TEXAS FORESTS AND THE FORESTRY INDUSTRY

The diverse, pine-dominated, 12 million-acre forest of the Pineywoods forms the renewable base of the east Texas economy, providing paper, cardboard, building products, and jobs.

However, the forest is evolving into a monoculture, even-aged pine plantation, devoid of hardwoods, groundcover, vines, and mid-story trees. In 1975, there were 550,000 acres of pine plantation in East Texas; by 1992, there were 4.2 million acres of plantation here. Even Texas' national forests are being managed increasingly, and more exclusively, for paper and lumber, with 82% of these public lands classified as "suitable for timber production".

Looking into the near future, the next shift appears to be toward genetically engineered trees: the USDA has issued more than 300 permits for trials of GM trees, and commercial GM woodlots are expected to be planted by 2005. While these GM trees would have good commercial qualities of faster growth and resistance to herbicides and disease, there appear to be many unexplored and unresolved issues about the impact of introducing new genetic materials into the environment, particularly when trees are so much longer-lived and able to distribute their pollen so much further than the annual crops that have been considered so far.

So, the question still remains open – what will the forests of east Texas look like in the coming generation, and what biodiversity will they still support?