Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

Logging, Terrorism, Species, Economics

September 15, 2004

John Youngberg is not one for understatement: "Al-Qaida only had to fly airplanes into buildings once," the vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association said recently in the Missoulian.

"After that, they only have to anonymously threaten to do so to put the United States on high alert.

Likewise, environmental activists only had to have one success -- the spotted owl -- to put industry into a tailspin."

Well now. Let's look into this just a little.

Mr. Youngberg says that, post spotted owl litigation (which continues, by the way) all environmental groups have to do is sigh loudly about just about any species and timber companies will scurry away, dragging their chainsaws behind them. If this were so our woods might be in better shape, but in fact the industry and its allies -- the Forest Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service -- fight bitterly against nearly every effort citizen groups make to preserve vanishing species.

Okay, so no one would take seriously the Al-Qaida analogy, but Mr. Youngberg also levels a far more serious charge: "So great was the upheaval caused by protection of the northern spotted owl -- sawmills closed, jobs lost, communities on the skids -- that the timber industry now will do almost anything to prevent other endangered species listings."

One hears a good deal of such rhetoric from certain politicians and their industry friends, but if you look beneath the brimstone (as you can here) you'll see that Mr. Youngberg is simply wrong. As the ECONorthwest economists found:

The reduction of logging triggered widespread fear of economic catastrophe. Some predicted as many as 150,000 workers would lose their timber-related jobs, hundreds of communities would become economic wastelands, and the region as a whole would fall into a depression that would take years, if not decades, to reverse.

These dire predictions, however, did not materialize. Instead of collapsing, the region's economy expanded. The PNW weathered virtually unscathed the national economic recession that occurred at about the same time... and both Oregon and Washington have consistently outperformed the national economy throughout the 1990s. While timber harvests fell 86 percent on federal lands and 47 percent overall from their peak in 1988 to 1996, employment in the lumber-and-wood products industry, which constitutes the bulk of the timber industry in the PNW, fell 22 percent. In contrast, total employment rose 27 percent.

And, along the way, a bit of irreplaceable ancient forest was saved, though it is still in peril from the likes of Mr. Youngberg.

This is particularly important to understand these days as the Endangered Species Act faces its most serious assault in years: All the attacks on the law will be couched as a return to balance, or streamlining, or protecting small landowners. The truth of the matter is that the opponents of the act are big concerns that would profit from its wounding.

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org