Good Gaia! Put the two Daves on the Sierra Club Board of Directors and they succumb immediately to infectious Beltwayitis. In trying to cozy up to the old boy network that Dave 1 (Brower) once wisely removed himself from years ago and Dave 2 has been wanting acceptance from all along, they would have us believe Zero Cut is actually the cause of all those stumps.
Under the Dave-squared theory, perhaps we should give back the wilderness areas and national parks, as that too would desegregate the damage and spread it over the landscape. Throw in a few Audubon sanctuaries, as well.
Don't they get it? If we provide the timber-industrial complex with cheap, subsidized federal logs, of course they'll lay off the private lands--for a while. Once Zero Cut is thus implemented by default (since there'll be nothing left worth cutting on public lands), the remaining private trees will furiously fall, leaving us with stumps all around.
This discredited shift-the-pressure nonsense has already been abandoned by the industry. Remember the arguments that if environmentalists don't let industry cut the forests where regulations exist, then they'll just have to cut the tropical forests where the damage will be much worse? How in heck did the Daves ever buy into applying this nonsense to public vs. private logging?
Brower even says "Requiring that there be no cutting on public land is too much like requiring there be no grazing in designated wilderness." (At least we agree on something!) Dave, exactly what is the point of a "wilderness system" infested with cows? Talk of phasing them out? In the 31 years since the wilderness areas were established, cows there have increased, not declined. Go tour the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Area in New Mexico and see how your hero's land ethic is applied on his namesake public land before you advocate the same for private land, as well. Blowing the tops off of wilderness area mountains to create water tanks for cattle is hardly what Leopold had in mind.
Rename the Bureau of Land Management? Use trees to produce "a few billion toothpicks" for the domestic market but "no chopsticks" for export? Guess us Westerners must need those toothpicks to pick that public lands' beef out of our teeth. "Reform the U.S. Forest Service?" "Concentrate our energies in furthering the Wildlands Project?" How did we overlook these brilliant solutions all these years?
The sorry, sad truth is that the maxim "you never miss the water till the well runs dry" also applies to those that have been "fighting U.S. Forest Service malpractice for forty-seven years" or less, in most cases. Zero Cut takes away the discretion that allows the malpractice to occur in the first place.
Eliminate the incentive for Forest Service managers to kill off the life support system and we may just eliminate the legions of green bureaucrats who have made a comfortable living writing white papers on reform and grand wildlands schemes, traveling in ozone-depleting jet airliners to collect speaking fees at conferences, monitoring the implementation of forest plans and the like. Talk about "institutional addictions."
Even that green-washing corporation known as The Wilderness Society has the honesty to say that "Zero Cut is the obvious solution, but it's not politically feasible."
If Brower really fears that "the national park forests will not be safe once industry has been permitted to grind through the last primeval forest outside the parks," then why oppose, with dubious arguments at best, the one proposal that calls for an end to the grinding? There is no way that cutting the plantations will offset the volume from the old growth cutting that continues to this day. We may need to cut some plantations for ecological reasons (I prefer they just lop and scatter), but that is no solution to the agencies' volume addiction.
Foreman says he'll "work to strengthen the Sierra Club forestry policy even if I don't endorse Zero Cut for all national forests." Just what sacrifice zones do you endorse then, Dave? Give us a list. Then we won't be so unreasonable as to try and stop sales there.
Remember, we all support buying up private lands to put into the public life support infrastructure. It's just that we'd like to have any trees thus bought remain vertical. And, by Gaia, a public lands policy requiring that they remain so is the only way to assure it. Hell, we'll even buy stump lands, if there's an assurance they'll be kept free from further abuse. In fact, I believe that we shouldn't have to buy them at all. They should be forfeited because of the abuse.
With ninety-plus percent of our native ecosystems already gone, there's no way that we'll accept addled arguments and lame criticism of a proposal that merely contains the devastation at a point probably already well past the point of no return.