http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0829-01.htm
Published on Friday,
August 29, 2003 by the Long Island (NY) Newsday
Bush's Forest Plan Worse Than Fire
by Edward O. Wilson
The fires that have savaged forests
of western North America
this summer are the ecologist's equivalent of a perfect storm.
The best way to avoid
these catastrophic fires is by trimming
undergrowth and clearing debris, combined with natural burns
of the kind that have sustained healthy forests in past
millennia. Those procedures, guided by science and surgically
precise forestry, can return forests to near their equilibrium
condition, in which only minimal further intervention would
be needed.
On the other hand,
the worst way to create healthy forests
is to thin trees via increased logging, as proposed by the
Bush administration.
The health-by-logging
approach reveals the wide separation
between two opposing views concerning the best use of U.S.
forests. The administration, seeing the forests as a source
of extractive wealth, presses for more logging and road-building
in wilderness areas. Its strategists appear determined to mute
or override the provision of the 1976 National Forest Management
Act requiring that forest plans "provide for the diversity
of
plant and animal communities."
Environmentalists and
ecologists, defending the provision,
continue to argue that America's national forests are a
priceless reservoir of biological diversity, as well as
a historical treasure. In this view, the forests represent
a public trust too valuable to be managed as tree farms for
the production of pulp, paper and lumber.
The economic argument
for increased road-building and logging
is unfounded. It is contradicted by the U.S. Forest Service's
own measure of forests' contributions to the nation's economy.
Of the $35 billion yielded in 1999 (the last year for which
a comprehensive accounting was published), 77.8 percent came
from recreation, fish and wildlife, only 13.7 percent from
timber harvest, and the modest remainder from mining and
ranching. Roughly the same disproportion existed in the
percentages of the 822,000 jobs generated by national forests.
And that is only part
of the story.
The Forest Service's
accounting does not include long-term
profits that accrue indirectly from natural habitats. These
add-ons derive from peripheral tourist facilities and other
businesses attracted by the amenities of pleasant environments.
Such economic growth is all but absent in the case of logging
and other extractive industries, for the obvious reason that
Americans do not find mill towns and logging roads appealing.
And
there is more. If we have learned anything from scientific
studies of forests, it is that their biological diversity
creates a healthy ecosystem - a self-assembled powerhouse,
generating clean water, productive soil and fresh air,
all without human intervention and completely free of charge.
Each kind of forest
or any other natural ecosystem is a
masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely well adapted to the
environment it inhabits. The fauna and flora of the world
are, moreover, the cradle of humanity, to which we, no less
than the rest of life, are closely adapted in our physical
and psychological needs. Each species and its descendant
species live, very roughly, a million years before suffering
natural extinction. Worldwide, habitat destruction combined
with the other three of the four horsemen of environmental
ruin - invasive species, pollution and unsustainable logging
- have increased the rate of extinction by as much as a
thousandfold, thereby shortening the average life spans
of species by the same amount.
Much of the loss of
America's native plant and animal species
is due to the replacement of biologically rich natural forests
with tree farms. From the standpoint of species diversity and
resilience, these cultivated woody crops rank as no more than
cornfields.
While tree farms can
easily be expanded on private lands,
national forests - the reservoirs of much of our nation's
biological diversity - cannot. The euphemism used by the
Bush administration and the timber industry to help justify
this practice, the Healthy Forests Initiative, does no justice
to the broad needs of the United States.
America's national
forests are a public trust of incalculable
value. They should be freed from commercial logging altogether.
The time has come to free them from political partisanship
and use their treasures to benefit all Americans, now and
for generations to come.
Edward O. Wilson, a
professor emeritus at Harvard University,
is author of many books, including "The Future of Life."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679450785/104-3743078-1875965
Copyright © 2003,
Newsday, Inc.
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