International Paper and shipping giants are dismantling the South’s pine economy for cheaper fiber.
I know what that kind of disappearance looks like. In Adams County, a mill closing did not remove one employer from one town. It pulled money, families, school children, suppliers, and the reason for a hardware store to stay open. The building remained. The membership did not. What is happening in the Southern pine belt is that same hollowing with six million landowners and a hundred years of forestry behind it.
Pulpwood prices across the American South have fallen to their lowest level in nearly 40 years. Some growers now pay to have pulpwood hauled away rather than sell it. Last year, the United States shed roughly 10% of its containerboard capacity in a single wave of mill closures. International Paper shuttered an 89-year-old mill in Savannah and another in nearby Riceboro. ArborGen, one of the world’s largest suppliers of loblolly pine seedlings, watched sales drop more than 20% across its past two fiscal years.
A fifth-generation sawmill family in Statesboro, Georgia, is staring at a balance sheet where pulpwood pays nothing and the trees still need to come down.
This is not a market correction. It is the dismantling, in real time, of an economy that took a hundred years to build.
The Howards built their operation on one bet: the pine forests of southeast Georgia would always have a buyer. For most of the twentieth century, they were right. A Savannah scientist named Charles Herty figured out in the 1930s how to turn the young loblolly and slash pines sprouting on cutover longleaf tracts into paper. Paper mills could not chase a receding treeline the way mobile sawmills could, so they promoted pine as a crop to be planted rather than a resource to be mined.
Union Bag & Paper opened its Savannah mill in 1936. At its peak, it was the world’s largest paper mill and employed more than 5,000 people. The company sent agents into the hinterlands to teach farmers how to manage timber. With the boll weevil devastating cotton, the federal government retiring cropland, and paper executives wanting fiber, tens of millions of denuded acres from Virginia to east Texas became rows of pine.
That was the deal. Plant trees. Wait a quarter-century. Sell the pulpwood and lumber. Run the thinning passes and sell the small-diameter wood to the mills. Replant. Repeat.
In Georgia, 88% of woodlands are owned by individuals and businesses. Across the South, more than six million owners hold at least ten wooded acres. Families built retirement plans, college funds, and working lives around that cycle.
Now the buyers are gone.
“We went from the best pulpwood market in the nation to the pits,” Bill Howard told the Wall Street Journal. “Sixteen dollars a ton for it last year — that’s the number everyone talks about at the breakfast club. Now, it’s zero to $5.”
The forests did not fail. Demand disappeared.
Recycled boxes, cheaper pulp from Brazilian eucalyptus plantations, plastic mailers, and paper envelopes have all taken a bite. Per-capita U.S. containerboard demand peaked in 1999. The pandemic e-commerce boom pushed total box shipments to records in 2021, but the years after the pandemic exposed what was already happening. The structural shift was baked in. Lumber prices have been rising even as housing demand softens, a supply-side squeeze that makes the pulpwood collapse harder to dismiss as ordinary weakness.
Amazon and the rest of big-box shipping now pack the smallest box possible. The old box-inside-a-box waste has been designed out. The savings show up on somebody’s logistics spreadsheet. The lost buyer shows up on a Georgia timber tract.
International Paper faced a choice at the Savannah plant: spend $300 million on a new roof and other repairs, or invest $250 million in a newer facility in Selma, Alabama, that makes the lighter-weight containerboard modern shippers want. The company chose Selma. The roughly 735-acre Savannah River site is now listed for sale, alongside the Riceboro property.
This is what market efficiency looks like in practice. A mill that once employed 5,000 people becomes a real-estate listing.
Lynda Beam and her grandson Will Wheat learned about the closure while loggers were on their family’s land northwest of Savannah, thinning a patch. With their pulpwood buyer gone, they are raking longleaf pine straw and selling it to garden centers while they wait for a market that may never come back. The Howards still employ about 300 people across a sawmill, two other plants, and three builder-supply yards. The family is openly asking whether there will be a sixth generation.
The crisis is moving upstream.
ArborGen’s 20%-plus drop in seedling sales means fewer acres are being replanted. Howard is planting fewer seedlings per acre to reduce upfront costs and thinning bills. Some landowners have stopped planting entirely because they do not want to leave their heirs trees that cannot be sold. Pine plantations take 25 to 30 years to mature into lumber-grade timber. The first major payday, the thinning, used to come from pulpwood.
Now thinning is another bill.
“If they’re not planting trees,” Howard said, “I’m not going to have anything to cut.”
That is the Worker Self-Exploitation contradiction in plain view. The industry praises self-reliance, family ownership, and long-term stewardship. Then it removes the buyer and leaves the landowner holding every cost: seedlings, taxes, roads, thinning, storms, fire, labor, and twenty-five years of waiting. The family is still expected to call that independence.
Studs Terkel understood the difference between work and the story people tell about work. The tree farmer is not failing because he lacks grit. He is being asked to carry an entire supply chain after the corporations above him have decided the supply chain is no longer their problem.
The larger timber companies are scrambling for substitutes. Weyerhaeuser, the South’s largest timberland owner, holds about 6.6 million acres across 11 states. It is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into facilities in Arkansas and Mississippi that would turn pulpwood surpluses into engineered lumber and an alternative to metallurgical coal. Lobbyists are pushing laws that would encourage burning wood pellets to generate electricity. Cellulose-based jet fuel, battery materials, and bio-fabrics are being floated as new markets.
Those ideas may produce useful products. They do not restore the old market. A proposal is not a buyer. A press release is not a pulpwood check.
Joe Hopkins, who manages 75,000 acres of pine in southeast Georgia, struggles to net a 1% return for shareholders in the timberland operations his great-uncle and grandfather founded.
“The day a forest landowner becomes wealthy is the day he quits being a forest landowner,” Hopkins told the Journal. “That’s the day I call a stockbroker and say, ‘Hey, I’m good with 6% — that’s 600% more than I’ve been getting.’”
Across the Okefenokee, family-owned Superior Pine Products has stopped planting timber on some of its 110,000 acres and replaced it with Southern highbush blueberries, which reach supermarkets between the Florida and northern crops. Chief Executive Scott Griffin is also considering solar leases and carbon credits.
“There’s only so much you can diversify,” Griffin said. “Timber has been our bread and butter for 100 years.”
Diversification is a polite word for retreat.
The South’s pine economy is being converted, acre by acre, into solar farms, blueberry fields, and untested industrial experiments—not because landowners want to abandon forestry, but because the alternative is to keep paying to remove trees no one will buy.
Wendell Berry has written that the health of a land community cannot be measured by the output of an extractive industry alone. The question is whether the work preserves the membership: the families, the skills, the local buyers, the people who know one another’s names and can still make a living from the place. A forest economy that leaves landowners with no pulpwood market has not become more efficient. It has severed the relationship that made the forest economy possible.
Frank Peeples, whose grandfather entered the timber business in South Carolina in the 1950s, called it “an industry in crisis.” He and other industry and government figures are set to host European Union officials next month, hoping to persuade the trade bloc to lift its ban on sulfuryl fluoride so wood chips can be exported to Europe.
The fact that the South’s timber industry is reduced to begging Brussels for a fumigant exemption is its own kind of epitaph.
“Without a pulpwood market,” Peeples said, “there is a real question about the long-term viability of our forest industry in the U.S. South.”
The federal government is largely absent. There is no serious emergency program for displaced mill towns. There is no serious policy response to the loss of pulpwood demand. There is no adjustment for the competitive pressure from Brazilian eucalyptus pulp. There is only a slow, grinding divestment from a rural economy that helped build modern America—and a Washington that cannot locate the South on a map of its own priorities.
This is the Community Collapse contradiction. The country praises rural families when their land supplies cheap fiber, cheap packaging, cheap energy, and steady corporate returns. Once the market changes, those same families are told to diversify, adapt, relocate, sell, or absorb the loss. The community was valuable as long as it functioned as an input.
The South built a pine empire in a hundred years. It is being dismantled in less than a decade. The package shippers, Brazilian pulp exporters, recycled-box logistics chains, and capital-market calculations that prefer Selma to Savannah will not look at the empty mill sites or the unreplanted cutovers.
They will not see the seedlings that were never ordered.
They will not see the family counting the years left in the trees.
They will not see the county after the buyer leaves.
This is the cost. Someone should be made to count it.