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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
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Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
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Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
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Footprints
in the Dust
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Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
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March 24 - March
30, 2002
Clearcutting Montana
A Bitterroot
to Swallow
By Jeffrey St. Clair
A tremendous victory. A kick in the ass of the
timber industry. A huge step forward for native fish conservation.
A win whose significance cannot be overstated. These are the
chest-beating sound bytes that have been broadcast by a cadre
of environmentalists to support their settlement of a lawsuit
against the Forest Service over plans to clearcut thousands of
acres in Montana's Bitterroot National Forest, along the spine
of the Continental Divide.
But it turns out that the deal is much
less than its cracked up to be by the green dealmakers. Indeed,
the vaunted settlement, hatched with the Bush administration,
will give a greenlight to one of the largest timber sales ever
on public forest lands in the United States in an area that is
home to grizzlies, wolves and rare trout.
Here's the story.
In the summer of 2000, fires raced across
the Bitterroot forests, charring trees, burning down houses,
generating media hysteria and whetting the appetite of the big
timber companies, who've come to learn that when there are fires,
cheap timber sales soon follow. There's an old saying among loggers
that sums this up:: "The blacker the trees, the greener
the paychecks."
Of course, summer fires are nothing new
for these Rocky Mountain forests. It's a fire-dependent ecosystem,
the very forests themselves having evolved with fire. But the
Bitterroot valley is no longer a wilderness landscape and you
can put part of the blame for that on John Denver, whose song
Wild Montana Skies hit the airwaves in the 70s like a real estate
ad for this once sleepy valley. "He was born in the Bitterroot
Valley in the early morning rain / Wild geese over the water
headin north and home again." With these treacly lyrics,
Denver launched a land raid of rich back-to-the-landers, who
now inhabit multi million dollar hobby ranches at the edge of
the wilderness. They like the view, but they don't like the rhythms
of the ecology: they want fire suppression, predator control,
and privacy from hikers.
After the fires, the locals wanted the
scorched forests logged, buying into timber industry hype that
clearcutting reduces fire risk. In fact, just the reverse is
the case. Logged over forests produce more and bigger fires than
natural forests. But the Forest Service was only too willing
to comply. They quickly cobbled together what would be billed
as the largest timber sale in US history, offering at a bargain
rate more than 190 million board feet of timber from 46,000 acres
of forest.
But they overreached. Anxious to please
its financial backers in big timber, the Bush administration
issued an emergency ruling exempting the sale from any kind of
administrative challenge or appeal. The Sierra Club and six other
groups (Friends of the Bitterroot, The Ecology Center, American
Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Rivers
Council, and the Wilderness Society) quickly filed suit against
the plan.
A huge victory was won in the courtroom
of federal Judge Don Molloy, who excoriated the Forest Service
for traducing numerous federal laws. A preliminary injunction
against the sale was handed down. The Forest Service took its
appeal of the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court, which sent
the case back to Judge Molloy asking him to rule quickly on whether
or not some sales could proceed. In particular, the Forest Service
wanted approval to log 15 timber sales, before this winter's
snows melted. The judge ordered both sides to enter into a mediation
process, overseen by federal Judge Michael Hogan. Hogan is a
notorious rightwinger and born-again Christian whose loathing
of environmentalists is equaled only by his hatred of abortion
providers.
It's important to note that Judge Molloy
did not order the parties to agree to a settlement, but merely
to attempt to reach a deal. He was prepared to make a final ruling
in the case within a week. But the environmentalists were apparently
itching to deal. In a revealing story in the Missoulian, Sheri
Devlin quotes Sierra Club president Jennifer Ferenstein as saying
the plaintiffs met on February 3 and faxed a settlement proposal
to the Bush administration that included a concession that would
allow areas to be logged within days. "The signal we gave
is that we are willing to consider an option that put people
[ie., loggers] out on the ground," Ferenstein said. "We
can be flexible."
This new sense of "flexibility"
came after the enviros were tweaked by Montana Senator Max Baucus,
a conservative democrat who is up for reelection in the fall.
Baucus applauded Molloy for "knocking their heads together"
and urged the enviros to agree to a settlement that would permit
some logging this winter.
The Bush administration said that the
enviro proposal was a good starting point for negotiations. The
opposing sides convened for a two-day session in Missoula and
the deal was hatched. It calls for 60 million board feet of timber
sales and clearcutting on about 14,000 acres of land. The enviros
signed away the right to challenge those sales, regardless of
their environmental consequences.
Then came the blizzard of self-serving
press releases. "This is a great improvement for our wild
forests, wildlife habitat, native fish, and, perhaps most importantly,
public participation," crowed Ferenstein. "We have
preserved the right of the public to appeal Forest Service decisions
that would harm the National Forests they enjoy and want to protect."
"Once we were finally able to sit
down and talk, we made some real headway. It was the kind of
productive discourse that would have been silenced had we not
challenged the original Bitterroot plan," said Ferenstein.
"The original Bitterroot plan was a transparent attempt
by the Bush administration to increase commercial logging on
our National Forests, skirt public scrutiny and circumvent important
environmental regulations."
This effusion is a little bit much to
take. Ferenstein is talking about a mediation session that put
her face-to-face with the Prince of Darkness himself, Mark Rey.
Rey, formerly the timber industry's top lobbyist, is now the
undersecretary of agriculture overseeing the Forest Service.
Rey doesn't play nice and he's not given to gentle "discourses"
with environmentalists, who he considers to be the equivalent
of domestic terrorists.
Others painted a different picture. One
plaintiff spoke of the negotiating session as "grueling,"
"painful" and "torturous." These kinds of
remarks make it sound like the plaintiffs were under the kind
of duress that an East Timorese human rights organizer might
have suffered in an interrogation by one of Suharto's henchmen.
Such hollow posturing makes the redwood-sitting Julia Butterfly
Hill seem like Nelson Mandela in comparison.
But to be fair apparently Ferenstein
wasn't the dealmaker. She's merely the Katie Couric of the environmental
movement, a perky face ushered forth to dispense the bad news.
The real deal was apparently cut by the lawyers and the Wilderness
Society's forest guru, Michael Anderson.
The chronology of events as detailed
by Devlin's story makes it clear that the environmentalists'
had decided to sell-out long before their grueling negotiations
with Rey and his flacks in the Forest Service. If their was any
armtwisting going on, it must have been between the plaintiffs.
Some people never learn.
A few years ago we exposed the saga of
Jon Roush, the former head of The Wilderness Society, who logged
off a few acres of big Ponderosa pines on his multi-million dollar
ranch in the Bitterroot Valley. At first, Roush tried to lay
the blame for the whole deal on his wife, who was divorcing him
at the time. Then he sent us to his forester, who said that the
logging was needed to improve "health" of the forest
stands. At the time, "forest health" logging was viewed,
even by ecologists at the Wilderness Society (perhaps the most
cautious of mainstream environmental groups) as a pr gimmick
designed by the timber industry, a kind of feel-good clearcutting.
By and large, environmentalists-- including some of the plaintiffs
on the Bitterroot lawsuit--were appalled at Roush's hypocrisy.
He resigned his position a few months later.
But Roush's predations were puny compared
to the all-out assault sanctioned by the Bitterroot plaintiffs.
Instead, this deal reminds many forest veterans of the so-called
Deal of Shame, the 1993 debacle where enviromentalists agreed
to a request from the Clinton administration to give up an injunction
blocking timber sales in ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest.
The deal fractured the environmental movement, jumpstarted logging
in the Northwest and set the tone for the Clinton administration's
duplicitous environmental policies.
Revealingly, the Bitterroot deal involves
many of the same players, most notably the environmental attorneys
who signed off on the deals: Earth Justice (aka the Sierra Club
Legal Defense Fund) and the Western Environmental Law Clinic.
A scrutiny of the fine print of the Bitterroot
settlement may reveal what was truly afoot. In part the settlement
says: "(10) Nothing in this settlement shall be construed
as an admission of fact or law by any party on the issue, including
plaintiffs' claim that the Forest Service has violated the Appeals
Reform Act. (11) These settlement resolves all claims that Plaintiffs
have asserted or could have asserted in this litigation, except
as provided in paragraph 12 below. (12) Plaintiffs retain the
right to seek attorneys' fees under applicable law. (13) This
agreement embodies the entire terms and conditions of the agreement
between the parties."
In other words, it seems the only real
victory in this case was the right of the enviros' attorneys
to petition the court to have their legal fees reimbursed.
"This is another trees for fees
deal," says Michael Donnelly, a forest organizer from Oregon.
"It's no longer about what gets saved, it's about how they
can get their expenses paid for and then spin it in the press.
This is what happens when the environmental movement becomes
bureaucratized, when it lives off of foundation grants and political
pats-on-the back. It's lost its spine and its moral purpose."
So 60 million board feet of clearcuts
are sanctioned without regard to their damage to an already stressed
ecosystem. The enviros involved have tried to downplay the damage
these clearcuts will cause. But think of it this way: it will
still represent one of the largest timber sales in Montana history.
The sale volume is four times what the entire Bitterroot forest
has been logging per year for the past decade or so. The amount
of acreage that will be clearcut is 2,000 acres larger than the
Charles C. Deam Wilderness on the Hoosier National Forest in
Indiana.
"The fact is that the salvage sales
released without appeal in the settlement will be the single
largest timber sale in the United States, including Alaska, that
is currently in play," says Bryan Bird, an ecologist with
the Forest Conservation Council. "People on the ground in
the Bitterroot have stated that several of the salvage units
are in areas of low intensity burn and contain some rather healthy
and large trees. I believe that these sales could have been stopped
for sure on the procedural claims and possibly stopped on the
substantive claims. But the public now believes that large-scale
salvage logging is not a problem. We will face this for years,
as fire is not going away and the USFS knows its last stronghold
for the logging program is salvage and "fuels reduction."
In theory (and its fundraising letters),
the Sierra Club is a "zero cut" organization, meaning
it opposes commercial logging on all national forest lands. The
other plaintiffs on the suit are members of the Roadless Area
coalition, meaning they oppose all logging in roadless areas,
which are de facto wilderness lands. The Bitterroot settlement
not only gives the green light to a blitzkrieg of new logging,
but much of it will take place inside these roadless areas, the
most sacrosanct and vulnerable lands in those mountains.
"This deal stinks so badly it makes
me feel like never identifying myself as an environmentalist
again," says Steve Kelly, a longtime forest activist in
Montana. "There was no reason to throw in the towel, the
fight had only started. If the enviros had really won, the timber
industry would have sent out log truck convoys in protest. Instead,
they're waiting in line for the clearcutting to begin."
Victory? Somebody should ask the grizzlies
and bull trout. They won't be around long if these kinds of sell-outs
continue to be hailed as triumphs on their behalf.
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