Wilderness Committee
Help stop California clearcutting
Tuesday, September 16, 7 pm, Colby Room, Sierra Club Headquarters, 85 Second Street, San Francisco (near Montgomery Street BART/Muni station).
No, clearcutting has not ended. Although the Forest Service limits clearcutting in national forests, on vast private forestlands it is still the dominant timber-harvesting method.
Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) is by far the worst offender. The company owns 1.7 million acres in California, in patches scattered from east of the Bay Area up to the Oregon border. In 1999 it announced that over the next 100 years it would be cutting and converting to plantations one million acres. In the nine years since, it has already done this or received approval to do this for a quarter million acres.
To stop the onslaught, the Sierra Club has partnered with ForestEthics in a campaign to arouse public outrage at this logging practice and thus to redirect wood demand to products not produced by destroying forests. Five California Sierra Club chapters, including the Bay Chapter, have contributed funds to hire a Sierra Club organizer to enlist and coordinate volunteers in the campaign.
Marily Woodhouse knows first-hand the destruction of clearcutting. Her quiet, little-used road in the foothills of Mount Lassen suddenly became a superhighway for truckload after truckload of trees being hauled away from SPI clearcuts. She told us, "What is being done a few miles from where I live is a microcosm of what is being done all over the northern part of the state. It is deforestation as surely as what has been done to rainforests in other parts of the world. The difference is that it is right here in our state instead of thousands of miles away. These archaic and unsustainable logging practices must be stopped. The only way to do that is for `we the people' to act to make it so."
The Sierra Club's partnership with ForestEthics is a marriage of strengths. We have many members to call upon, while ForestEthics brings tested approaches from its successful campaigns to persuade Victoria's Secret to stop producing catalogs with paper made from Canada's boreal forests, and to convince Staples that it was in its economic interest to stop marketing products made from old-growth forests.
The key to this campaign will be to draw the public's attention to the horrific effects of clearcutting, including the loss of beauty and wildlife habitat, the erosion and sedimentation, and the poisoning of soils and streams with herbicides. We will remind the public that healthy forests provide 60% of the state's water supply while sequestering carbon to help combat global warming. It will be public pressure, threatening demand for SPI wood, that will force the company to change its timber-harvesting practices.
WhatYouCanDo
For this ambitious effort to be successful, we need many volunteers for tabling, writing to newspapers, demonstrations, phone -banking and generally spreading information and awareness. To learn more, and to sign up to help, contact Marily at marily.woodhouse -at- mlc.sierraclub.org or (530) 474-5803.
To hear from Marily in person, come to the Chapter Wilderness Committee meeting at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, September 16.
For more about ForestEthics and the Save the Sierra Campaign visit www.savethesierra.org