CLEARCUTS & LANDSLIDES: WHO BENEFITS AND WHO PAYS
by Paul Cienfuegos
"Let us cut," the industry says, "but don't hold us responsible
for our logging. We want your trees, but you pay for the logging roads,
you fight the fires, you subsidize the sales with your taxes. We want to
clearcut steep slopes, but when they slide and bury public roads, you pay
for the cleanup and repair. We want to log your watersheds, but when cities
cannot use their water supplies because of siltation from our logging, that's
just tough. We foul your streams and rivers, and if you have to spend hundreds
of millions of dollars to build a water filtration system, that's your problem.
If your homes flood, if your insurance rates go up, if you have the misfortune
of being killed by a mudslide, hey, that's just too bad....We want to suspend
the laws because they're in our way. We want the last old growth. We want
the last redwoods. We want. We want."
If another nation had done this to our lands, we would call it an act of
war. -Tim Hermach, Executive Director, Native Forest Council
Throughout the Pacific Northwest and Northern California last fall and winter,
thousands of logging-related slides killed at least 17 people, buried roads
and damaged homes, destroyed countless salmon spawning streams, contaminated
public water supplies, crippled agricultural production, and caused general
havoc. "Political and economic forces created these slides, not God
or Nature," states Andy Stahl, Executive Director of Forest Service
Employees for Environmental Ethics.
Government and corporate officials continue passing the buck, claiming that
more studies are needed to determine if there is a direct correlation between
clearcutting and landslides. But there is irrefutable evidence, documented
over thousands of years of human history, to link logging, flooding and
landslides.
After the 1964 storms, a U.S. Forest Service study found that the greatest
soil loss was from mudflows and landslides, and these occurred more frequently
at roads and clearcuts. According to research in an Oregon State University
master's thesis, "Landslides occur 24 and 253 times more frequently
(relative to forested rate) in clearcuts and road areas, respectively."
In "Cumulative Effects of Forest Practices in Oregon," 1995, the
Oregon Dept. of Forestry stated, "Clearcut harvest and/or slash burning
on steep slopes may increase failure rates from 2 to 40 times over rates
on undisturbed sites."
The expense to taxpayers is record-breaking, and continues to rise. City
officials in Portland and Salem have asked that their watersheds not be
logged anymore due to economically devastating sedimentation from logging
operations. The early January floods were easily the most expensive in California
history, totalling over $1.8 billion. Nearly 300 square miles of northern
California were flooded (including the Central Valley), damaging or destroying
21,000 homes, 3000 mobile homes, and 1900 businesses. At the height of the
emergency, 120,000 people had been evacuated. The cumulative cost, via taxes
and personal loss, can be considered another donation by we the people to
logging corporations, which are not required to pay for the damage they
create (i.e. corporate welfare).
Here are a few local examples:
*Humboldt County: $16.4 million in damage, and climbing.
*The lower Klamath River: 28 businesses and more than 50 homes damaged or
destroyed-$800,000 just to repair one section of riverbank.
*U.S. Hwy 50 between Sacramento and South Lake Tahoe-blocked by a seven-story-deep,
800-foot-wide, 3000-foot-long mudslide that heavily damaged homes and carried
away cars-will take two months to reopen and cost $5 million.
*Forest Service road repair expenses, Siskiyou National Forest-$10 million,
Rogue River NF-$8 million.
*Curry County-$2 million (and as quickly as possible so the Forest Service
can reopen the roads in order to sell more healthy ancient trees.)
*Jackson County: more than $50 million in damages, including 1200 affected
homes. And on and on and on.
Will states, counties, and municipalities have to raise taxes to cover these
expenses? Or will they have the courage to send the bills to the real culprits:
the logging and other resource extraction corporations. How many more hundred-year-floods
will we accept before we stop battling one clearcut at a time? Is it enough
simply to sue specific corporations for specific harms? Has the time arrived
for a new kind of citizen activism, which fundamentally challenges the rights
of giant corporations to rule over us? What if we got organized enough,
through the citizen initiative or other processes, to ban all corporate
involvement in the political process? Would our elected officials continue
to ignore majority citizen opinion if they no longer received funds from
corporations, if corporate lobbying was banned? This is not a pipe dream.
It was the norm in most states throughout the 1800s and remained the law
in Wisconsin until 1953.
For more than 100 years, American citizens understood that a corporation
was an artificial, subordinate entity with no inherent rights of its own,
and both law and culture reflected this relationship between sovereign people
and the institutions they created. Towards the end of the 19th century,
corporations set out to transform the law and recreate themselves as "natural
persons" with Constitutional protection. By the beginning of the 20th
century, corporations had become 'sovereign', and in turn had defined 'We
The People' as merely consumers, workers, taxpayers, etc. Today, our law
and culture and most citizen organizations concede our sovereignty to corporations.
Here's how you can get involved: Support (with your time and money) one
of the organizations struggling to keep up with the unraveling forest landscape
crisis:
--Oregonians for Sustainable Forestry has gathered a remarkably diverse
coalition working to pass a state ballot initiative which would ban clearcutting
of all Oregon forests: 2675 SW Vista Ave., Portland, OR 97201, ph (541)
770-3191, e.mail gbhutch@jeffnet.org
--Native Forest Council is circulating a petition demanding Zero Cut on
all public lands and has drafted a five-part legislative package called
The National Forest Protection Acts: POB 2190, Eugene, OR 97402, (541) 688-2600,
e.mail Victor@ForestCouncil.org
--Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics is working hard to challenge
Forest Service policy, and recently produced a video, "Torrents of
Change" ($18 postpaid): POB 11615, Eugene OR 97440; ph 541-484-2692;
e.mail afseee@afseee.org
--Environmental Protection Info Center (EPIC), POB 397, Garberville, CA
95542, 707-923-2931, epic@igc.org
--Siskiyou Regional Education Project, POB 220, Cave Junction, OR 97523,
(541) 592-4459, siskiyou@igc.org
--Mendocino Environmental Center, 106 W Standley, Ukiah, CA 95482, 707-468-1660
--Klamath Forest Alliance, POB 820, Etna, CA 96027, (916) 467-5405, klamath@snowcrest.net
--Trees Foundation, POB 2202, Redway, CA 95560, (707) 923-4377, trees@igc.org
Headwaters, POB 729, Ashland, OR 97520, (541) 482-4459, headwtrs@mind.net
--For current news, read NFC's excellent Forest Voice, Spring '97 issue,
"Landslides: Living in the Barrel of the Gun" (single issue free-see
address above); "Landslides and Clearcuts: What Does the Science Really
Say?" by Doug Heiken (free from author: 1551 Oak St, Eugene, OR 97401
or ONRCdoug@efn.org); Corporate Power, Corruption & the Destruction
of the World's Forests by the Environmental Investigation Agency (15 Bowling
Green Lane, London, England EC1R 0BD, ph 0171-490-7040); and "Getting
Business Off the Public Dole: Model Laws for State and Local Governments
to Curb Corporate Welfare Abuse" by Loyola Law School Prof. Robert
Benson ($4 from Democracy Unlimited, POB 27, Arcata, CA 95518).
--If you'd rather read the computer screen, try Public Information Network's
website at: http://violet.berkeley.edu/~orourke/PIN.html.
SOME Corporate Perpetrators
Rough and Ready
Weyerhaeuser
Georgia Pacific
Louisiana Pacific
Sierra Pacific
Boise Cascade
Maxxam
Barnum Timber
Sun Studs
Willamette Industries
Champion International
Davidson Industries
Hampton Tree Farms
MacMillan Bloedel
Roseburg Forest Products
International Forest Products
Don Whitaker Logging &
Hauling
To find out how you can join a growing new national movement of people who
are learning how to take democracy back from logging and other corporations,
send $4+ for an info packet to Paul Cienfuegos, Democracy Unlimited, POB
27, Arcata, CA 95518 <cienfuegos@igc.org>.
Paul Cienfuegos has been active in social change movements since the late
1970s and worked for Ancient Forest Protection, Native Sovereignty, Nuclear
Disarmament, Ecological Restoration and Dismantling Corporate Power.
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