The Fate of the Forests

Smokescreen: Fire, Forests and the Bush Administration’s “Healthy Forest” Plan for Increased Logging

by Orna Izakson

In August 2002, the largest fire in the nation that year skittered and leaped across a steep and rocky landscape, through a unique ecosystem and the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in the southeast corner of Oregon. The Bush administration saw opportunity in the fire. As the 500,000-acre fire was dying, President Bush came to the area to survey the damage and offer assurances.

With the ashes still warm, Bush presented the centerpiece of his policy for public forests, the Healthy Forest Initiative. He told the fire-weary citizenry that his plan would:

• Speed up logging in the name of fire prevention;
• Minimize or eliminate environmental analyses of such projects' effects on wildlife or the landscape;
• Eliminate procedural safeguards that provide a check against logging promotion by the Forest Service -- in other words, the right of citizens to sue if a proposed action violates environmental laws.

A year later, fires raging in southern California helped Bush push portions of the Healthy Forests Initiative through Congress. That legislation -- now being hammered into its final form by lawmakers trying to reconcile House and Senate versions -- is only a small piece of a comprehensive effort to rewrite rules that for decades have allowed citizens to slow or halt unsustainable logging that endangers species and water quality. MORE>>

Writing Off Indonesia’s Forestry Debt: How the IMF, the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency and Bank Mandiri Are Financing Forest Destruction

by Christopher Barr and Bambang Setiono

Bogor, Indonesia -- Indonesia's Bank Mandiri, the country's largest lending institution, in July sold 20 percent of its equity shares in a highly touted public offering. Investors responded enthusiastically, and Mandiri's share sale was oversubscribed by seven-fold, generating $320 million. The Indonesian government, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and a growing chorus of financial analysts have claimed this is the surest sign yet that Indonesia's economy -- which in 1997 suffered the world's largest banking collapse ever -- is well on the road to recovery.

But for Indonesia's forests, which include some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, Bank Mandiri's public offering is bad news. MORE>>

From Worst to First: Under Pressure, Boise Cascade Agrees to Stop Logging Old-Growth Forests

by Jeff Shaw

The paper in the printer at your office or school might once have been part of a rare 500-year-old tree. So might the door into your house, or its shingles, or the boards that make up its bones.

It doesn't have to be that way -- and a just-concluded activist campaign took a step toward a world where it isn't that way. A new environmental policy announced by the Boise Cascade Corporation, the result of a three-year effort by Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and its allies, offers significant safeguards for forests previously threatened by the company.

This September, the timber giant announced that it would no longer log old growth forests in the United States and would take steps to ensure its suppliers protect endangered trees as well. The announcement makes Boise the first major timber company to commit to a complete phase-out of old-growth logging as well as the first to extend such a policy to the suppliers from which it buys wood. MORE>>

Public Lands and the Public Good: Firefighting, Outsourcing and Other Threats to Sound Public Land Management

An Interview with Andy Stahl

Andy Stahl is executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE), a non-profit organization founded in 1989 by a timber sale planner who worked for the U.S. Forest Service. It is an employee-citizen partnership of over 12,000 members, about 500 of whom work for the Forest Service. FSEEE's mission is to forge a socially responsible value system for the U.S. Forest Service based on a land ethic that ensures ecologically and economically sustainable resource management. Stahl is a forester who has worked for the U.S. Forest Service, Associated Oregon Loggers, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. MORE>>