Beach concedes there is plenty of wildlife here. And he praises Westvaco's management system. We need industrial woodlands. We need the paper and other products they produce. We need the jobs they create.
Beach favors planting tree farms on eroded or otherwise unused farmland.
But he objects to destroying bottomland hardwood or longleaf forests to create pine plantations. South Carolina has 12.4 million acres of trees, covering two-thirds of the state. And it's about the same acreage that the U.S. Forest Service predicts the state will have in 50 years. But while the size of South Carolina's forestland has remained the same, the trees have changed dramatically. The number of acres in plantation-style pine has exploded during the past three decades, from 233,000 in 1952 to more than 2.6 million today.