Diana McCaulay, Contributor
ON MY first trip to a rural area in Washington state, I saw what could be described as a bumper sticker skirmish. The first sticker showed acres of tree stumps with this caption: "The only problem with progress is it won't stop".
The second sticker had a picture of a truck piled high with logs and the caption was: "Save people. Kill an environmentalist".
The two bumper stickers were shorthand for the tension between forest conservationists and the logging industry. The Pacific Northwest is one of the few areas in the United States with old-growth forests remaining, so protecting them is a hot topic. Washington also has an important logging industry, so at least once a week, the tension between jobs and the preservation of natural resources is played out in the press.
When I left Jamaica, our Forestry Department's mission statement explicitly stated that the department sought to maximise its contribution to GDP. This sounds harmless enough, until you reflect that using current methods of calculating national accounts, a tree mostly contributes to GDP when it's cut down. The Jamaican Forestry Department's mission statement is therefore not exactly conservation-driven.
'Multiple use'
The U.S. Forest Service has had a similar mind-set over the past several decades with a mantra of "multiple use". "Multiple use" means trying to eat our cake and have it; logging and then replanting in monocultures, keeping some areas pristine for recreation and science, allowing log cabins around lakes and so on. We're slowly learning that nature doesn't work that way.
So the U.S. Forest Service has recently presented President Bill Clinton - he seems to still be President - with unprecedented recommendations to halt road construction and end commercial logging in almost 60 million acres of roadless forests in 39 states.
Forester Harv Forsgren, of the Pacific Northwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service, wrote a letter to the Seattle Times following these recommendations. The letter states in part: "I'm proud of the decision made by the agency...I believe it clearly speaks to the values that help to define us Northwesterners - clean water, robust populations of fish and wildlife, natural scenic beauty, diverse outdoor recreation, opportunities for solitude and personal renewal and productive forests".
Remember who's writing. This is a member of the U.S. Forest Service, a part of the Federal Government. Despite decades of not doing enough quickly enough, contributing disproportionately to the world's stocks of hazardous waste and greenhouse gases, and enjoying a standard of living that would requires six more earths if everyone were to be so privileged, many Americans (at least here in the Northwest, it might be different in Texas), seem to have got it about the environment.
Values
I've had eight weeks of immersion in decision frameworks and cost benefit analyses and I've come to feel that protection of the environment boils down to one word in Mr. Forsgren's letter: Values. When we use money as the basis of our decisions about environmental issues, we will be inexorably led into a win/lose situation. It will forever be dams OR salmon, jobs OR forests, wetlands OR houses.
If money is our main criterion, think about the things we'd do and the things we wouldn't. We'd immediately declare war on somebody, war is great for the economy. We'd go back to putting children in factories, kids are really cheap. Slavery would be even better. We'd never have a restroom with disabled access, it simply isn't cost-effective. In the West, we've come some way in understanding that money is not all that matters. With regard to the environment, though, we're just beginning to realise the issue has ethical underpinnings. Destroying forests doesn't only compromise clean air and water, it's also not right to devastate natural systems we only dimly understand.
Decisions based on ethics will never be bad ones. The money will come; children kept out of factories will be more productive adults. The people of the Northwest want jobs and housing, but they're not prepared to sacrifice clean water, forests and abundant wildlife to get them. The message to decision makers is clear: Find another way. Find the win/win.
Human ingenuity can find the win/win. Technology will not provide all the answers, it's true that the lifestyles of Westerners are unsustainable, unless the rest of the world is to be relegated to grinding poverty. But technology will provide some solutions. Just this week there was an ad on T.V. for disposable paper plates, made not from trees, but from fast-growing grasses. We will find such solutions when we decide swapping trees for paper plates is wrong.
Lofty considerations of ethics aside, though, this is still the U.S. So on a lighter note, an environmental activist has taken the struggle for forest conservation to an entirely different level in California. Dona Neito, a.k.a La Tigresa, has found a new way to stop the logging trucks. She steps into their path, recites poetry to the bemused drivers through a megaphone and then takes off her shirt. She calls it "Strip Tease for the Trees". So far the loggers are enjoying this new form of eco-protest.
