private — 73%
public — 27%
states — 7%
federal government — 20%
National Forests — 17%
National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, and lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management — 3%.
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Percentage of Earth’s original forest cover remaining: about 50% with greatest losses occurring within the past 3 decades.
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Percentage of the Earth’s remaining original forest entirely within the temperate zone (regions characterized by moderate climate, including much of the U.S. and Europe): 3%.
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Percentage of U.S. original forest cover remaining: 3-4% in the contiguous 48 states.
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Total U.S. forestland: 737 million acres, 33% of the U.S. land area. Two-thirds of the total that existed in the year 1600, the lost third has been converted to agriculture or other uses.
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U.S. forestland acreage protected as wilderness, National Parks, or other classifications: 47 million acres, or 6%.
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Total “commercial timberland”: 490 million acres, or 66% of all U.S. forest. Commercial timberlands are all forestlands outside of protected areas capable of growing 20 cubic feet per acre per year.
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National Forest acreage: 191 million acres.
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Commercial timberlands ownership in the U.S.:
private — 73%
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Total annual U.S. wood consumption: 100.3 billion board
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Timber volume cut from National Forests in fiscal year 1996: 3.87 billion board feet, 3.9% of the nation’s total yearly timber consumption.
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When the National Forests were established, much of the more accessible, highly productive forest in the U.S. was not included. As a consequence, National Forest timberland is, on average, of lower productivity, and on steeper, higher elevation terrain than are private timberlands. In the Northwest, for example, only 22% of the most productive timberland is found on National Forests. In the eastern United States, steep mountainous areas also predominate on federal forestlands. Their terrain makes National Forests especially important for managing water flows and protecting and maintaining watershed conditions, and much less valuable for producing wood products.
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Congress has mandated that the Forest Service and BLM maintain the underlying principle of forest productivity and not allow the value of the forest resources to diminish. In the terminology of the law, the forests were to be managed to insure “sustained yield” of all resources on the public’s forest trust. However, since this law passed in 1960, over three million acres of old growth timber have been clearcut in the public forests of the Pacific Northwest and California alone. A study on Forest Service planning (House Committee on Interior Affairs, “Management of Federal Timber Resources: The Loss of Accountability,” June 15, 1992) found that the agency has sold timber with no means of ensuring that the fundamental requirements of the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act have been met, because it does not have auditing systems adequate to verify that cut levels can be sustained or that the use of clearcutting and other techniques have not damaged the productivity of the land.
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Annual loss from National Forest logging program: approximately $1 billion of taxpayer money plus incalculable indirect loss from damage to fisheries, watersheds, tourism, recreation, and future opportunities.
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Percentage of total logging program cost spent for all environmental analysis/documentation and appeals/ litigation: less than 6% in fiscal year 1995. (The timber industry claims that environmental regulations are the cause of money losing timber sales on public lands.)
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In fiscal year 1996, nearly $800 million was appropriated from the General Fund of the U.S. Treasury (i.e. from taxpayers pockets) for expenditures associated with the timber sale program on National Forests. In addition, the Forest Service spent another $532 million from its off-budget logging accounts for additional expenses of the logging program. In the same year, the logging program generated only $535 million in timber sales receipts, and none of these receipts were returned to the General Fund of the Treasury.
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The Forest Service predicts that, by the year 2000, recreation, hunting, and fishing in National Forests will contribute 31.4 times more income to the nation’s economy, and will create 38.1 times the number of jobs, than logging on National Forests.
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Environmental protection stimulates economic development as new residents and businesses flock to areas known for clean water, access to recreation, strong environmental protection, and overall quality of life. A recent study that compared environmental protection laws with economic performance on a state-by-state basis consistently found that states with high environmental standards led economic growth. (Institute for Southern Studies, Hall, Bob, “Green and Gold,” 1994.) The Pacific Northwest, for example, led the nation in job creation, income generation, and success in attracting new businesses and residents from 1988-1995, even as traditional industries including aerospace and timber were sharply declining. Many economists attribute the impressive growth to the region’s reputation as “providing a superior, attractive environment in which to live, work, and do business. The natural environment appears to be especially important.” (Power, T.M., ed., “Economic Well-Being and Environmental Protection in the Pacific Northwest: A Consensus Report by Pacific Northwest Economists, University of Montana, 1995.)
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Between 1979 and 1988, while logging levels increased dramatically, more than 26,000 timber industry jobs disappeared due to automation and exports. In 1979 it took almost 5 workers to produce 1 million board feet of timber. By 1990, it took only 3 workers to produce the same amount. In the Southeast, new chip mills can consume 200 square miles of forests in 3 years, while employing as few as 4-12 workers per shift.
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Federal timber supplies are insignificant to the lumber and wood products sector. Between 1988 and 1996, the amount of timber logged from National Forests dropped by 70 percent, from 12.6 billion board feet to 3.9 billion board feet. During the period, national employment in lumber and wood products jobs actually rose. In 1988, the lumber and wood products sector supported 771,000 jobs with a $15.2 billion payroll. In 1996, the sector supported 778,000 jobs with a $20 billion payroll. This phenomenon occurred in even the most timber dependent regions. For example, in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico — home of the Vallecitos Sustained Yield Unit — wood products employment rose in the 1990-1994 period even though federal timber sales dropped by 88 percent. In 1990, there were 127 employees with a $2.6 million payroll. In 1994, after logging restrictions virtually eliminated federal timber sales, employment rose to 225 employees with a $3.6 million payroll.
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Watersheds: Deforestation of upland catchments often leads to disruption of hydrological systems, causing year-round water flows in downstream areas to give way to flood and drought. While forest cover remains intact, rivers not only run clear and clean, they also flow throughout the year. When the forest is cleared, rivers turn muddy and swell or shrink. Forests exert a “sponge effect,” soaking up water before releasing it at regular rates. The multistoried structure of the forest, together with its abundant foliage, helps break the impact of downpouring rains. Much of the water trickles down branches and tree trunks, or drips off leaves in a fine spray, so that when the rainfall reaches the ground, it percolates steadily into the soil or runs off into streams and rivers gradually. The impact of downpours causes more soil erosion in deforested areas than anywhere on Earth. Washed away topsoil causes rivers to become burdened with sediment. Siltation becomes a problem for municipal water supply systems and impedes the ability of fish stocks to migrate and spawn.
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Global Climate: Much of the energy that converts surface moisture into water vapor comes from the sun’s heating of the land surface. Vegetation absorbs more heat than does bare soil. Over thick vegetation, such as forests, vigorous thermal currents take moisture, provided by the plant cover, up into the atmosphere where it condenses as rain. This effect constitutes a basic factor in controlling climate. Still more important is the forests-climate linkage at the global level, through forests’ role as carbon sinks and hence their capacity to mitigate global warming (Apps and Price 1996, Woodwell and Mackenzie 1995). Forests currently hold some 1,200 gigatonnes (billion tons) of carbon in their plants and soils, by contrast with 750 gigatonnes in the atmosphere. When forests are burned they release their carbon as carbon dioxide. Globally, twice as much carbon goes into the atmosphere each year due to forest fires than is absorbed by new growth of trees and plants. Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to global warming. Methane, which is another potent greenhouse gas, is also released in forest fires. In addition, global warming itself will cause increased die-off and decomposition of forest biomass, in turn triggering a further release of carbon dioxide and methane (Houghton et al. 1995). Global warming could lead to all manner of environmental discontinuities that ecologists can only surmise about at present. It is plausible that the world could eventually face a “runaway” greenhouse effect as forests decline, taking with them their crucial function in the global carbon budget. In the effort to halt global warming, it is likely that much irreversible damage has already been done through the momentum of climate change dynamics (Woodwell et al. 1995).
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Biodiversity: Forests supply habitat for large numbers of plant and animal species. This biodiversity supplies abundant ecosystem services and functions as a “genetic library.” Genetic resources contribute to both modern and traditional agriculture, medicine and industry. All forms of biodiversity are both generated and maintained by natural ecosystems. In the past two decades, the science of conservation biology has emerged. Conservation biologists are in widespread agreement that the existing network of protected lands, including wilderness, National Parks and wildlife refuges are too small to address the preservation of ecosystems, and hence biodiversity. Pioneering efforts, such as the Wildlands Project in Tucson, Arizona, have designed large landscape level systems of reserves, corridors, key watersheds, and buffer zones spanning all ownerships which are needed to protect and restore what remains of native biological diversity in the United States. Ending public lands logging is fully compatible with this approach since public lands are the core reserves around which wildlands recovery strategies should be designed. Source: Daily, Gretchen C., ed. “Nature’s Services — Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems,” 1997.
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Fire is a natural and beneficial part of forest ecosystems, but avoiding catastrophic fire risk is often used to justify preventive logging. Ironically, however, according to the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project Final Report commissioned by Congress, “Timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate, and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity.” The report advocates prescribed burning to reduce fire risk where necessary, stating that “prescribed burning has proven an effective tool to reduce fuel loads and fire hazards while restoring a process important for maintaining ecosystem functions.”
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Clearcutting can change fire climate so that fires start more easily, spread faster, and burn hotter than they would under natural conditions. The effect of these changes on the fire control problem is extremely important. For each person required to control a surface fire in a mature stand burning under average conditions, 20 will be required if the area includes clearcuts.
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Salvage logging is often recommended to remove trees from a forest where fire has occurred in order to preserve the maximum economic value of the timber. But 50 scientists, in an open letter to President Clinton, dated September 19, 1994, stated that, “Because salvage logging removes natural fire breaks, it homogenizes the landscape and increases susceptibility to catastrophic fires and insect outbreaks.”
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Insects also play an important role in forest ecosystems, as a food source, by helping create nesting cavities for birds and through recycling organic matter in the soil. Yet former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas, in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Agricultural Research, Conservation, Forestry and General Legislation on August 29, 1994, acknowledged that: 1) the Forest Service logs in insect infested stands not to protect the ecology of the area, but to remove trees before their timber commodity value is reduced by the insects; and 2) that the Forest Service fights forest fires to maintain high timber commodity value of stands, not to protect forest ecosystems. The Payette National Forest in Idaho logged 10,000 acres under the guise of “salvage logging,” claiming that those forests were “dying” from insect infestations. However, they left test plots of a few hundred trees — which were still alive more than a year after the logging occurred. Ms. Julie Weatherby, a Forest Service entomologist, wrote a memo to the Forest Supervisor, embarrassed to report that the trees were not dying. She correctly surmised that the still-living trees were a political liability, and would call into suspicion their earlier “salvage logging” operations.
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The passage of a salvage logging amendment to a fiscal year 1995 Interior Appropriations bill was a dramatic example of Congress, the timber industry, and the Forest Service working to increase the amount of logging on National Forests under the guise of restoring forest health. The bill purported to be responding to a “forest health crisis” that included fire risk and insect infestation, but in the letter to President Clinton mentioned above, more than 50 forest experts from across the United States disputed that claim. The salvage rider expressly overrode virtually all existing federal environmental laws. Language was included that restricted judicial remedies and prevented citizens from gaining relief in court. Under the salvage rider, tens of thousands of acres of healthy forest were logged, threatening water supplies, endangering protected species, causing soil erosion and imperiling communities that depended on fishing and recreation. Perhaps the most serious consequence for communities was that the increased logging also led to increased flooding and mudslides.
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In the past three years, economic and environmental forces together have prompted producers, such as Minnesota’s 3M Incorporated, and Heartland Fiber Corporation to actively develop and promote the use of nonwood fibers for pulp and paper manufacture. Projects such as ReThink Paper at Earth Island Institute have worked hard to educate and advise consumers to revisit nonwood fiber sources as the pulp input to their manufacturing, which were the norm until the 1890s. Before wood pulp became widely used in the late 1800s, agricultural plants were the dominant source of fiber. Cotton, straws, and hemp — the paper used to draft the Declaration of Independence — were the fibers of choice.
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There is no shortage of nonwood fiber material in this country. U.S. farmers annually generate an estimated 280 million tons of excess agricultural fiber, suitable for papermaking. Generally these fibers are known to be pulped with higher fiber yields than wood and require fewer chemicals to be processed, less water, and energy. Farmers would benefit from new income from those residues that would otherwise be burned. There would be new opportunities for value-added rotational crops; new uses for over 65 million acres of idle farmland in the United States, such as is widely found in the State of Minnesota; and new replacement options for declining industries, such as tobacco. These benefits to farmers and the environment cannot be fully realized as long as logging subsidies give an unfair advantage to wood at the expense of nonwoods and the American farmer.
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In 1996, the American Farm Bureau announced its support for industrial hemp. And in a letter to Colorado legislators, International Paper wrote: “IP’s interest in industrial hemp stems from logging shortage of wood fiber in North America and the resultant need to develop new sources of fiber.” The California Rice Growers Industry Association, which faces a moratorium on the burning of rice straw, is strongly advocating use of rice straw in pulp manufacture for newsprint. In 1996, a successful trial run using Smurfit Newsprint Co. appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Oregonian, Sacramento Bee and other major papers. These recent events indicate the proven potential of agricultural substitutes for wood in paper. Most importantly this data indicates that America can keep both its farmers and pulp and paper mills alive and well. But we must move quickly to ensure that the U.S. develops these capacities soon, so as not to be left behind by neighboring countries. Canada is already developing these industries with diverse sectors such as automobile makers, like Ford and Chrysler.
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While it is in the public interest to protect public forestlands from logging, private forestlands can be managed for productive uses following the principles of ecoforestry. Ecologically responsible, local decision making about forest use is critical to the practice of ecoforestry. The basic principles of ecoforestry ensure that all plans and activities protect forest functioning over time. Numerous citizens organizations, such as the Public Forestry Foundation of Eugene, Oregon, sponsor and organize trainings in ecologically responsible forest use.
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In 1997, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Congressman Jim Leach (R-IA) responded to the public’s call for an end to public land logging by introducing the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act (NFPRA). Intended to save taxpayer money, reduce the deficit, cut corporate welfare, and protect and restore America’s natural heritage, the Act eliminates the commercial logging program on federal public lands and assists communities dependent on this program with economic recovery and diversification.
