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MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #25-00 Public Lands, Private Profits: Logging in U.S. National Forests
June 21, 2000

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2000/0025.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact....

Martin Litton: The United States government spends about a billion dollars a year to support private loggers on public lands. In other words, it is the only landowner in the world, that I know of, that actually pays people to deplete its own resources.

Chad Hanson: We could appeal timber sales forever, and the agency will always break the law. It's an endless thing. And people began realizing that we've got to actually stop this program, because we're losing so much forest every single year, and we actually just have to get the timber industry off public lands once and for all.

Phillip Babich: According to logging industry observers, the U.S. government sells timber on public lands to private companies at a small fraction of market value. On this program, we take a look at logging on public lands. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact , an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information.

Majestic, nature-filled backdrops seem to be the order of the political day as President Clinton and Vice President Gore seek out rustic photo-ops to promote their environmental initiatives. In April 2000, for example, Clinton signed a forest protection measure into law, flanked by U.S. Forest Service employees under the shade of a giant sequoia grove. With his pen stroke, Clinton designated threatened old-growth trees in California's Sequoia National Forest as a national monument. Martin Litton is with the environmental group Tule River Conservancy. He and others have worked for decades to preserve the sequoias.

Martin Litton: We pushed very hard on President Bush for a national monument, and he said wonderful things but never did anything. Along then came President Clinton, who of course is noted, now with wanting the leave the presidency with a legacy of environmental accomplishments. And somehow he was impelled to create national monuments, which is something a president can do. He can't create national parks, but he can create national monuments. And he began to do that. And every one of them has been a national monument in name only. They haven't amounted to anything. President Clinton keeps making points and he had these trophies. That's another scalp added to his belt, and he thinks he'll go out of his office in glory. We didn't even know what was in the Sequoia National Monument when he proclaimed it - and I attended the ceremony.

Phillip Babich: Litton's initial hopes turned to frustration when he learned what the plan actually entailed.

Martin Litton: I was somewhat happy, thinking, "Hey, we're going to do something here!" And then after all the hullabaloo was over and we came back down to earth and read the proclamation in its entirety, we found it was going to require four times as much logging as had been going on. Over the preceding fifteen years, with lawsuits and appeals and so forth, we'd been able to cut the logging back from 85 million board feet in 1991 (I'll use that year), down to seven million board feet in 1999. Suddenly the new national monument comes along, and the president gives the jost of designed it to the Forest Service, which has been the source of the problems all along. It's like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. And, so he gives it to the Forest Service to design, and what do they do? They lick their chops and suddenly it's going to be 28 million board feet in the next 2 and a half years. And that's in the monument part of the forest alone, which is only one-third of the area. The rest of the national forest will be ravaged by more logging.

Phillip Babich: In addition to tree monuments, Clinton instructed the U.S. Forest Service in October 1999 to develop a policy for roadless area protection in national forests. It covers areas of 5,000 acres and larger, and would halt only road building, not logging. The proposal has disappointed many environmental activists like Jeannette Russell, who works with the National Forest Protection Alliance in Missoula, Montana.

Jeanette Russell: Basically, we're looking at a proposal from the Forest Service that allows 61 percent of planned new roads to go in, and that's 880 miles of roads. And it also allows 73 percent of timber sales to continue in roadless areas. And also, our biggest, our nations largest roadless area in Alaska, called the Tongass National Forest, is not protected. They totally left it out. And, you know, this is a very, this is an item that we felt was very important to be included. And 95 percent of the timber sales are going to happen at the Tongass roadless areas. So this so-called proposal really does not protect our national forests in the roadless areas.

Phillip Babich: Martin Litton adds that even if no new roads are built in these areas, timber companies have found other ways to get to the trees.

Martin Litton: The roadless areas are getting to mean less all the time, because you can say, "Well, we'll keep the roads out." But the loggers and the Forest Service have devised ways of getting the forest cut down in the roadless areas. One of the ways, the obvious one, and it's used quite a lot, is the use of giant helicopters to lift the logs out after the trees are cut. And another is to use great big tractors with rubber tires, big fat rubber tires that don't need a road. They can go almost anywhere. And of course if they come to small trees that get in the way where they're cutting down the big streets, they just knock those over and run right over them. And they can lift and pull good sized trees out. And the other thing is, they've now devised a thousand-yard long cable on a winch, of nearly three-fifths of a mile. They can pull a cable into a roadless area and still pull the logs out. So, one might say we're going to keep it roadless...that's kind of tongue in cheek. It doesn't mean they're not going to log it.

Phillip Babich: Jeannette Russell says that not only does the new policy fall short of protecting roadless areas, it diverts attention from the larger issue of preserving public lands as a whole.

Jeanette Russell: They're attempting to frame the debate of roadless protection as, this is really what Americans want. And it's not...we want all lands protected. The same polls that show that 70 percent of Americans want roadless lands protected, are the same 70 percent that want all national forest protected from commercial logging, grazing, mining, etc. So really roadless, I don't believe is real protection, is really the debate. We need to be talking about protecting the entire national forest system from commercial exploitation, and remove that commercial incentive that's driving our current Forest Service management policies.

Phillip Babich: These sentiments are shared by many religious groups that have come together to protect national forests. The Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation is a coalition of churches and synagogues that have issued a call to end all commercial logging on public lands and to save all old-growth forests. Fred Krueger is the coordinator of the campaign.

Fred Krueger: The roadless proposal of Clintons may be a step -- unfortunately it saves mostly rocks and ice. It saves those areas that are not heavily timbered, and that only marginally impact commercial logging. And so our position, and the position of the religious groups that support us, is far stronger.

Phillip Babich: In May 2000 Krueger and other religious leaders traveled to Washington, D.C. to call on President Clinton to take stronger action to protect public lands.

Fred Krueger: We went to the White House and called for a presidential executive order to end commercial logging on national forests. The president has that in his power. Our purpose was to thank the administration, first, for its initial small steps to preserve the forest, but we wanted that executive order that would preserve all of the federal forests from commercial logging.

Shereen Meraji: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, please give us a call. It's toll free, 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tape and transcript orders. That's 800-529-5736

Phillip Babich: Logging is big business on U.S. Forest Service land, and the agency's timber sales program attracts some of the largest corporations in the United States. For bargain basement prices, private companies purchase lumber by the boardfoot. At present, corporations are cutting forests on public lands at a rate of 2 square miles per day, according to Chad Hanson, executive director of the John Muir Project.

Chad Hanson: With an awful lot of taxpayer subsidies, over a billion dollars every single year, that is coming out of taxpayers pockets, and goes to the Forest Service. And they cover a lot of costs to the timber industry -- basically pay the timber industry to come in and log the national forests. Of course, the timber industries pay what is, by and large, a nominal fee, but they get the benefits, you know, tenfold. And of course, taxpayers, you know, get left with the bill, and are losing over a billion dollars a year.

Phillip Babich: Tell us exactly how the timber sales program works.

Chad Hanson: Congress appropriates money to fund the agency, the Forest Service, to conduct the timber sales program. The Forest Service goes out and decides which stands of trees it wants to cut down. It marks off the boundaries and gets a rough estimate on how much it wants to sell those trees for (of course, it's always well below market value). And then offers that sale for bid on the open market. Highest bidder gets the sale, then they can go in and cut it. Now the scariest thing, aside from the fact that there's logging in our national forests at all, is that fact that the revenue from these timber sales doesn't go back to taxpayers. It goes to the Forest Service and they pad their off-budget logging accounts with these funds. They basically enhance their agency budget. So there's perverse incentive for them to offer more trees for cutting, because the more trees they cut, the more laws they break, the more money they make as an agency.

Phillip Babich: Hm... Now, the price for the timber that the U.S. Forest Service sells is quite low. There's one statistic cited in a book called, "Take the Rich Off Welfare," by Mark Zepezower and Arthur Naiman, and that puts it about $2.85 for 1000 board feet of lumber. They say that's about the price of a cheeseburger. Is that about the number that you're looking at as well?

Chad Hanson: Yes. There are some prices that are even worse, and some prices that are not as bad. But consistently, it's appalling.

Phillip Babich: The timber industry and its supporters argue that a logging ban on public lands would hurt lumber supply and cost jobs. But, Hanson says that statistics from the U.S. Forest Service itself and Congress' General Accounting Office tell a different story.

Chad Hanson: You only have to look into it a little bit to realize what a non-issue that is. Back in the '60s, the timber sale program in the national forest presented a larger percentage of the nations timber consumption than it does now. It still was by no means a majority, but it was significant. Now it's less than three percent, three percent of all the wood that we consume in this country comes from the national forest system. But of course that three percent is coming from the country's most ecologically sensitive rare forests, the roadless areas, the old growth forests. So it's not the makings of a timber supply crisis in any way, shape or form. In fact, because you'll be reducing that billion dollars of subsidies, it'll make the tree-free alternatives just that much more competitive. Recycled products will be that much more competitive, recycled paper, tree-free building materials -- there's a number of them out there.

Phillip Babich: And what about the jobs argument?

Chad Hanson: The jobs argument is another red herring. In fact, the vast majority of the mill closures in Oregon and Washington that the timber industry made big news about in the early '90s; the vast majority of those occurred before the Spotted Owl was ever listed as a threatened species. The vast majority of them occurred before the first injunction was imposed on Northwest federal forests by Judge Dwyer. The reason those mills were closing was because of two factors, primarily. Number one, just the lost of old-growth forest due to logging itself, and number two, pretty much equally as number one, is automation. The timber industry had been putting timber workers out of work for decades. Workers they need, but they don't like to hire. They don't like to pay workers, if they can take a little bit of the profit margin and put it in automation, and put 10,000 timber workers out of work and use several hundred machines to do their jobs, they'll do it. And they've been doing that for decades. From 1979 to 1989, 20,000 timber workers lost their jobs, despite the face that this was peak logging levels. So it just gives you an idea of what we're talking about.

In fact, the General Accounting Office issued a report in 1990, that determined that even if logging levels were increased by 50% over the next 50 years, there would still be a 27% loss in timber employees. That's just to give you some idea. Aside from the fact that there aren't nearly enough timber workers employed by the national forest logging program as the timber industry would have us believe, it's not about timber workers. It's about timber executives' profits, and politicians whose campaigns they fund. Those are the ones who are profiting and benefiting from this program, and those are the ones who'd love.

Phillip Babich: Can we put a name on some of those profiteers, to which corporations in which executives are benefiting primarily from this timber sales program?

Chad Hanson: Well, in California, the Sierra Pacific Industries is the worst. They log far more on national forest than any other corporation. There's a number of them that log, and they all do a lot of damage, but Sierra Pacific Industries...and of course, the head of that is Red Emerson. So there's just one corporate bad guy. And of course, there's lots of them. There are other corporations that do a lot of damage on public lands. Boise Cascade does a lot of damage. So's Weyerhaeuser, actually. People think that Weyerhaeuser only has private lands. Well, they do a lot of logging in national forests too. Georgia Pacific. You name it.

Phillip Babich: Doug Bevington, the California organizer for the John Muir Project, has been researching Sierra Pacific Industries, or SPI, for the past year.

Doug Bevington: SPI's the biggest logger in California, both on public and private land. On private lands, they own 1.5 million acres, which makes them the biggest private land owner in California, actually the second largest private land owner in all of North America. And what are they doing with this land? Well, a recent study by the California Department of Forestry revealed that in the last seven years, Sierra Pacific Industries has increased the amount of acreage that they're clearcutting by 2,426%. Absolutely skyrocketing. At the same time, on public lands, they're the single biggest recipient of timber off of California's national forests. And we have to remember that the Federal Timber Sale program as a whole operates as a net loss to taxpayers of over 1.2 billion dollars per year. Now, SPI has a near monopoly on California's national forests, receiving 39% of all the timber cut in this state, almost half of it. So SPI is pillaging our national forests at taxpayer expense. And then using these profits to buy up and clearcut the rest of California's forests.

Phillip Babich: On its private lands, Sierra Pacific Industries says that it is more profitable to clearcut and replace existing forests with uniform rows of select tree species grouped by age. The company's forest practices on these "tree farms" include routine herbicide usage and genetic testing. As for logging on public lands, SPI district manager Tim Feller said he was frustrated with the lower levels of timber being offered by the Forest Service.

Tim Feller: Because of the reduction, you know, of what's happened in their forest planning, their Sierra Nevada framework, and a few other land use decisions documents, they basically aren't producing a tenth of what they used to produce. And 39% of nothing is still 39% of nothing.

Doug Bevington: SPI is still getting 150 million board feet of timber off of California's national forest.

Phillip Babich: Doug Bevington with the John Muir Project.

Doug Bevington: At the same time we're seeing a drastic decline in the populations of the California spotted owl. This bird's populations are declining by seven to ten percent per year as it's habitat is being destroyed by logging. Now, if you look at where the California spotted owl has been wiped out, that's the private timberlands of the Sierra Nevada, where SPI is now the dominant landowner. Where is the California spotted owl left? It's left on the National Forest in the Sierra Nevada, the very places where SPI is now clamoring to get more and more timber cut down and sent to their mills.

Phillip Babich: Brian Vincent, an organizer with the American Lands Alliance, described the effects of SPI's logging practices in May 2000 at a town hall meeting in the Sierra Nevada.

Brian Vincent: I want you to humor me for a moment. Close your eyes and envision you're standing before the Durham Cathedral in England. It's one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, 900 years old, with flying buttresses, and stained glass, and ornate Corinthian columns. And then you see a wrecking crew there, with a wrecking ball, slamming against the cathedral walls. And the walls crashing down, and the stained glass in shattered, and it's just left with a pile of rubble. Well, the Sierra Nevada is one of natures most grand cathedrals. But Sierra Pacific Industries has taken a wrecking ball to the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra Nevada has been so degraded that species like the California spotted owl, the Pacific fisher, the pine martin, and salmon are being pushed to extinction. Wildlife habitat has been fragmented and degraded and lost, and water quality has been degraded.

Phillip Babich: Despite being California's biggest logger, SPI has managed to avoid media scrutiny. That has started to change, in part because of SPI's role in the so-called Quincy Library Group federal legislation. This controversial logging rider will more than double logging levels in parts of the National Forests in the Sierra Nevada. SPI is expected to be the primary beneficiary of this increased logging.

Doug Bevington: Well, SPI may act like California's national forests are its personal fiefdom (but) these are public lands, belonging to all Americans, and national polls show that a majority of Americans do not want timber companies cutting down our national forests.

Phillip Babich: In addition to receiving subsidized timber from national forests at taxpayer expense, SPI has also been connected with instances of outright timber theft on public lands. Charlotte Fox is with the Government Accountability Project.

Charlotte Fox: We have a number of clients from the former Forest Service Timber Theft Task Force, later to become the Timber Theft Investigation Branch. And what we're looking at right now here at G.A.P. is the fact that the Forest Service, since they closed the Timber Theft Investigation, has not upheld its pledge to accept timber theft as a priority. And as it concerns Sierra Pacific Industries for the last 10 years, or slightly longer, there has been an open felony investigation against Sierra Pacific Industries each and every year. Yet, it seems as though Sierra Pacific Industries, along with other corporate timber sale companies, or timber sale contract purchasers, have been able to get away with stealing trees on public lands, but individuals have not. This is typical of the was the Forest Service Law Enforcement investigations branch has been operation in the last few years. We have cases in California where individuals have been prosecuted for removing timber from public lands illegally, but when you see someone like Sierra Pacific Industries with repeated felony investigation, yet there's been little if any criminal charges against any of their subcontractors or even themselves, one begins to wonder how realistic is timber theft investigation.

Phillip Babich: Nor are the problems associated with SPI limited to timber theft and clearcutting, according to Doug Bevington.

Doug Bevington: SPI embodies all the worst practices in the timber industry today. Extensive clearcutting, pillaging national forests at taxpayer expensive, forest health logging scams that actually harm the forest, connection to timber theft on public lands, dubious land trades, destruction of wildlife habitat, pushing species closer to the brink of extinction, enormous proposed habitat conservation plan to undermine endangered species protection, spraying dangerous herbicides, and buying out our democracy with big political contributions, campaign fund-raisers and a large team of lobbyists. This is how SPI operates. And it's SPI and timber companies like them that are the only beneficiaries of continued logging on our national forests.

Phillip Babich: According to the John Muir Project, the U.S. Forest Service operated at a loss of $1.2 billion dollars in 1997, a deficit that has been fairly consistent over the past few years. Despite steep loses, the U.S. Forest Service remains well funded, says Chad Hanson, because of heavy timber industry lobbying...and the agency retains control of timber sales revenues.

Chad Hanson: Agencies need to justify their budgets. Most agencies. They have to do their job effectively. If they don't, they don't get funded through appropriations. Every agency, the life blood of an agency is the appropriations they get from Congress, for federal agencies, or from the state, for state agencies. And every year, if their budget goes down, they have to lay off staff, they have to make cutbacks, etc., they have to cut programs. The Forest Service, they don't have to worry about that as much, because they get appropriations from Congress. Of course, members of Congress, who are beholden to the timber industry because of campaign contributions, have an interest to give the Forest Service even more money than they request for timber sales. This happened many times, actually. But even the money the Forest Service does get, they conduct their timber sales program. And whatever revenue they get from timber corporations from selling these forests on public lands, 90% of that revenue goes right back to the Forest Service. They keep it. It doesn't go back to the taxpayer. It doesn't have to go through that, you know, back to taxpayers, back to appropriations, back to the Forest Service. Taxpayers and our elected officials never get to make another judgment about what to do with that money. Forest Service keeps it. They use it to pad their agency budget, so they don't have to worry as much about, well, where's our money going to come from. And, of course, you can see the problem that creates. The more forests you log, the more laws you break, the more money you make, you're going to break more laws and log more forests.

Phillip Babich: If we were to take this position or just look at timber sales from strictly an economic standpoint, the U.S. government is a business, and it needs to raise money. Is there any salvaging of the U.S. Forest Service program, i.e., raising the cost of the timber sales, reforming the way it works, so that the U.S. government can collect more money?

Chad Hanson: No. The timber sales program's been going for over 100 years now, In those 100 years, only three years were actually profitable. And that's from a, even that's from a fairly skewed accounting perspective. If you did a full cost accounting, even those three years would not be profit-able. They would be a huge loss. It will never be a good idea for taxpayers. And part of the reason is, it's public land. You're going to have to spend a certain amount of money monitoring the timber companies to insure that they don't log more than they're supposed to. You know, timber theft is a huge problem in our national forests. You know, so even if the sale, as it's planned, is deemed to comply with the laws, well, and the laws are very weak, which is why we need to change them to stop the timber sales program, but even if the sale complies with the laws in their current form, frequently the timber corporation will just go in there and cut a lot more trees than they're supposed to. The Forest Service looks the other way, with a wink and a nod, and this is how the system works. You will never ever have a timber sales program without doing huge ecological damage and without costing the taxpayers a lot of money.

Phillip Babich: On a much broader level, do you think that the public lands and national forest is kind of locked in some kind of ideological battle over privatizing everything. Over corporations' desire to have all things that were once public be handed over to so-called private interests? Do you think about that, and what are your thoughts on that?

Chad Hanson: Yes. This is a key problem. This is essentially the battle. You've put your finger on the fundamental ideological struggle. Of course, for them, it's not ideological, really, it's just about the bottom line. You know, these corporations, they don't have a conscience. The just see if we can mitigate the political process to get more money, well, we're going to do that. But that's what it's about. They are in an effort to privatize public lands, in any way they can. This is not just logging, it's also grazing and mining and concessionaires, etc. You name it. And just the selling off of public lands itself. And also the problem of land exchanges, that's another huge problem. In one way or another, the corporations, by manipulating the system of representative government, are trying to extract as much resources out of these public lands and also to privatize them to the greatest extent they can. To put them under greater and greater private control.

Phillip Babich: Chad Hanson is executive director of the John Muir Project.

A bill to ban logging on public lands, was introduced by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a Georgia Democrat. The National Forest Protection and Restoration Act, H.R. 1396 has attracted the support not only of traditional environmental advocates, but also fiscal conservatives. The bill is being co-championed by Congressman Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican and head of the House Banking Committee.

That's it for this edition of Making Contact: a look at logging on public lands. Thanks for listening. And, special thanks this week to Mike Thornton for recorded portions.

Laura Livoti is our managing director; Peggy Law is executive director; Associate producer is Stephanie Welch; Senior advisor, Norman Solomon; National producer, David Barsamian; Women's desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman; Prison desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt; Production assistant, Shereen Meraji; Archivist, Din Abdullah; and I'm your host and managing director, Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project, at 900-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. You can also go to our website at www.radioproject.org. Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. 'Bye for now.