Forest Defense Time to Drop Boise Cascade

Author: Wellington Lyons

In December of last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the Roadless Area Conservation Rule (RACR), a policy drafted during the late years of the Clinton administration, and supported on the record by over 2 million Americans who commented on the policy. The RACR protects our remaining roadless areas in our publicly owned national forests from commercial logging and road construction. Only 58.5 million acres of America's 191 million acres of national forest remain roadless. The increasing scarcity and value of these areas as wildlife habitat, as watersheds and as refuges for human beings is becoming increasingly evident with each passing day.
The RACR rule was formulated after dozens of public hearings, millions of citizen comments, years of increasing scientific study and recognition of the value of intact, roadless lands in sustaining healthy wildlife populations, clean watersheds and natural ecological processes. After being suspended by a district judge in Idaho in 2001, the RACR is once again the law of the land. However, there has been far too little discussion of the entities whose name is on the lawsuits against the RACR. One of them just so happens to be the paper supplier for Middlebury College, the Boise Cascade Corporation. Boise has already appealed the Ninth Circuit's affirmation of the RACR, and its continued legal blockades against sound forest management compels us to reassess our relationship with the company.
The RACR, in protecting intact, naturally functioning ecosystems, reflects the increasing scientific understanding that bark beetles and root rots, along with other millennia-old agents of change in natural forests, are far from the signs of "unhealthy" forests that we have often heard timber companies proclaim must be remedied at their own profit. Rather, these agents are essential and indispensable parts of a forest ecosystem, for which human beings have yet to devise any equivalent or replacement. Not surprisingly, however, Boise Cascade has been at the forefront of a public relations blitz to manufacture a comical parody of how forests function.
Boise Cascade's own Web site is very telling. It argues, "This lockup would potentially expose America's national forests and surrounding communities to devastation similar to what occurred in 2002, when 4.6 million acres of federal land were destroyed by catastrophic wildfires." Such statements reveal a profound and powerful willingness to disregard the existence of the overwhelming scientific evidence that shows that the logging and development of roadless areas has increased, rather than decreased, the severity and extent of catastrophic wildfire.
It is most ironic that, in the 2002 wildfire season cited by Boise Cascade, the most powerful fires, including the Hayman and Chediski-Rodeo, occurred in some of the most heavily roaded and logged national forests in the country. The Departments of the Interior and Agriculture's National Fire Plan staff concluded, in its 2000 report to the U.S. president, "The removal of large, merchantable trees from forests does not reduce fire risk and may, in fact, increase such risk." Boise Cascade's own corporate predecessors have dominated federal land policy for the better part of the 20th century, and have aggressively supported the fire suppression and commercial logging that has created the "tinderbox" condition in certain parts of the country today. Indeed, the Fire Plan staff has identified 89 million acres of National Forest System land that have a moderate to high risk of catastrophic fire. Of this, less than 16 percent are in roadless areas that have not yet been manipulated by the hand of man.
The Court rightly found that "given the importance of roadless lands as a resource and the ease with which they may be irretrievably damaged a near total ban on further road construction in the remaining and precious roadless areas within our national forests is not the drastic measure that the plaintiffs make it out to be." Thankfully, the Court was not suckered by the misleading caricatures of the natural workings of forests that are hyped by Boise Cascade's public relations department.
Boise Cascade's argument that our forests will suddenly not survive without their benevolent logging services is a slap in the face to the American public, and a grave insult to anyone with a basic understanding of forest ecology.
If Middlebury is going to continue to purchase from Boise, a corporation directly engaged in steering public policy towards its own profit at the public expense, why shouldn't we be contributing to anti-environmental lobbying groups as well?
The future of our national forests is at stake, and we had better do something about it. I call on the environmentally minded students of Middlebury College to organize a campaign to get the administration to drop our current paper supplier and to make the switch to a more environmentally friendly corporation. Our student environmental groups, such as the Environmental Council, should take the lead on this initiative.
Until that time please e-mail me, wlyons@middlebury.edu, and we can outline an action plan. All too often it seems as though corporations only get the message when their actions begin to hurt their bottom line. As thoughtful, powerful consumers, we must exert our influence. If a serious lost sale is what it takes to get Boise to clean up its act, then that should be our first tactic in the struggle to win a more environmentally sound future.

Wellington Lyons is a political science major from North Yarmouth, Maine.