Zero Cut has problems that are overwhelming and haven't been addressed.
Were it not for these problems, there should be no objection to some members of a coalition--such as chapters and groups within the Sierra Club--taking stronger (i.e., more protective) positions than the parent body. Harmonization, as the Sierra Club determined in its opposition to NAFTA, can be far too costly. It puts a ceiling over protection rather than a floor under it. It guarantees mediocrity. I wholly share the concern--make it desperation--over what the government is letting happen to public forests. I feel the same way about what is happening to privately owned forests, such as the redwoods and New England.
What I'd like to argue is that Zero Cut erodes protection because the perfect is the enemy of the good (whoever said that?) and the "perfection" of Zero Cut can hurt us and has hurt us because it inhibits--even precludes--consensus. It's not that I am addicted to consensus. I don't like its tendency to require a watering down of purpose to please some ultraconservative. But when a proposal generates severe disagreement among good people and they can't come to a consensus, I worry. That is happening. I consider you [Chad Hanson] and Tim Hermach [of Native Forest Council] exceptionally good people. Unfortunately, I feel the same way about myself--a person who has been fighting US Forest Service malpractice for 47 years.
So on with the argument.
Capitalist soil and communist soil have one thing in common: they're both soil. The same holds for public soil and private soil. Trees, public or private, are still trees. Nature does not recognize the difference.
Public and private trees have several things in common. They lock up carbon, free oxygen, minimize erosion, regulate the flow and quality of water, and provide habitat--alive, dying, and dead--for other species as well as other trees. They look pretty, inspire, are important to cultures, and, in California's Bohemian Grove, provide a place for Bohemians to pee. They also provide pulp, timber, and if they are the right maple, sugar. The latter are the forest resources the market knows how to measure. The former constitute a massive subsidy--the tree itself--to whoever cuts it, be it on public or private land.
Associated with other species, trees form forests and invite abuse, which foresters are good at. It is up to us to stop it. We need to promote the flourishing of forests, which foresters have not been good at. God is good at it. A new breed of humans, ecosystem managers, are trying to second-guess the Creator, and are failing. They had better concentrate on managing each other.
Too much of the world's forest has been put to human use, too little left for God's. Those of us who think we are made in God's image could try being a bit more godlike, even as those following Christ should try practicing peace, now and then, and reintroduce themselves to compassion and love.
But back to trees.
Too much forest is in private hands. Private owners can be nice, but governments last longer (except in Italy) and when reminded to do so, can concern themselves with future generations better than privatized institutions do, and history proves it.
As happened in 1911 under the Weeks Act, government now needs to acquire vast areas of private forest and make them public. The government also needs to cure itself of silvicultural malpractice on its forests, which the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have proved themselves incapable of achieving--so far. They must be required to achieve it.
Clearly, it is desirable to put some trees to commercial human use, as in walls, floors, a roof or two and a few billion toothpicks. Indeed, that is what some of the Weeks Act forests were acquired for. No chopsticks.
If we prohibit cutting on public forests, we will increase the burden on private forests and make it next to impossible to convert any more of them to public forests. There are trees on public forests that should be cut--ecologically unsound plantations, for example, which resulted from the error of planting trees instead of growing forests. I have called such forests infectious monoculturosis.
If we discourage further acquisition of public forests by making them untouchable, we will end up with less overall protection of forests, which is exactly what we don't need. For example, there are some three million acres of private forest in Maine that should be acquired by the public.
Requiring that there be no cutting on public land is too much like requiring that there be no grazing in wilderness. Were we to have insisted on that in 1964, there would be no wilderness system. Insisting that there be no agriculture included in Point Reyes National Seashore would have precluded success there. Grazing in wilderness and agriculture at Point Reyes are being phased out. There would be nothing to phase them out of if we had insisted on "perfection."
The old argument, "you never miss the water till the well runs dry" applies to loggers' attitudes toward ancient forests, and Japan's toward all forests (in 1976 Japan was claiming that all the world's forests combined could not meet Japan's requirements for forest products). The logging industries won't miss the forests until they and the jobs are gone-- unless we prevent their myopia.
What, then, do we need? I submit this list:
1) Teach the market how to evaluate the forest functions, listed above, that it now ignores. If the market reveals their true value, protection will follow. People will understand the value of non-use if a use costs too much. They will seek alternative sources of pulp and timber.
Teaching the market to do this will not be easy, but I think it will be easier than trying to sell the "perfection" of Zero Cut. Paul Hawken tried to do this in his The Ecology of Commerce and will try harder, I think, in Natural Capitalism. We took a step in this direction in using kenaf for Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run: A Call to Those Who Would Save the Earth. (Remember, one out of every five trees is cut for pulp, and one out of five trees is cut from public land. Shift to kenaf for all pulp and we achieve the Zero Cut goal!)
2) My book advocates replacing the BLM with a new National Land Service, to be concerned not only with public land, but also with establishing Leopold's land ethic on private land. Some other countries are farther along on this than the US. This move could lead to Gordon Robinson's "excellent forestry" and Orville Camp's "ecological selective logging" (see Clearcut) on private land and straighten out Bureau of Land Management on the O&C forests [land originally owned by the Oregon & California railroad company].
3) Reform the US Forest Service.
4)Remember that national park forests will not be safe once industry has been permitted to grind through the last primeval forests outside the parks.
5) Reinvigorate the advocacy of timber substitutes in construction (pointing out that Italy and Greece did this long ago, and their buildings last longer).
6) Urge major investment in forest restoration. The last number I heard (some 40 years ago) was that there are eight million acres of unrestocked or poorly restocked forest land in California, Oregon, and Washington.
7) Concentrate our energies in furthering the Wildlands Project, as it appears in legislative form in NREPA, and help it lead to NREPAs elsewhere.
8) I think it feasible to require a moratorium on most public forest cutting in order to sever institutional addiction to it, and thus prohibit the cutting of ancient forests that we want to see in Wildlands Project zones of maximum protection. I would like to see all primeval forest so protected. Insistence on total protection of all public forests weakens that case, as well as precluding gains listed above.
--David Brower in his letter to Chad Hanson