For Jason LaRose, cutting down a tree is always the last resort.
Co-owner of Queen City Silviculture with his wife Danielle, LaRose would preferably treat or prune a tree rather than cut one down.
“The value of a tree in the urban environment can’t be overstated,” LaRose said. “If it’s a healthy, live tree, we’re not going to be able to replace a 200-year-old oak tree in our lifetime. It took three lifetimes for it to grow.”
There’s simply no way to underscore the importance of trees.
“People think they know what trees do,” said Emma McCartney, who works with the LaRoses at Queen City Silviculture in Staunton. “They are vital. If they don’t exist, we don’t exist.”
Sometimes tree removal is the only option.
“When we do have to take a tree down, we’re finding new ways to advocate,” LaRose said. “Like, ‘OK, let’s replant.’”
At Queen City Silviculture, the aim isn’t a world where a tree is never chopped down.
The aim is a world where tree harvesting doesn’t happen irresponsibly.
“As long as humans are populating this earth, we’re going to continue to harvest trees to build furniture, for fuel [and] food,” LaRose said. “It can totally be done responsibly. There’s got to be a way for us to live in some homeostasis. It wouldn’t take much to just turn the corner a little bit on the way we’re looking at the land we’re living on.”
His concern isn’t without warrant.
Over the last 10,000 years, the Earth has lost roughly a third of its forestland.
Most of that loss has come in the last 300 years.
In Virginia, recent statistics show that two trees are planted for every one tree that is cut down.
As one of the biggest economic drivers in the state economy – tree harvesting is the third largest industry in Virginia — many loggers and tree harvesters around the state are trying to do good business while simultaneously being good stewards of the state’s forestland.
“The whole world uses wood. It’s a basic building block,” said Tom Sheets, president of Blue Ridge Lumber in Fishersville. “The forest sustains our industry. I don’t know any industry that would rush to its demise.”
Rather than lean to either extreme – no harvesting or reckless harvesting — Hank Shugart, W.W. Corcoran professor emeritus of natural history and research professor at the University of Virginia, offers a third way forward.
“It’s interesting when you think of the way forests are taken care of,” Shugart said. “You either have an ecological conservation orientation, putting a big fence around it and don’t let anything happen to it, and it will take care of itself. The other thing you do with forests is start growing forest like [a] crop. There is a middle ground to that.”
For Sheets, healthy forest stewardship simply makes good financial sense.
“We believe in protecting the environment,” Sheets said. “If you think we’re cutting trees to save the world, we’re not. But it’s the reality of what we do.”
Don Bright, president of Meherrin River Forest Products in Lawrenceville, believes the blame for deforestation is often unfairly placed on loggers.
“It’s real easy to look at a logger and say, ‘oh, man, they’re cutting all the trees,’” Bright said. “That’s not what causes deforestation. It’s the parking lots. It’s the roadway. It’s our houses.”
LaRose agrees.
“There’s all types of pressure on our lives when we intervene in a way of paving,” he said. “Building a house takes up the footprint where wild things would be.”
In Brunswick County, lumber is vital to the economy.
“Brunswick County is number one in timber harvesting in the state of Virginia,” said Alfreda Jarrett Reynolds, director of economic development for Brunswick County. “What we have is trees and trees, and those trees have more trees.”
In 2022, retired logger Sam Speck estimated that Brunswick County alone harvested 12,000 acres of lumber.
“In this county, that’s what we do,” said Frank Myers, owner of MM Wright and president of the Virginia Loggers Association. “We either farm or we log.”
For Brunswick residents like Speck, it starts at an early age.
“My father put me on a John Deere tractor when I was 9 years old,” Speck said. “By the time I was 13, I was doing the work of full-grown man.”
From an economics standpoint, Speck has seen all that’s good and bad with logging as a profession.
“In 2012, I ventured out and got into logging with another gentleman,” Speck said. “Three years later, we lost everything we had. That was the hardest day of my life. I lost $400,000 just like that.”
The economic concerns around tree harvesting are a reality.
“A lot of loggers ... we put our lives, we put everything on hold and we throw ourselves at our business,” said C.K. Greene, owner of Virginia Forestry LLC and Virginia Custom Thinning & Chipping. “You put your heart and your soul into it, and hopefully one day it all pays off, but sometimes it don’t work that day. Sometimes, the end game you get cut short. You’re gone before your objectives in life are met.”
Shugart believes flourishing forests and thriving tree-harvesting businesses can co-exist.
“People talk about what ought to happen to forest in some sort of ideal way,” Shugart said. “If you’re making money on something by doing something to it and somebody tells you to leave it alone, the issue is ‘What are you doing to the land?’ but simultaneously, ‘What are you doing to my business?’ The thing we need is a generational consciousness to leave the world better for the next people that come.”
This article is based on the Trees episode from VPM’s Life in the Heart Land Season 2 docuseries. The series gets to the heart of those creating unique solutions to rural Virginia’s toughest challenges.
Watch Mondays at 9:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on VPM PBS — or anytime on the PBS App.
Visit vpm.org/heartland to learn more.