Kirk Dahlstrom moved to Alaska and rescued a failing sawmill there in the 1990s when the federal government crippled the timber industry in his native Washington State to protect the Spotted Owl. (Spotted Owl numbers continued to decline anyway – now steely-eyed environmentalists hunt the “bad” Barred Owls to save the noble Spotted Owls they have been outcompeting. True story.)

Dahlstrom, now CEO of Viking Lumber, is fighting the federal government again in Alaska, where he says the Forest Service is out of compliance with its own resource management plan, imperiling the supply of wood needed for Steinway pianos, NASA wind tunnels, and various boats, airplanes, and helicopters.

Dahlstrom’s daughter, Sarah Lehnert, writes in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1994, my dad, uncles, their lifelong friend and my grandfather took a gamble on a bankrupt sawmill on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska. My dad moved our family to rural Alaska, sight unseen, 31 years ago… Today, our wood goes into instruments from Martin and Gibson Guitars as well as Kawai, Boston, Essex, Yamaha and Steinway & Sons pianos. Our company, Viking Lumber, is the last remaining mill in the U.S. able to provide the wood needed for a Steinway piano.

You depend on our wood even if you don’t play an instrument. Our Sitka spruce is used in National Aeronautics and Space Administration wind tunnels, in boat and airplane construction, to make the blades of helicopters that fight fires and deliver supplies to troops, and in the nose cones of U.S. military missiles…

In our part of Alaska, the federal government owns approximately 94% of the land and controls access to timber resources. In 2016 the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a management plan that promised the availability of old-growth timber from the Tongass annually on a fixed schedule. The government hasn’t exactly stuck to that schedule… in the past four years it offered less than 10% of the annual needs for the industry…

Our 31-year operation won’t be able to go on. The families who depend on us here will be forced to move. Our sawmill, the leading supplier to musical manufacturing companies in the world, will die.

Viking Lumber is suing the federal government with the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation. But the Trump administration shouldn’t need to be sued to recognize we need to “log baby log” just as urgently as we need to drill baby drill and mine baby mine.