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Mississippi Politics Page
by Keith Wright
6/25/2000
How much are our national forests worth? Many people can tell you how much in terms of pallets, paper, and other wood products. That is easy. However, the forest is worth much more living than dead. To believe that you must only recognize that money is not the only valuable thing on the planet. Forests make immeasurably valuable contributions to our well being, from water filtration to clean air, from biodiversity to aesthetic delight. Some folks out in California tried to duplicate all of the systems naturally found on Earth that support life. They called it Biosphere II, and they almost died trying. Replication of the earths natural bounty is probably impossible; the project cost millions of dollars.
Still, though, there are a few folks in our own biosphere who insist that we should chop down as many trees as we can out of our national forests. When it comes to the environment, it seems like our social institutions are incapable of accounting for noneconomic values. This has got to change; it seems like our national forests are a good place to start. However, seeing we are so caught up in doing things according to economic incentive and economic rationality, maybe we should apply some economic rationality to our national forest, and see what we come up with.
In fiscal year 1997, over $1.3 billion was appropriated from taxpayers pockets for expenditures associated with the timber sale program on national forests. In addition, the Forest Service spent another $466 million from its off-budget logging accounts for additional expenses of the logging program. In the same year, the logging program generated only $555 million in timber sales receipts, of which $68 million was returned to the federal treasury. So, while the receipts were $555 million, the costs to the taxpayer were $1.7 billion. One forester estimates that the trees taken by the timber industry that year were worth over $3 billion, or, $2.5 billion more than they were sold for.
These dramatic losses are not unique to fiscal year 1997. For example, between 1992 and 1994, the General Accounting Office estimates that the Forest Service lost $1 billion. Such expenditures have gone in the past towards, for example, building and maintaining 440,000 miles of roads; replanting, and other forest management expenses. The John Muir Project reckons that the US Forest timber program gives a great deal to the timber industry. If the Forest Service didnt spend the money on costs related to timber harvesting, then the timber industry would have to. The costs to biodiversity are immeasurable.
Weve spent a lot of money on the timber program, and harmed a natural resource in the process. It seems like taxpayers might fairly ask, "Do we need to?" Timber cut annually from our national forests comprises 3.3% of the nations total annual wood consumption, and less than 4% of the sawtimber used for construction.
In 1992, approximately 48% of all US hardwood consumption was for the manufacture of shipping pallets. Industry sources estimate that 54% of these pallets are used just once before being discarded into landfills. A 1998 poll, commissioned by Taxpayers for Common Sense, found that 69% of Americans now oppose continuing to allow timber companies to log our national forests.
And yet timber companies are still at it. And why wouldnt they? Not only are they making millions of dollars at taxpayer expense, they are also buying the wood at pennies on the dollar. No less an idol of the market than The Wall Street Journal editorialized in May of 1996 that "government dumping of cheap timber makes the market unpredictable for private sector commodity suppliers, reducing their incentive to manage land responsiblyIts time for the Forest Service to abandon its role as a producer of commodities."
Of course, the Forest Service is not powerful enough to stop logging on our national forests, nor is it within their institutions culture. This fact is perhaps best illustrated by the recent proclamations of the last two Chiefs of the Forest Service. First, in 1997 Jack Ward Thomas, a highly touted Forest Service ecologist who was hand-picked by President Clinton to run the Forest Service, resigned in disgust after just a few years at the helm, citing the budgetary stranglehold Congress exerted to maintain a higher volume of timber production.
Then, in 1998, current Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck said that the agency intends to shift away from being synonymous with the timber industry by moving toward a focus on providing recreation and clean water. Dombeck said logging will remain part of the Forest Service mission, dismissing the 68% of Americans who disagree with him, but assured America that the days of massive clear-cuts and nonsustainable harvest levels are over in timber-dependent communities.
These proclamations reveal some interesting facets of our national forest policy. The forest service has been synonymous with the timber industry, and this is due in large part to a Congressional stranglehold exerted to maintain a higher volume of timber production. The Forest Service is beholden to the Congress that funds it. Which raises an interesting question. When it comes to national forest policy, to whom is the Congress beholden?
The timber industry distributed $4.2 million in PAC, individual, and soft money contributions to federal candidates and parties in the 1996 election cycle, 84 percent to Republicans. Between 1993 and 1998 our own Sen. Trent Lott ranked 19th out of 100 Senators in the total amount of campaign contributions, with a total of $39,900. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that tracks the influence of money in politics, when a vote was coming up before the House or the Senate on an issue that effected the timber industry, the campaign contributions flooding the coffers of our elected officials was overwhelming.
And what kind of Congressional business would be of interest to the timber industry? This past fall there was a bill before the house that would have severed the link between timber harvest and the amount of money county governments receive from the sale of timber in their counties.
According to a Capitol Hill press release, the Forest Service is the dominant landowner in many rural communities, and localities are powerless to tax the agency. Since 1908 the government has shared twenty-five percent of the revenue derived from national forest activities with the surrounding localities. The communities then use this revenue to finance schools and local roads. In recent years, however, federal forest revenues have plummeted more than seventy-five percent from historic averages and the payments have dropped in some communities by as much as ninety percent.
The legislation that was originally before Congress recognized that linking the amount of trees that gets cut from our forests to how much money some counties get to spend on education is an unsound practice. It puts extreme pressure to cut trees to fund schools. Nonetheless, in Perry County, where 41% of the county is national forest land, $651,000 was generated for the county from timber sales. This money is extremely important to counties with no other tax base that they can use to pay for county services. Legislation before Congress would have set up a payment to counties like Perry so that all Americans would share the cost of preserving our national forests.
However, when the timber industry got wind of that legislation, they killed it. A substitute bill, H.R. 2389, replaced it and was recently passed by the house. Eighty percent of the payment would still go to fund community schools and roads, but the remaining twenty percent would be used for "local forest management projects," a euphemism for what are essentially timber sales.
When the timber industry barks, members of Congress, addicted to corporate campaign contributions and fearful of timber industry public relations, quickly do their bidding. Congressional offices periodically call forest service offices and demand that the forest service staff expedite timber sales. Often times the Forest Service, which is obligated by law to protect biodiversity, has to rely on weak or nonexistent scientific basis for approving such sales. It is then that vigilant grass roots organizations sue the Forest service for breaking any number of environmental laws designed to protect the land. This is a sorry twist of fate.
Commercial logging on our national forests was originally illegal. It wasnt until six years after the creation of national forests that commercial interests opened them up to timber sales through an appropriations rider in Congress. The forests were originally created in response to intense destruction of land and the subsequent flooding brought on by an overzealous timber industry. The industry never learned its lesson. Today, the floods that have recently ravaged Oregon are being blamed on over zealous logging in our national forests.
American citizens do not have to tolerate having their national forest policy dictated by timber interests. Congress is currently considering passage of HR 1396, The National Forest Protection and Restoration Act. With 76 bipartisan sponsors, the bill would end the federal governments timber sale program on national forests. It would cancel existing timber sales in all roadless areas. Members of Congress are afraid of the timber industrys pubic relations manipulations, and the card that the industry has chosen to play with this legislation is the jobs card. However, the legislations authors anticipated this.
HR 1396 would redirect logging subsidies to provide funds for worker retraining, and it gives preferential treatment to displaced timber workers for jobs in the woods doing ecological restoration. Under this legislation there would be a need for such workers; the legislation would begin a scientifically-based ecological restoration program for federal public forests, and some of them really need it.
In Mississippi the number of jobs that would be lost from ceasing harvest on public land is negligible. Ninety percent of Mississippis forests are privately owned, and as mentioned earlier, only 3-4% of our wood supply comes from the National Forests. It seems probable that 3-4 % of our loggers would be interested in retraining to do ecological work instead of logging.
In the Pacific Northwest, people were screaming that environmentalists cared more about the spotted owl than they did about the humans that relied on that spotted owl habitat for their survival. The jobs vs. the environment debate has since proven to be a false dichotomy. Studies reveal that job loss from the timber industry happened before the spotted owl controversy would have eliminated jobs. In fact, the institution responsible for eliminating jobs was the timber industry. Between 1979 and 1989 the industry eliminated 20,000 jobs despite extremely high logging levels on Northwest federal forests. Automation and the loss of forests proved to be the culprits.
In addition, a 1995 report notes that even the most timber dependent economies are reporting a net increase in jobs, attributed in part by the prospects of increased environmental protection. Even the Forest Service predicts that this year recreation, hunting, and fishing will contribute 38 times more income to the nation economy than logging, and it will create 31 times more jobs. When the timber industry starts acting as if it is a protector of jobs, suspect a smokescreen; the industry is notorious for job destruction and union busting, and is no friend of labor. If they were honest, they would be screaming about lost profits and corporate welfare, but jobs gets people upset, which in turn helps to solidify their cozy deal with the taxpayers.
The National Forest Protection and Restoration Act also takes money currently used to subsidize the logging industry, and uses it instead to replace the 25% revenue sharing payments to states for county and local governments. Finally, it redirects logging subsidies to provide funding for environmentally sensitive non-wood alternative paper and construction materials. And here is the kicker: even with all of these programs, compared to the current billion dollar boondoggle, taxpayers would still save $500 million a year.
National forest policy is a good indicator of how our democracy ails, how our societal institutions have become tools for corporations to exploit at the expense of a nation, biodiversity, and future generations. Contact your members of Congress, and urge them to support the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act. Your grandchildren will thank you.
Keith Wright is an activist for the Freedom Hills Green Party of North Mississippi, a political party dedicated to democracy, nonviolence, social justice, and ecology.