U.S. Activists Swing Ax at Canada’s Timber Exports

High in a misty valley that hugs the Mamquam River, there is a wound in the hillside’s carpet of pine, cedar and fir that only now, more than a decade after it was leveled, is growing a thin fuzz of new trees. It is known as the “seven-story clear-cut.”

A logging company shaved the entire hillside, six square miles of it, leaving behind a dismal mass of broken limbs and churned-up soil. The wood, from huge, mature trees hundreds of years old, most likely went to build houses in Oregon, Washington, California and Japan. The leftover chips made pulp for phone books, toilet paper and newspapers.

The hills over the nearby Squamish River, home to the largest population of breeding bald eagles in the world, are laced with gashes. Clear-cuts in British Columbia’s interior forests as big as 60 football fields are common--the product of an annual timber cut that is felling some of the last magnificent stands of old-growth forest in the world.

Nearly a third of the wood is shipped duty-free to the United States.

Now, U.S. environmental groups have begun a major assault on the international trade rules that permit the import of duty-free Canadian lumber, along with a stepped-up campaign to attack Canadian logging on what may be its most vulnerable front, the U.S. marketplace. Already, the environmental campaign is bearing unexpected fruit. MacMillan Bloedel, the Vancouver timber company that logged much of the Mamquam Valley, surprised the world timber community recently with its announcement that it will end clear-cut logging in British Columbia over the next five years.

Contracts Worth Millions Canceled

And the Coastal Rainforest Coalition, fresh from a European campaign that won pledges from several major buyers to end purchases of wood products from British Columbia, launched a similar U.S. campaign this year.

At least $30 million in contracts with the two biggest logging companies on the B.C. coast have been canceled as a result of the campaign, which includes an international boycott. This comes on top of what already, thanks to the downturn in Asian markets, was the worst timber slump in two decades.

Today, the coalition is announcing the agreement by more than 20 major U.S. companies, including IBM Corp., Nike Inc., Hallmark, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., 3M Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., to halt the use of products made from old-growth trees logged out of British Columbia’s rainforests, except from sources certified as upholding rigorous environmental standards.

“It started with a fundamental concept--that a company has to have a social license in order to operate,” MacMillan Bloedel President Tom Stephens said of the company’s decision to end clear-cutting.

The company’s vice president for environmental affairs, Linda Coady, put it more bluntly: “As the old saying goes, there is nothing like the sight of your own blood to focus your mind.”

While the North American Free Trade Agreement virtually opened up the border between the U.S. and Canada, the issue of softwood lumber, the longest-running trade dispute between the two countries, was set aside for a separate agreement concluded in 1996, allowing the duty-free import from Canada of up to 14.7 billion board feet a year.

The Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund, representing two U.S. environmental groups, has filed notice of intent to sue in U.S. federal court alleging the agreement encourages industrial-scale logging in Canada for sale to the United States without oversight by the kind of U.S. laws that protect endangered species and waterways that cross the border.

Canada Lags U.S. in Protecting Species

Canada has long been seen as the great wilderness of the north whose reserves of wild forests seemed to guarantee that, whatever sins were committed in the U.S., there would be a North American wilderness left.

The reality, environmental groups say, is that grizzly bears, protected as a threatened species in the U.S., often cross the border from Montana, only to be legally shot by hunters because there is no endangered species law in Canada. The spotted owl, whose dwindling numbers virtually shut down logging in the Pacific Northwest, has only weak protection in Canada.

Indeed, until complaints by U.S. loggers of an unfair competitive advantage spawned Canada’s Forest Practices Code in 1995, there was no comprehensive framework of policies governing logging. Even under the new code, protection areas around streams are substantially smaller than those required in the U.S., and logging along very small streams is permitted to go straight to the water’s edge, almost certainly killing any salmon that might inhabit the waters.

Clear-cut logging, the safest and cheapest way of logging but discouraged as a habitual practice in the U.S. because of its potential devastation to soils and habitat, is how 92% of British Columbia’s timber is harvested.

What concerns conservation groups most is the sheer volume of wood hauled out of British Columbian forests: 71 million cubic meters a year, enough to level 120,000 acres of forests, a rate that by many estimates is at least 10 million cubic meters a year above what the forest can sustainably produce.

What that means is that large, stately stands of old-growth forest that are crucial to the survival of species like the spotted owl and caribou are rapidly being cut down and replaced with younger stands of second-growth forest.

Conservation groups say the government is headed toward elimination of all but about 12% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests--which cover most of the province--over the next several years. The Ministry of Forests says up to 60% of the old trees will be preserved.

The issue takes on an international dimension because Canada is one of only three regions in the world, along with Russia, central Africa and Brazil, which still has significant remaining primary forest. Particularly precious is the temperate rainforest along the central coast, the enormous Great Bear Rainforest, which supports ancient cedars more than a thousand years old and Sitka spruce trees that tower over 200 feet tall.

The central region of the Great Bear Rainforest is being felled at the rate of about 1 million cubic meters a year, with half its remaining-intact, unprotected valleys scheduled for logging and roading over the next five years.

British Columbia says it is managing the $14.8 billion-a-year forest industry as its own public demands at a time when logging industry unemployment on the coast approaches 50%.

“We have a consensus-based, democratic land use planning process that all stakeholders in the process have the opportunity to participate in . . . establishing a plan and determining the values that society thinks are important for management and protection,” said Mark Hubert, forest policy analyst for the Ministry of Forests.

The provincial government also points to its landmark policy for setting aside wilderness in protected areas, a strategy which eventually will preserve 12% of the entire province in parks and other reserves--a total of 38,600 square miles.

Meanwhile, the logging industry has chafed so much under the Forest Practices Code that the government agreed in June to streamline more than 500 of its provisions.

“Our forest practices in the ‘70s and early ‘80s were like forest practices everywhere else in the world--unacceptable now. So there had to be some change. They brought in the Forest Practices Code, and like most governments, they went too far. Too many bureaucrats. Too much paperwork. It drove the cost of logging up as much as 75%,” said Jack Munro, chairman of the Forest Alliance, a logging industry group. “Even so, we will match our forest practices with any country in the world.”

Companies have increased streamside buffers, improved the way they build roads and expanded removal of logs by helicopters, he said.

However, the two U.S. environmental groups that are planning to sue over the import agreement--the Defenders of Wildlife and the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance--will argue that the entire softwood lumber agreement should be subject to U.S. environmental laws.

Boycott Targets U.S. Companies

“Under this agreement, we are sending 300,000 log trucks a year loaded with Canada’s natural heritage south of the border,” said Kevin Scott, a Vancouver conservationist who is supporting the planned lawsuit.

On the boycott front, the rainforest coalition, which includes Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rainforest Action Network, is hoping to make inroads with a public action campaign that includes visiting Home Depot outlets, planting giant inflated bears on their roofs and attempting to seize Canadian old-growth lumber purportedly used in high-grade trim products.

It has also lodged protests at companies such as the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register, which purchase newsprint made from wood pulp that is, in part, manufactured from the chip byproducts of old-growth lumber.

Kathryn M. Downing, president and chief executive of The Times, said in a statement that an exhaustive investigation of logging practices in British Columbia and meetings with diverse groups involved in the issue convinced the company that the region’s forests are being managed democratically and sustainably with “a balance of economic and environmental values.”

She cited the decision by several major timber companies to seek independent environmental certification of their logging processes and to defer harvesting in key ecological areas as assurances that the region’s land use issues “are being debated in an appropriate forum and in a manner that is fair and unbiased.”

Companies like MacMillan Bloedel say the protests are sparking a new approach in the industry, such as the independent certifications, steps which would have been unheard of only a few years ago. “The difference between rules and regulations and social license is largely a function of time,” Stephens said. “Written rules and regulations are a reflection of yesterday’s values.”