By Chad Hanson and David Orr
As two of the leaders of the Sierra Club's campaign to end timber sales on federal public lands, we read Jane Braxton Little's article, "To Cut or Not to Cut" (American Forests, Autumn 1996), with some concern. We wish to address a number of inaccuracies and misconceptions.
The article states that the initiative approved overwhelmingly by Sierra Club members "allows harvesting some trees and selling the material when it is justified by forest health." Wrong. The Club's position is that timber sales should not be allowed on federal public lands regardless of the stated reason for the sale. We want private profit-making incentives removed from land management decisions. Science, not commodity production, should guide the Forest Service.
The Forest Servicešs own national poll found that 58% of Americans expressing an opinion on this issue oppose any commodity production on public forests (1). And why shouldn't they? Total annual U.S. wood consumption is 18.7 billion cubic feet (2), while annual timber volume cut from all U.S. federal lands is currently about 0.87 billion cubic feet (3) - only 4.7 percent of the nationšs total yearly timber consumption. We simply donšt need to log public forests for our wood supply.
Further, recreation, hunting, and fishing in national forests contribute over 37 times more income to the nationšs economy--and create over 32 times more jobs - than logging on national forests (4). Moreover, the public lands timber program continues to operate at ever-greater losses financially. Congress appropriated approximately $1 billion dollars for the national forest timber program in 1996, including timber sale planning and administration, replanting, logging road construction, and timber productivity research (5). Yet, gross timber sales receipts for 1996 amounted to only $597.1 million--and the Forest Service has already put $367.8 million of this back into its timber program (6), rather than returning the money to taxpayers.
To put this in perspective, if we ended all timber sales on our national forests and redirected this corporate subsidy into timber community assistance we could provide over $25,000 for each public lands timber worker for job retraining or ecological restoration work.
Ms. Littlešs article claims that "reduced harvesting on federal lands simply puts more pressure on private forests..." Not true. In fact, the opposite is likely to occur. As two conservative economists pointed out in a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal, "government "dumping" of cheap timber makes the market unpredictable for private-sector commodity suppliers, reducing their incentive to manage land responsibly... Itšs time for the Forest Service to abandon its role as a producer of commodities... Commodity production is best left to the private sector."(7) In other words, many private landowners are overcutting their lands to compensate for lost profits as they struggle to compete with the subsidized public timber that is flooding the market.
Besides, there is a severe logical flaw in Little's "shifting pressure" argument: if we accept it as gospel, we cannot protect any land anywhere - public, private, or international - for fear of displacing the demand elsewhere. It locks us into accepting current levels of production, consumption and waste, which are unsustainable and unnecessary.
The article quotes industry backers who make the remarkable claim that we need to log public forests to prevent forest fires. The authors of the Congressionally-commissioned Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project Report are emphatic on this point, stating that "Timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate, and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity." (8)
It's time for change on the ground in our national forests, and in the agency itself. The only way we can get there is to remove the incentive for profit-making from the management of our public forests. The Sierra Club, as shown by the overwhelming support of its members, is leading the way and the Forest Service, sooner or later, will follow.
(1) U.S. Forest Service, Architecture for Change, Appendix D, Sec. 3, 1994
(2) U.S. Forest Service, 1993 RPA Timber Assessment Update, General Technical Report RM-GTR-259, p. 34.
(3) U.S. Forest Service, The Forest Service Program for Forest & Rangeland Resources, October 1995, p. II-2.
(4) U.S. Forest Service, Explanatory Notes for the 1997 Forest Service Budget; National Summary Timber Sale Program Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1994.
(5) U.S. Forest Service, 1997 Budget Explanatory Notes for Committee on Appropriations.
(6) U.S. Forest Service, Washington, D.C. Office, Fiscal & Accounting Dept., Dec. 1996.
(7) John Baden and Pete Geddes, "Resource Politics Miss the Forest for the Trees", Wall Street Journal, 5/22/96.
(8) Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project Report Summary, p. 4.