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"Forests are under attack all over the world. One estimate says that, globally, two and a half acres of forest are cut every second. That’s equivalent to two football fields, or 150 acres cut per minute. That’s 214,000 acres per day – an area larger than New York city –, and 78 million acres each year – an area larger than Poland. Indeed, about three quarters of the world’s original forests have been cut, most in the past century. Much of what remains is in three nations: Russia, Canada and Brazil. In the continental US, only 5 per cent of native forest remains.
And what do those who run the timber corporations want to do now? As former Louisiana Pacific president and CEO Harry Merlo stated with no hint of irony: ‘We need everything that’s out there. We log to infinity. It’s ours, it’s out there and we need it all. Now.’
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Corporations sue activists, and activists sue them back. Laws are passed to protect environmental health, only for de-foresters to be appointed to ‘enforce’ those laws. The state of California, for example, recently passed a law giving its Water Quality Board the authority to stop logging that would degrade impaired watersheds further; within weeks a leading Maxxam apologist was appointed to the California Environmental Protection Agency. Similarly, soon after Lee Thomas left his job as head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) he joined timber products firm Georgia-Pacific – one of the organisations he had previously pretended to oversee. Fellow former EPA chief William Ruckleshaus went on to sit on the boards of Weyerhaeuser, Monsanto and several other corporations. And who better to oversee the US Forest Service than the attorney who defended building products manufacturer Louisiana-Pacific from charges of monopolistic practices detrimental to the people and forests of the US? John Crowell was made chief of the Forest Service by Ronald Reagan. He immediately set out to double the timber production from US national forests by the end of the 20th century. Part of the reason that didn’t happen was because there weren’t that many trees left. But by 1988 the US had become a net exporter of wood products for the first time in its history, and Americans were subsidising the Forest Service’s destruction of public forests with billions of tax dollars.
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Instead, we yammer on about ‘hope’. You wouldn’t believe how many magazine editors have said to me that they want me to write about the apocalypse but to make sure I ‘leave readers with a sense of hope’. But what, precisely, is ‘hope’? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I couldn’t; so I turned the question back on the audience. Here’s the definition we came up with: hope is a longing for something over which you have no control; it means you are powerless. Think about it. I’m not, for example, going to say, ‘I hope I eat something tomorrow’. I’ll just do it. On the other hand, I hope that the next time I get on an aeroplane, the plane won’t crash. To hope for some result means you have no control over that event. When we realise how much power we actually do have, however, we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure tigers survive. We do whatever it takes."
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http://www.theecologist.org/article.html?article=447
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