Lessons from the US

Dave Groves

“They say they care about jobs. They do not. They export whole logs, pulp and chips. With those resources go our local jobs and tax base. If they could strip our forests with robots, they would do it. But they blame the spotted owl for work force reduction.
I have been speaking to environmental campaigner of over 20 years, Tim Hermach, president and founder of the Native Forest Council, who is fighting a long running battle from his home in Oregon U.S.A. that eerily mirrors the relatively young fight we have currently in Tasmania.

Perhaps we could use the knowledge they have learned through endurance and perseverance in America to ensure this crisis is never repeated in Tasmania.

Tim has published opinions in The Washington Post and The New York Times. He has appeared on CBS Evening News and ABC’s Prime Time Live, has been featured in Newsweek and the Chronicle of Philanthropy and is featured in Anne Becher’s book of American Environmental Leaders.

According to Tim in a recent article published in Oregon’s “The Register-Guard” there are opinions written by members of the pro logging lobby that take “personal shots at community minded professionals”, and while being unable to refute the facts continually attack those who would bring truth to the debate about heavily subsidised mono culture and clearfell of public forests.

Tim writes about Roy Keene, a distinguished forester, an advocate for sustainable forest practices and a businessman. Roy recently offered a productive and clear alternative to current logging practices. His knowledge is current, and his honesty is widely known. The logging industry chose to slam him personally instead of responding constructively.

This sounds eerily like Tasmania. All you would have to do is change a few names as the theme is just the same.

“In the 1960s, the logging companies said they needed to cut trees off public lands for only another 20 years. They said growth on their lands would catch up and fill the demand for timber from that point on. Yet today, they are screaming for a greatly increased cut from the public lands.

The logging companies said they would not cut and run. But they did.

They said they would cut in a sustainable way. They did not. They are still cutting their lands at ever younger ages and much faster than they are growing.

They said they would renew the forest. They degraded the forest.

They said they would never log the steep, landslide-prone back country. They have logged most of it”.

“They say they care about jobs. They do not. They export whole logs, pulp and chips. With those resources go our local jobs and tax base. If they could strip our forests with robots, they would do it. But they blame the spotted owl for work force reduction.

They have lobbied to have all severance taxes removed from industrial forest tracts of more than 5,000 acres. They pay almost no property taxes. They do not pay their share.

Taxpayers subsidize the removal of each precious tree from our public forests. These trees are not just about a Sunday afternoon hike. They clean our water and support spawning beds critical to the survival of the fishing industry. They hold and enrich the soil upon which we depend”.

Tim continues to point the finger at the corporations and Federal subsidies that allow these entities to survive.

“The forests are a potent weapon in the battle to stabilize our climate. They are the lungs of the planet, and without them we will not survive. Yet we pay the logging companies to liquidate them.

This is what they do not want you to know. Every well-intentioned and honest forest products worker is tangled in industry’s web of deceit and public relations that in effect makes them dependent on taxpaying citizens just as surely as we support those on Social Security or any other entitlement program. But this entitlement is a double-edged sword. It robs the federal treasury of dollars, and it robs our grandchildren of their future”.

Furthermore Tim defines the real goals of the forest industry and some of the double speak that mirrors words used here in Tasmania.

“The timber industry always has intended to convert as much of our forests as possible into industrial fiber farms. That is why even though more than 90 percent of Oregon’s complex native forests are gone, this industry continues to demand more of the last remaining ancient forests.

The industry even developed a whole new set of dishonest programs and institutions with which to continue the destruction, including:

1. Fuels reduction. The real goal is to eliminate nutrient competition for their mono-crop fiber plantations.

2. Collaborative forestry and stewardship. These are covert ways of re-naming logging to avoid litigation. The stewardship authorities have been effective in seducing environmental groups into becoming plantation managers.

3. Biomass and cellulosic ethanol. These are new and destructive ways to mine the nutrients of the soil, depleting it to the point where it will not grow forest”.

As you see, those who seek to take our forests, our children’s inheritance are further down the track in the U.S. than they are in Tasmania, but they are obviously valuable mentors to corporations hard at work removing as much native forest as possible from our tiny island.