New York TimesApril 16, 2002
Scientists Seek Logging Ban on U.S.-Owned Land
By JIM ROBBINS HELENA, Mont., April 15 — A letter signed by 221 scientists and sent to President Bush today calls for ending all logging on federally owned forests, arguing that the value of the timber produced was minuscule compared with the environmental damage caused by the harvests.
The letter, a project of the Sierra Club and signed by Dr. Edward O. Wilson, Dr. Anne Ehrlich and other prominent scientists, primarily biologists, asserted that the American taxpayer not only subsidizes logging directly, but also indirectly, because logging reduces the economic value of the forest for other uses.
"It is now widely recognized that commercial logging has damaged ecosystem health, clean water, and recreational opportunities," the letter reads. "Annually, timber produces roughly $4 billion per year (from national forests), while recreation, fish and wildlife, clean water and unroaded areas provide a combined total of $224 billion to the American economy each year."
Timber industry officials, however, said that the scientists' argument was wrongheaded. Not only does cutting timber on national forests provide wood products, they said, it also keeps forests healthy.
"All this national forest land the environmentalists want to sit there and burn, which is what it is doing now," said John Mechem, a spokesman for the American Forest and Paper Association. "We've seen fire after fire because environmentalists want to wall off the national forests. There is a scientific argument for active forest management, which includes tree removal."
I believe this argument has an enormous amount of validity, as this relatively new book I purchased has pointed out. In the book, Natural Process by Mark Edward Vande Pol, the environmentalist argument about doing nothing is questioned. While it is easy to convince urban activists (a technical term I picked up in the book) that logging is wrong--show them torn up ground, broken branches--there could be greater danger in doing nothing. Errors of inaction Mr. Vande Pol calls them.
The philosophy of preservation preserves ignorance of ecological systems by destroying the resources and tools to fund, measure, mitigate, or reverse historic damage. It could make the situation impossible to fix.(Natural Process p 30)
There was one other sobbering idea in the book, though presently I can't find it. Paraphrased: The environmental movement is composed of foundations, environmental groups that are corporations, and business is good for them because they have a supply of resources (other people's property, gov't-owned land) to finance they operations. What happens when they run out of resources?
But if we take this notion of the environmentalist's: That by doing nothing we're protecting something and tag it with the question raised in the book: However, if we adhere to this perspective of doing nothing, what good is preventive intervention? and apply it to the legislation in Congress to take some of the sting out of the ESA--how do the two compare?
On one side we have the argument that to support HR2829/HR3705 is to lend legitimacy to regulatory problems that tryannical, an obstruction to the growth of the Tree of Liberty. Would that be the same as "doing nothing"?
I'd like to continue, but I have to go look at a house.