WHITE SWAN, Wash. —
Christy Fiander has been around timber since she was a kid.
As a member of Yakama Nation, she cultivated a reverence for the towering trees that grow in central Washington.
“When I was a young child, my grandfather was the first Native American, Yakama-owned logging business,” she said.
Now, Fiander is the resource manager for Yakama Forest Products, and her connection to the trees has only grown.
“Most of our people here on this reservation, we utilize this forest not only for recreation but a lot for gathering foods and medicines,” she said.
Yakama Forest Products was one of a handful of suppliers who contributed wood to the new terminal being constructed at Portland International Airport, touted as the largest sustainable mass timber project in the country.
“The whole project really was one about how do we do this differently?” said Vince Granato, chief projects officer with the Port of Portland. “How do we involve our region? How do we create a pathway for our community to help provide what this future building looks like?”
New terminal, new supply chain
The new terminal will certainly look different. Its undulating, wood-lattice roof spans some nine acres. There will be live trees in the concourse. Large circular skylights will bring in natural sunlight.
“It's our one shot at really making a statement here,” Granato said. “We know this is going to be around for a 50-year timeline.”
But they wanted to do more than just have a terminal that looked different. They wanted to build it different, too.
“You normally might just go out say, ‘Give me the low bid.’ We're not doing a low bid here. We want to make sure that whatever we are using for this project is sustainable,” Granato said. “When we install it, we know where every piece of wood came from. That is not your traditional construction. It hasn't been done before, certainly not to this scale.”
To accomplish that, the port needed to essentially create a new supply chain from scratch.
They enlisted the help of Sustainable Northwest, a nonprofit that’s been working on sustainable forestry for decades.
“You build a connection between big buildings like the airport and forest through relationships. You can't do it with certifications and paperwork alone,” said Paul Vanderford, green markets program director for the organization. “We all care about forests. We all care about local communities and jobs, and when you ask the question of where your wood is coming from, you can start delivering those values for your clients.”
Raising the roof
The roof in the new terminal is made up of some 2.6 million feet of Douglas fir. It’s constructed using mass timber, where smaller pieces of wood are glued together to form structural beams that have a far lower carbon footprint than concrete or steel.
Mass timber has grown in popularity as the climate crisis has worsened and builders have sought to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions associated with their projects.
But a mass timber project is only as environmentally friendly as the forestry practices used to harvest the timber.
Traditionally, timber harvest has been seen as a detriment to forests. And after a century of aggressive clear cutting in the Pacific Northwest, it often is.
But it doesn’t have to be, Vanderford explained.
“It's very easy because of history to see the harvest of trees as potentially harmful,” he said. “I think the unique nature of this project is it sees the support of the wood products infrastructure as a critical ally and conservation tool to achieve stewardship.”
That emphasis on stewardship is what led Vanderford to connect the builders at the airport with Yakama Forest Products.
The original stewards
Roughly 2.6 million feet of Douglas fir went into the roof of the terminal alone and much of that was grown outside of White Swan, Washington, a town of around 800 people on the Yakama Reservation, where the tribe operates its mill.
Fiander explained that the Yakama approach to forest management stems from the generations before her who saw the land as more than just a collection of trees.
“Because we have such a connection with this land and this forest, we want to take care of it the best we can,” she said. “The pride that we have as a people and how we manage our forest goes back to time immemorial.”
Yakama Forest Products uses selective logging, not clear cuts, meaning they only choose certain trees for harvest.
“We don't go for the biggest, best trees,” said Fiander. “We want to leave them so that they can reproduce more trees for our future generations.”
Selective logging also leaves a more open forest, which has several benefits.
“It provides that sunlight to come down,” Fiander said. “It provides for our understory to flourish where our foods and medicines grow. It also allows for the snow to pack down in the wintertime and to be able to store water.”
A less dense forest is less likely to burn in a wildfire and a more robust snowpack means healthier salmon, a food source of tremendous importance to the people of Yakama Nation.
“That's our very first food, our most sacred food,” Fiander said. “They're the ones that stood up for us and said they would take care of us. In return, we have to take care of them.”
And beyond the environmental benefits of their forest management, Fiander said it’s crucial for people to know where their products originate, which was a focus of the folks spearheading the airport project.
“A lot of times we don't understand where our products come from,” she said. “We don't understand where our food comes from. We don't understand where any of the things that we buy from the stores come from. So, to actually connect the land to this building, I think, is important.”
Beyond the terminal
The endeavor to create a traceable supply chain for the Portland airport was novel. No one had tried to do such a thing for a project of that size.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be repeated, Vanderford said.
“This work 100% should be scaled up and seen as a method that can and should be used by others,” he said. “What Sustainable Northwest uniquely did for this project is that we created a track-and-trace pathway that allows there to be a credible transparent method, and that method allows projects to go and do that again for their next clients.”
Indeed, Granato said he’s already fielding calls from other cities who are interested in the process.
“New York, Philadelphia, Boston, they've called us and said, 'How did you do that? Because we think this is something that we can do in our region as well,'” Granato said. “This can be replicated. What you have to have is the desire to do it.”
Vanderford thinks that, as long as there is demand, sustainable forestry will be able to meet it.
“Once you create the wheel, it can be spun many times,” he said.
Embedded within the soaring roof and intricate lattice work is something more important than the wood itself: the connection to the people who grew it.
“We want to reflect our people, our region in this building here,” Granato said. “It's not just another airport terminal building, right? It's our airport terminal building.”
That reflection is palpable in central Washington in the woods where the Douglas fir grew and in the mill where the logs were hewed into lumber.
“Normally, we don't necessarily see the end user of our wood,” said Tyler Martinez-Bobb, assistant sales manager for Yakama Forest Products. “Next time I'm (at the airport), I can specifically point out, that’s our lumber right there.”
The terminalwas scheduledto open to the public in May, but the timeline has beenpushed back due to construction delays. When it does open, Granato said he hopes it will be a source of pride for the people who live here and those visiting for the first time.
“We realize we're the front door. We're the first thing they see. Sometimes it's the last thing they see on their way out the door. We want to leave a good impression,” he said.
The terminal will also feature signage acknowledging the contributions of people like Fiander, which will come with its own sense of pride, she said.
“I feel like it's a good thing to be able to let people know that we are still here, that we don't live in teepees, that we live in homes, and that we're still contributing to society in a good way,” Fiander said.
