mergers seem to have achieved certain efficiencies, but there is little prom-
ise, really, of survival in the international market. This, in turn, is owing
to the emergence of paper complexes in tropical America, which enjoy the
enormous advantage of climates yielding tree ‘‘rotations’’ even shorter than
the astounding fifteen years U.S. geneticists have achieved in loblollies.
American paper production is not likely to end altogether; Americans re-
main the most egregious consumers of paper in the world. But if the com-
plex is reduced substantially, one must wonder what future tidewater land-
scapes might have.
There is another wood products industry in the South that (one must
hope) does not survive for much longer. This is the production of wood
chips, virtually all for export and manufacture into composition board
abroad, and the industry is unlike the paper complex altogether, with no
resemblance to the complex’s chemically maintained, monochromatic
sprawl. It is a new industry, too. In the Pacific Northwest, timber corpora-
tions have blown sawdust and chips into the holds of Japanese vessels at
Coos Bay, Oregon, for years. Southeasterners chipped their pulp bolts (as
lengths of loblolly are known) but cooked and digested nearly all to make
paper. Then in the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway opened to naviga-
tion. At billion the most expensive public work to date, the project was
to enrich the impoverished counties along the Alabama-Mississippi state
line, from remote Tennessee hill country down to Mobile Bay. After a de-
cade, though, it became obvious that the waterway would never replace,
much less rival, the Mississippi (not to mention the rail lines and interstate
trucking) in delivering midwestern commodities to the Gulf. Of operating
barge traffic by the late s, more than half consisted of wood chips or
wood-for-chipping loads that had been harvested in those border counties,
where the poverty rate, sad to report, had actually risen since the waterway
opened.^12
American corporations with familiar names, such as Weyerhaeuser and
Scott Paper (now merged with Kimberly-Clark), sell the chips to (usually)
Japanese buyers in Mobile. But chip suppliers are small, simple-technology
operators who buy the woody cover on small private properties within easy
reach of the waterway. Pine, oak, sweetgum, poplar, and hickory—any spe-
cies of any size will do. All these are bush-hogged or bulldozed and then
dumped into large, barrel-like contraptions with spikes inside that tear off
bark and reduce sticks and logs to chips. These in turn are poured into
‘‘Tenn-Tom’’ barges bound for Mobile. The government of Alabama ‘‘ad-
vises’’ landowners to replant stripped plots, but so far as we know, few