Extremist Views of Logging Threaten the Environment

by Jack E. Phelps

Executive Director of the Alaska Forest Association.

(as published in the August issue of the Alaska Business Monthly)

Extremism, which Webster defines as "advocacy of extreme political measures," frightens most reasonable people today. Webster connects it with the state of being radical, which is a sharp departure "from the usual or traditional." While every sane person recognizes the inevitability, even the importance of change, most people understand the need for balancing competing interests as society moves forward.

Not so the extremist. He demands change immediately regardless of the consequences to those who don't share his vision of the past or the future. It's "dam the torpedoes, full speed to the left." This drove Maximilian Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety to take control of the French Revolution and institute the Reign of Terror, in which thousands of ordinary and innocent French peasants literally lost their heads.

Extremists today, at least in this country, do not haul people off to the guillotine. But like their political cousins, the Jacobins, they act without regard to facts and without regard to the human costs of their policies. An article in the July, 1996, issue of Outdoor Life illustrates this perfectly. The headline reads: "Two Visions of the Tongass, game-rich habitat, or stricken moonscape? Those are the choice."

Granted, headlines are meant to grab the reader's attention, and are often sensational even if the content of the article is not. Unfortunately, this does not hold in the current example. The article trots out all the myths associated with the extremist environmental agenda so familiar to those of us trying to make an honest living from the forest while maintaining the rich fish and wildlife values we share with other Alaskans.

The litany includes the notion that logging is destroying fisheries and deer habitat, and that logging companies gobble up trees and ravage the landscape with no regard for the natural environment. The writer describes the result of timber harvest as "sterile, fishless rivers and ... fragmented, lifeless forest habitat." This would be tragic if accurate, but it bears no resemblance to the truth.

In fact, the fish and wildlife protections on the Tongass and on state and private land in Alaska are among the strictest in the nation. Fish-producing streams and beachfronts are protected by mandatory buffer zones where no timber harvest is allowed. A recent study produced by a top expert on fish habitat, and published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, indicates that Alaska's stream buffers are working very well to protect fish habitat. Yet the extremists, if they mention them at all, give buffers only passion mention, as if they were unimportant.

Another fact rarely mentioned by environmental extremists is that 4 million of the 5 million acres of productive old growth on the Tongass are protected by non-harvest designations such as parks, monuments, and wilderness. Only 1.7 million acres are open for any forest development. The industry is content to harvest within this relatively small area over a 10-year cycle, provided timber sales are consistently available.

Contrary to the extremists' rhetoric, the choice really is between responsible development and poverty. It is between responsible timber harvest here and ecologically damaging harvest in places like Russia and Third World countries where environmental consciousness is not at the level enjoyed by Alaska's forest. The demand for wood products in this country and around the world is not going to decline soon. We can maintain the economic health of our own timber industry while protecting the environment, or we can force more harvest overseas at the cost of our jobs and at the expense of the environment. That is the real choice.

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