Does it pay to let chips fall where they may?

• Position: Interview with North Carolina State University's forestry department head Fred Cubbage - Interview

Fred Cubbage, who holds a doctorate in forest economics, heads the forestry department at N.C. State. Dan Richter has a doctorate in soil science and ecology from Duke, where he is a professor. They're studying the economic and environmental impacts of stand-alone wood-chip mills in North Carolina.

BNC: What's all the fuss about?

Cubbage: It's that chip mills lead to clear-cutting. The thesis behind that is that timber companies are putting in a mill and clearing a 75-mile radius around it. Some of the controversy, too, is the traditional environmental opposition to timber harvesting in general and clear-cutting in particular. That's been a theme since the 1960s. The trend has been for less harvesting, less clear-cutting on public land like national forests. The chip-mill debate is an extension of that debate to private land. Of course, then you get into the larger question of the public interest in protecting forests vs. private property rights.

BNC: Do environmentalists have a point?

I haven't run the calculations yet, but it would be extremely doubtful that chip mills would have as large an impact on the landscape as environmental groups say. But that's what we're trying to figure out.

BNC: Why are chip mills increasing?

Ever since we've bought wood for pulp and paper, since 1909 or something, we've had some type of chipper at plants - taken round logs, broken them into chips and fed them into a digest to become pulp and paper. The thing that has attracted the current attention and dissatisfaction is the extension of chip mills to stand-alone facilities where wood is chipped, then shipped to different plants or overseas. That's a more recent phenomenon.

BNC: Why is it happening?

A lot of reasons. It's not good to bring tons of wood into one large mill. You run into a logistics problem of storing a lot of wood in a place where you've already got a manufacturing facility. Chip mills also provide more economical means to ship wood longer distances. It's difficult to ship tree-length logs. They're big. They're unwieldy. They throw bark and junk all over the road. And they can't be loaded well because they're heavy on one end, light on the other.

BNC: From '90 to '96, chip exports grew 28% a year. Where did they go?

Probably Japan. Japan is willing to pay a higher price for our chips than people locally are. They have a large pulp and paper industry for domestic consumption and Asian export. And they're short on fiber.

BNC: If exports are...