Deforestation Hits Home: U.S. Forest Service Levels Our Landscape

by Karen Franklin

Year after year, regardless of which party controls the White House, the U.S. Forest Service runs its timber program with indifference to the enviromental consequences.

And that's not the half of it. The goverment often sells the wood at a loss, sometimes an immense one; in effect paying money to degrade the enviroment. It's not surprising that this agency consistantly draws fire from both liberal enviromental groups and from conservative National Taxpayers Union.

Between 1982 and 1987 the Forest Service's timer-cutting losses totaled $2.4 billion dollars, according to congressional testimony by Barry R. Flamm, a former supervisor of the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, now chief forester of the wilderness Society. Timer sales from the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, for example, have lost from 91 to 99 cents on the dollar during the 1980s. In spite of a severely depressed timber market in the region, Foirest Service engineers built roads and well-appointed wilderness logging camps to the tune of at least $40 million a year, to provide timber that no one was very interested in buying. The agency started out asking $1,000 per thousand broadfeet of cedar. But the Louisiana-Pacific Corporation and Japan's Alaska Pulp Corporation - Tongass' exclusive customers by 50-year contract - insisted they couldn't pay that much. The price they finally settled on was $1.22. Similarly, spruce went from an asking price of $215 to $2.25.

In attempting to explain why the Forest Service pays money to disrupt the enviroment, agency officials often cite its lifelong friendship with timber-dependant communities. Some 90 years ago the Forest service began to invite mills to set up shop near the National forests, and whole towns grew up. To this day, Forest Service planners base their management decisions primarily on a skewed sense of obligation to locals.

Such thinking ignores the rest of the American people, each of whom owns an equal share in the national forests. Federal law mandates that the Forest service preserve endangered species' habitats, water quality, and backcountry recreation areas; nowwhere does it require the agency to look out for local economic interests.

[Excerted without permission from The New Republic (jan. 2, 1989). Subscriptions $56/yr (48 issues) New Republic, Box 56515, Boulder, CO 80322.]