthening the connection between Evergreen and NWA, and don’t forget to send me your logo.”
“Thanks Bob. Will do.”
My next email was to Luke Koch, a very nice young man who hangs out with our youngest daughter in Missoula. Luke has a Master’s degree in Forest Economics and works for the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana.
“Luke, what the hell is wildfire economics? Seems to me that it covers a multitude sins but I’m interested in a real answer from a real forest economist.
Here’s an edited summary of his answer.
“It’s helpful to consider pre, present and post fire activity. What sort of economic activity do these periods represent. Cost of putting out the fire. Salvage logging? Sawmill employment and lumber sales? Biomass? Replanting? The cost of growing a new forests, then another harvest or fire and the process starts anew. Then you have to try to quantify the cost of policy and regulation that impacts all of this.”
Ah yes, the aforementioned multitude of sins. But some of these costs can be estimated:
Cost of extinguishing a wildfire: According to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, the five-year average reported in 2025 was $56,000 per acre.
Hourly cost of an experienced lawyer to win the right to salvage log burnt timber is $500+
Hourly cost of hiring an experienced mechanical salvage logging operator is $500+ per hour not counting fuel
Hourly cost of hiring a logger trucker is about $180 per hour, not counting fuel
Delivered log cost paid by sawmill anywhere between $450 and $1,500 per thousand board feet depending on tree species
Hourly cost of running a family-owned sawmill with 150 employees is between $5,000 and $15,000 per hour.
On the plus side, the current selling price for dimension lumber is about $633 per board foot, depending on species.
The current selling price for engineered lumber ranges from $4.00 to $35 per lineal foot depending on produce and species
The current selling price for mass panel plywood ranges from $40 to $50 per square foot but bear in mind that the cost of a building a mass panel plant is 10 times the cost of a high speed small log sawmill - $15 million for the small log mill versus $150 million for a mass panel plant.
Cost to build a biomass plant that processes wood waste ranges from $200,000 to $1.35 billion for the big kahuna, but you can sell a 40-pound bag of home heating pellets for $6.00 for softwood to $20 for hardwood.
So there you have it Bob: wildfire economics with a dollar sign, not counting the cost of heartburn. $4.98 for a 60-count bottle of Extra Strength Rolaids at Walmart.
