Loggers Learn New Trades, Then Leave Home : Retraining: About 900 people entered programs to learn such skills as auto mechanics, nursing and accounting. But many of them are forced to move to get work. A few are learning new ways to profit from the forest in hopes of staying in the woods.

For many unemployed Northwest timber workers, government-funded retraining involves at least two wrenching changes--leaving the woods to learn a trade, then leaving town to find work.

For a small but growing number of Oregon timber workers, however, programs that teach new ways to profit from the forest are helping them stay in the woods and in the rural communities they love.

Such programs rely on a major change of their own, asking trainees to look beyond the big old trees to see what the entire forest ecosystem can offer.

Bjorn Everson, former tree-planting boss and now a supervisor at the Rogue Institute for Ecology and Economy in Ashland, was in the woods one recent day, holding a portable computer and standing over a stick of deer brush.

“C-E-I-N, Ceanothus interregnum, “ Everson said as his thick fingers, shaped by a lifetime of hard work, sought out the tiny computer keys to punch in a four-letter code for the plant’s scientific name.

He’s helping teach displaced timber workers how to assess special forest products: wild mushrooms, prized by gourmet cooks; beargrass, used in flower arrangements; the root of Oregon grape, a substitute for ginseng.

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“We had one old log-truck driver who was sure he would never learn the Latin codes,” Everson said. “But once you start calling a bigleaf maple A-C-M-A (for Acer macrophyllum ) , it sticks.”

Most of the $5 million awarded last year to Oregon retraining programs under President Clinton’s Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative went to more traditional training. About 900 displaced timber workers entered programs to learn skills ranging from construction work and auto mechanics to nursing and accounting.

But, with limited need for specialized skills in small timber towns, graduates often must move to more populated areas.

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Officials hope that people in the Rogue Institute’s program will be able to stay closer to home, finding government jobs cataloguing forest resources or offering themselves as consultants, telling owners of private woodlands what valuable things are on their land besides timber.

Other Oregon retraining programs in the works will help former loggers get jobs restoring watersheds damaged by decades of logging.

The number of workers involved is small, but such programs eventually could help create up to 3,000 new jobs in the rural, economically depressed areas where they’re needed most, said Bob Warren, a member of the governor’s forest policy team working with the Department of Economic Development.