Extreme Position Serves To Isolate

The Inland Empire Public Lands Council showed its true colors last week.

Claiming it has been forced to the wall by a corrupt political system (read, Republicans) and an unresponsive federal government, John Osborn’s group called for an end to commercial logging in our national forests. In doing so, the council joined the Sierra Club at the fringe of the timber debate - and showed how unconcerned it is about sawmill closures and lost jobs.

In fact, the council had the audacity to stage its announcement near the gates of a local sawmill closed by Crown Pacific three years ago. Apparently, council leaders are thrilled that the old sawmill has been converted into an industrial park. The millworkers who lost their jobs in 1994 probably aren’t as thrilled.

Environmental ideologues never seem to care about the human cost of their irresponsible positions and actions.

Indeed, the stand taken by the council now and the Sierra Club last year is so irresponsible that other environmentalists have run from it.

Dave Foreman, founder of militant Earth First! and a Sierra Club member, said last year: “I get quite frustrated with true believers who hold on to some idealistic notion of no compromise.” Larry McLaud of the Idaho Conservation League dismissed the new lands council position succinctly: “It’s not something our organization is going to support at this point.”

Foreman, McLaud and other responsible environmentalists understand the serious repercussions that would accompany a logging ban.

First, a ban would shut off a valuable, albeit dwindling, timber supply to Northwest mills; then, it may force significant over-logging and environmental destruction of private lands. In a worst-case scenario, it would force the United States to increase importation from countries with few if any environmental rules, thereby devastating the world’s forests.

U.S. timber companies have done much to improve their harvest and road-building methods - although you’d never know that from listening to the lands council and other environmental radicals. They’d have you believe that timber companies routinely run amok in the forests, clearcutting mountainsides, bulldozing streams and bullying the U.S. Forest Service.

Such propaganda, of course, is good for fund-raising purposes. But the council went beyond rhetoric and embraced extremism when it announced its ban-the-cut stand. In doing so, the Spokane-based organization removed itself as a rational player in the ongoing timber debate.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria/For the editorial board