When a forest is cut, it's not just trees that are killed. Whether it's lions in ancient Greece or, as today, spotted owls and coho salmon in America's Pacific northwest and gorillas in Africa, the loss of forests means the loss of the creatures living in them. The list of plants and animals damaged or extirpated by the deaths of once-great forests is long, and getting longer every day. Golden-crowned lemur, orangutan, Siberian tiger (of which there are only 250 left), marbled murrelet, Port Orford cedar (killed by a fungus transported on logging equipment), black forest wallaby, aye-aye, red cedar, mahogany, ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina parakeet, golden-capped fruit bat, Hazel's and smooth-skinned forest frogs, Amur tiger and leopard, forest owlet, Nelson's spiny pocket mouse, saker falcon, red wolf, panda bear: the list goes on and on. Scientists estimate that 130 species are driven extinct every day; that's about 50,000 each year. This devastation is not due just to deforestation; it is a consequence of the larger effects of industrial civilization. Nonetheless, 75 per cent of the mammals endangered by the activities of industrial civilization are threatened with loss of forest habitat. For birds, the corresponding figure is 45 per cent; for amphibians it's 55 per cent; and for reptiles it's 65 per cent.
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."
So the fight goes on. Contrary to what many people think, tree-sitting doesn't require everyone to spend months or years without touching the ground. Over the years I have met all sorts of people working hard to stop or slow deforestation. There are people who file lawsuits against individual timber harvest plans (THPs), and people suing timber companies outright. Some people oversee monitoring stations that sample waterways to track the effects of logging on water quality, and present their findings to the appropriate agencies. There are residents who come out in droves to speak at meetings with the "regulatory" agencies, or who attend the public comment period that is part of the THP approval process. Other volunteers search the forests for endangered species in the hope of protecting small pieces of land.
And yet the trees continue to fall, runs of salmon disappear, water quality is degraded, and the staggering effort put forth by concerned citizens leaves scarcely a discernible mark (or tree). It's an awful reality that begs the question of what to do next.
WHAT MUST BE DONE
In the relatively short history of campaigning against deforestation in North America, thousands of people have been arrested. Activists and organizers have had pepper spray applied directly to their eyeballs. They have been car-bombed for building links between exploited timber workers and environmentalists. They've been shot at, and one man was killed by a tree intentionally felled in his direction - seconds previously, the logger had been caught on video threatening to do just that.
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 organizations 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 subsidizing the Forest Service's destruction of public forests with billions of tax dollars.
So, what can people who disapprove of this state of affairs do? So long as we relegate ourselves to symbolic resistance, nothing will change. And so long as we expect a parade of "heroes" to step forward to do the work of stopping the loggers for us, ecological and human health will continue to be destroyed. Part of the problem is that most of us who pretend to resist the logging industry don't know what we really want. Do we want fewer clear-cuts? Smaller clear-cuts? Kinder and gentler clear-cuts? We don't know. And even if we did, we aren't willing to do what's necessary to stop those in power from murdering the planet.
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 airplane, the plane won't crash. To hope for some result means you have no control over that event.
When we realize 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.
And what will it take? Well, we can join those who are sitting in trees. Or, if we don't want to climb, we can bring them food and water. Or we can help them in other ways - filing lawsuits, testing water quality or searching for endangered species. We can use whatever skills we have in whatever ways we can to keep the remaining forests standing. The only question is whether we are willing to do so.
Derrick Jensen's most recent book (with George Draffan) is Strangely like War: the global assault on forests (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2003). That and Derrick's previous books The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros are available at the Ecology Center bookstore, same building as BACH. Remedy is a California activist who spent 361 days in a 1,200-year-old redwood before being forcibly removed by Maxxam-hired climbers. The full text of this article appeared in The Ecologist magazine and can be found at Derrick's website (www.derrickjensen.org/treesit.html) or Remedy's website (www.contrast.org/treesit).
