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They'll say whatever it takes to keep the subsidies rolling
in.
A Guide to Countering Timber Industry
Propaganda
A decade ago my brother and I fulfilled a lifelong dream of
hiking from Mexico to Canada on the 2,700-mile Pacific Crest Trail,
most of which traverses national forests in the Pacific Coast
states. We fully expected to see great expanses of wilderness,
unbroken and unspoiled, and we did-until we reached the northern
Sierra Nevada. There we began to notice Forest Service signs posted
on trees along the trail that read, "Trail washed out. Take detour."
We dutifully obeyed, and slogged along the hastily hacked-out
alternate paths.
Then one day, in Tahoe National Forest, we noticed two men up
ahead writing on one of these signs. When they saw us, they hustled
up the trail and out of sight. Their words in fresh marker-pen ink
warned: "Clearcuts ahead. It's a scam!" Intrigued, we stuck to the
main trail, and soon found ourselves staring across a massive
clearcut that extended over the ridgeline. Attempts to replant had
obviously been made, but the topsoil had washed away and the
saplings were dead. Not one living thing could be seen.
Catching up to the sign's editors, we were amazed to learn that
they were the U.S. Forest Service employees who had put up the
original warnings. Their bosses had ordered them to do this, they
said, in a cynical attempt to conceal the devastating effects of
commercial logging.
This was not the last clearcut. From the
northern Sierra, up through the Marble Mountains and the Cascades,
we encountered one stumpfield after another, along with
"reforestation" plantings of tidy rows of little trees, all of the
same species.
I had never before been politically involved.
But by the time I reached the Canadian border, five months and four
days after setting out, I was a convert to forest activism. I began
to investigate the Forest Service and the timber industry in an
effort to answer the question that kept recurring as we walked
through the devastation: Why are they logging our national forests?
The main reason is that we're paying them to do it. The Forest
Service's own figures reveal that the timber sales program on
national forests operates at a net loss to taxpayers of well over $1
billion each year. Not only does the industry get a sweet deal on
the trees themselves, but a substantial chunk of its overhead is
gratis, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. We pick up the tab for
logging-road construction, timber-sale planning and administrative
costs, replanting, and even restoration and cleanup.
But this is certainly not the explanation you'll hear from the
industry or the Forest Service. According to them, logging provides
jobs, offers fire protection, improves forest health, supports rural
education, and prevents deforestation in other parts of the world. A
closer examination, however, reveals that all of these claims are
merely deceptive ploys used to justify continued destruction of our
national forests.
Clearcutting Jobs
The Forest Service and the timber industry claim that logging our
public lands is essential for jobs and the economy. But the agency's
own documents show that recreation in national forests contributes
over 31 times more to the U.S. economy and creates 38 times more
jobs than logging national forests. If we ended all commercial
logging on national forests, and redirected the subsidies into
timber-community assistance, we could pay each public-lands timber
worker more than $30,000 a year for job retraining or ecological
restoration work, and still save taxpayers millions.
From
1979 to 1989-a period of extremely heavy logging on Northwest
federal forests-timber employment actually fell by about 20,000. The
main cause of job loss was not environmental regulations, as the
timber industry would have us believe, but automation and the loss
of old-growth forests due to logging itself.
A lot of
logging isn't even done by loggers any more. Enormous mechanical
monsters known as "feller-bunchers" roam the forest floor. A huge
hydraulic clamp grasps the trunk of the tree with startling
quickness and massive shears cut through it in one swift motion. The
clamp then sets the tree aside and the monster-machine rolls forward
through the forest. It is tireless. It never complains about wages
or working conditions. Its hunger for our trees knows no limit.
Given this technology, it is not surprising that ten years ago the
U.S. General Accounting Office projected that even if logging on
national forests increased by 55 percent over the next 50 years,
employment in timber extraction and milling would still drop by more
than 25 percent.
Logging Forests to Save Them
As the truth about logging and economics was increasingly
exposed by forest activists in the '90s, the industry faced a
public-relations crisis. The old "jobs versus environment" rhetoric
just didn't hold up, so new, ostensibly altruistic justifications
were invented.
The industry now insists that we must cut the
trees to protect them from fire and disease. Yet the Forest
Service's own 1994 study, "Forest Resources of the United States,"
revealed that tree mortality in the West due to both fire and
disease actually increases in logged areas. The worst rates were on
private lands, where logging levels are even higher and where less
natural forest remains. In western forests from 1986 to 1991, tree
mortality from fire and disease on private lands went up by 20
percent, compared to 3 percent on national forests, while it
actually decreased by 9 percent on other public lands, such as
national parks.
Fires tend to start in areas that have been
logged because logged forests are drier, less shaded, and contain
flammable debris known as "slash piles," unmerchantable branches
left by logging crews. When fires do occur in old-growth forests,
they rarely kill the larger trees, which have thick, fire-resistant
bark. Instead, such fires simply clear understory brush and return
nutrients to the soil, enhancing forest health. Even in the
relatively rare event that a fire does kill an old-growth stand, the
remaining trees and snags provide valuable nesting habitat for large
birds of prey and other forest species. Wildlife has little use for
stumps.
In 1993, the Forest Service introduced a new logging
program-"Forest Stewardship"-that is purportedly conducted for the
health of the forests. As public opinion polls in the mid-'90s began
to show that a growing majority of Americans wanted to end federal
timber sales, the Forest Service countered by reducing the volume
cut under its Timber Commodity Program and making up the difference
with a steady increase in logging under the Forest Stewardship
Program. Today, roughly half of all timber cut on national forests
is supposedly for the forests' own good. Most of the biggest, most
destructive timber sales-including massive clearcuts through ancient
forests and roadless areas-are planned, prepared, and executed under
the guise of stewardship. Most of these are supposedly carried out
to "reduce fire risk."
Last year, however, a General
Accounting Office report finally called into serious question the
use of timber sales to address fire issues. "Most of the trees that
need to be removed to reduce accumulated fuels are small in diameter
and have little or no commercial value," the report noted. Because
of this, Forest Service managers "tend to focus on areas with
high-value commercial timber rather than on areas with high fire
hazards" and "include more large, commercially valuable trees in a
sale than are necessary to reduce the accumulated fuels." The GAO
concluded that the program is "largely driven by commercial rather
than safety considerations."
Indeed, the principal
methods for setting the Forest Service's fire-reduction budget are
commercial. The cover of the technical course manual of the Forest
Service's National Fire Management Analysis System (NFMAS) shows a
balancing scale. On its right side is a stand of trees on fire. On
the left, a large bag of money. The text openly states that "NFMAS
presently has no provision for directly and systematically
estimating the economic impact of effects of fire on wildland
resource values that do not in and of themselves produce market or
commodity outputs." The message is clear: if it can't be sold, it
doesn't have value.
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