[GreenYes] FW: American Forest and Paper Association,

["Christine McCoy" <cmccoy@rcap.org>]

FYI....

 

 

Dead Wood  

The lousy economics of Bush's new forest policy.

By Douglas Gantenbein

Posted Wednesday, December 4, 2002, at 8:06 AM PT

 

 One day before Thanksgiving, when the only environmental issue anyone was

paying attention to was turkey depopulation, the Bush administration

quietly declared an enormous change in how the government will manage its

192 million acres of national forests. Billed as a way to "streamline"

planning in the forests, the Bush proposal would, among other things:

Allow local forest managers to decide if logging and grazing deserve

as much weight as protecting animals or birds;

drop a 25-year-old requirement that forest-management plans contain

detailed environmental impact statements;

set the stage for reducing requirements that the Forest Service

protect plant and animal diversity in the forests.

 

It's perhaps true, as Forest Service officials claim, that current

forest-management rules are too complex and costly to administer. But if

so, it's equally true that the proposed rule changes are essentially an

effort to open national forests to more logging than they have seen in

years.

 

 Among those with fingerprints on the proposal is Mark Rey, the

  u ndersecretary of agriculture who runs the Forest Service. Rey was a

longtime foe of logging regulations on national forests, primarily as vice

president of the American Forest and Paper Association, an industry trade

group that bitterly fought logging cutbacks during the early '90s. "This is

a timber industry proposal, pure and simple," Charles Wilkinson, a

University of Colorado law professor, told the Denver Post.

 

 But the real problem with the logging changes is not that they are

pro-timber industry, it's that they are economic nonsense. It's curious

that an administration that is so business-friendly would take measures

that actually would hurt business, let alone dozens of small towns across

the West. But that's exactly what would happen.

 

 For starters, the last thing the United States needs right now is more

lumber. Despite the continued housing boom, lumber itself is as cheap as it

has ever been. Two years ago, for instance, the lumber required to build a

new home might have cost about $12,000. Today that same lumber package

would run about $7,500.

 

 Despite a tariff on Canadian lumber, wood from north of the border

is inexpensive and plentiful. The continued strength of the U.S. dollar,

meanwhile, has encouraged timber imports from Europe. At the same time, the

strong dollar has discouraged exports to Japan, which once bought millions

of board feet per year taken from private U.S. timberlands (exports of logs

from national forests are banned). That privately owned timber also is

finding its way onto the U.S. market, adding to the glut.

 

 And on a per-capita basis, Americans simply use less wood than they once

did. Today new homes are built with big pieces of wood made by gluing

together little pieces of wood, a process that saves big, mature trees from

the chainsaw. Some "wood" isn't even wood?many homes now have siding made

with a mix of concrete and sawdust. In many new homes, the only traditional

sawn lumber may be the cheap 2-by-4 studs used for framing, and sometimes

steel studs replace even those.

 

 

More important, the proposals represent an archaic understanding of the

Western economy. The policy is designed to help a West traumatized by the

spotted owl and salmon logging cutbacks of the '90s. But this West doesn't

need the help.

 

 Logging is an extractive industry. Even during boom times, lumber towns

ever really prospered. They didn't attract other businesses or investment

 b ecause they were designed to be more or less temporary, since they were

mowing down their chief resource: trees.

 

 For many parts of the West, it was only when logging was curtailed in the

late '80s and early '90s that things picked up. That's because standing

trees?which attract tourists, well-heeled fly-fishers, and retirees looking

for a home in the country?are worth more than cut trees. Thomas Power, an

economist with the University of Montana, says that by the late '90s, eight

of 10 national forests in Montana generated three times as much income from

tourism and recreation as they did from cutting down trees.

 

Typical of the West's new economic order are companies such as North Fork

Anglers, founded by fishing guide Tim Wade in Cody, Wyo., in 1984. Today

the shop employs 15 retail employees and guides and hosts as many as 400

fishers a year who pay $150 a day for the privilege of wetting a line, fill

Cody's hotel rooms and restaurants, and add to the coffers of United and

Delta airlines. Moreover, Wade's company is theoretically permanent. It is

not destroying the rivers. Loggers, by contrast, are paid to decimate the

very thing that keeps them employed.

 

But perhaps the Bush administration's rule changes really are not about

economics. In conservative circles logging is a bellwether issue, a club

with which to beat Bill Clinton, the Sierra Club, and the heavy hand of

government in general. Logging is a kind of religious issue: Conservatives

take it on faith that cutting down trees is good for business. But the

economics of the West during the past 20 years argues that it isn't.

 

  

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074803