Zero Cut gets real

by Chad Hanson

"That's impossible."

"You'll lose all of your funding if you say that."

"You'll never get the Sierra Club on board."

"You'll be laughed out of every congressional office you visit."

"You'll never get a Republican."

"You don't understand political realities."

"You're completely out of your mind."

Zerocutters are a scrappy lot. For years, people have been telling us what can't be done, and we've been doing it anyway. Despite political realities, despite nay-sayers and the timber industry's power, on October 31, a bipartisan bill was introduced into the House of Representatives by Democratic Representative Cynthia McKinney and Republican Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, chair of the House Banking and Finance Committee, ending all timber sales on most federal public lands nationwide. The National Forest Protection and Restoration Act, HR 2789, would simply take the federal government out of the logging business and redirect logging subsidies into worker retraining, ecological restoration, payments for counties, grants for tree-free alternatives and deficit reduction. It currently has 12 cosponsors, including two Republicans.

No more timber sale appeals or lawsuits. No more euphemisms for logging. No more compromises. This campaign is about demanding what we want, rather than acquiescing to what we've been told we have to accept.

It's contagious. In the past several months alone, the number of organizations supporting zero cut has more than doubled. Already newspapers are beginning to editorialize in support. The debate has shifted from how much will be logged to whether logging will continue at all.

The facts are clear:

The timber cut annually on all national forests now comprises only 3.9 percent of total US wood consumption, according to Forest Service statistics.

Last year the Forest Service's logging program operated at a net loss to taxpayers of at least $791 million and not a dime was returned to the general fund of the US Treasury. To put this in perspective, if we ended all logging on national forests and redirected the money we would have over $25,000 for each pubic lands timber worker for retraining and/or ecological restoration work-and still have over $200 million left over.

One of the most exciting recent developments of the zero cut campaign is the network of grassroots environmental organizations from coast to coast that has formed. As a movement, we now have the opportunity to be greater than the sum of our parts. The fight against a local timber sale can attain much greater significance and attention as another example of the ecological destruction, industry manipulation and agency corruption which makes zero cut so necessary. By incorporating the national zero cut message into local and regional battles, and by beginning to coordinate strategy, we can increasingly define the message and the public debate, putting industry on the defense. We can create a national context where it will be difficult for press and policy-makers to talk about public forests without talking about zero cut.

The only remaining tactic available to logging corporations is sheer obfuscation. Destructive logging bills falsely promoted by Democrats under the guise of "fire risk reduction" (such as the Quincy logging bill) or similarly horrible legislation masquerading as "forest health" measures, will characterize industry's final attempts to assault federal forests. Timber interests will try to manipulate left-of-center communities by co-opting liberal terminology, spinning taxpayer subsidized deforestation on public lands as "consensus," "collaborative dialogue" or even "environmental justice."

Yet it is these very deceptions which give us the greatest advantage to advocates of zero cut (i.e., "Until we end logging on public lands, we'll never be safe from insidious timber industry ruses such as...").

Looking back at how far the zero cut campaign has come over the last several years, against immeasurable odds and adversity, I can't help thinking about a Chinese proverb that I came across recently, "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what others say cannot be done." I guess it just goes to show that one should never underestimate the power of a dream.