Dear HCN,
Kudos to HCN and writer
Sherry Devlin for the timely piece on Western timber issues
(-Timber companies export logs – and jobs – to Asia’) (HCN,
3/21/94). During research in 1988 for my book, Cut and Run: Saying
Goodbye to the Last Great Forest in the West, I learned how
successful the timber industry had been in diverting attention from
the fact that logs cut on industry-owned timberland, and then
exported, have a direct bearing on increasing demands for federal
timber.
Please allow me to add two points not
covered in Ms. Devlin’s story. Just a few years ago, in a phone
interview with University of Montana economist Charles Keegan, I
suggested that huge exports from timber-industry owned forests west
of the Cascades must be affecting the demand for even bigger cuts
east of the Cascades.
No, Keegan said, the
Cascades acted as a formidable barrier separating interior and West
Coast timber markets.
Devlin’s story successfully
nails down the undeniable link between log exports and Western
timber markets on both sides of the
Cascades.
Next, in a 1990 interview in Tacoma
with Ted Nelson, a Weyerhaeuser vice president, this industry
spokesman candidly explained how Weyerhaeuser got around federal
log export regulations. Nelson told me that while Weyerhaeuser, a
big exporter, “can’t directly purchase federal stumpage,” that
didn’t stop the company.
Nelson said Weyerhaeuser
and other big exporters regularly bought federal timber
“indirectly” through a third party.
The timber
industry continues to have an amazing public relations record. With
rampant forest destruction plainly evident everywhere in the West,
you have to wonder when the public as a whole will get the real
message.
Grace
Herndon
Norwood,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline They’re still cutting and running.
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