Dear HCN,
Soon, we’ll be deafened
by the whining of corporate loggers bemoaning federal Judge Carl
Muecke’s recent order halting logging until the Forest Service
develops an overall plan in Arizona and New Mexico to save the
Mexican spotted owl (HCN, 9/4/95).
Why sacrifice
the jobs for a little bird, they insist indignantly. First of all,
the corporate loggers have mostly themselves to blame. They went on
a logging binge in the 1980s, building up mill payrolls,
clear-cutting vast swathes, mechanizing logging jobs, and
high-grading the last of the big trees at a pace they couldn’t
possibly sustain. Naturally enough, they ran out of big trees and
employment dropped.
But set that issue aside.
Won’t the judge’s order devastate rural economies? Hardly. The U.S.
Department of Commerce counted 309 logging jobs and about 1,000
sawmill jobs in Arizona in 1993; there are fewer now. Granted, the
loss of those jobs can have an impact on a small town. But it’s a
drop in the bucket compared to the jobs provided by tourism,
hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities – which are all a
lot more fun in an old-growth forest than on tree-farm forest. A
state Department of Economic Security report released this week
says the state economy will create 160,000 new jobs in the next two
years.
So what’s all this fuss about 1,300 jobs
scattered throughout the state? We’d be better off using the
millions of dollars we use to subsidize below-cost timber sales to
hire those people to protect the forest.
Dian
Wilson
Tempe,
Arizona
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Block that myth.
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