Logging, wood, jobs and the environment

Many countries squander their forest wealth.  Large, highly efficient log-mining companies extract mountains of timber from the nation's public and private lands. The economies of scale -- as well as  huge government subsidies -- allow the lumber to be sold very cheap and still return a large profit.

Logging companies are under no obligation to process or use the logs anywhere near where they fall.  Because of advances in mechanization, a few men can now extract from the forest what was formerly mined by many.  

The timber debate in the United States has pitted loggers and their employers on one side, and environmentalists and endangered species on the other.  But owls are not the logger's enemy.  Neither is Earth First!  Rather, it is the multi-national timber companies, which desire to maximize profit at the expense of all else, including their loggers and all forest creatures.

The U.S. Government continues to spend taxpayer money paying privately-owned tree-mining companies to cut logs from public land at fire-sale prices and sell them at retail.  Politicians, in turn, got $5.8 million in campaign cash from logging companies between 1993 and 1998, according to the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).  Salmon, meanwhile, get streams full of silt in which they cannot live.

U.S. taxpayers spend more than $200 million each year just to pay for logging roads, says PIRG.  The U.S. Forest Service Timber Program lost some $1.7 billion of taxpayers' dollars between 1994 and 1999, according to PIRG.

That same amount of money invested into building material re-use and alternative building technologies would produce more jobs, whole new industries, more energy savings and less waste.  

Common sense logging policies would feature:

• No log milled more than 100 miles from where it falls
• No export of raw logs felled on public land.
• Maximize local wood processing jobs by developing rugged, portable computer-guided mini mills.
• Intensive reforestation, habitat restoration and anti-sedimentation projects.
• Invest in high-value-added wood manufacturing enterprises.
• Invest in wood recycling and deconstruction technologies.

Mini mills, capable of logging trees to very precise specifications, could be hauled by truck or helicopter into the forest.  They would use satellite hookups to receive orders and confirm deliveries.  Trees could be cut and milled to order, and delivered in the same amount of time it takes to get lumber to market today.

Reforestation can create as many jobs as deforestation did in decades past.  Millions of acres of land across the U.S. have been completely denuded of trees, allowing soil to run into streams and hillsides to slide into towns.  Instead of subsidizing this destruction for the benefit of a few wealthy timber barons, federal dollars could create thousands of modest-income jobs growing, planting and nurturing millions of trees over the next 20 years.

For more information on timber and logging issues, please see:

• Sustainable Forestry wiki
• Wasteful US Subsidies for logging in Alaska; More details on that
• Bush's Healthy Forests" legislation.  Yeah, right.
• Sustainable Forests Partnership at Oregon State University
• The Earth First Journal offers the latest information on tree-sits and non-violent forest protection campaigns around the globe.  The EF! Journal newspaper reports stories ignored by the mainstream media, and excels at  documenting  the global ecosystem destruction wrought by big timber.